See you in 2010

I have been taking a break from my blog and I apologize for my lack of new material in the past few weeks. I posted a small teaser article until I am able to devote more time to my blog. I wish all of my readers a happy holiday season and I will be back in February or sooner if possible. Thank you for reading my blog and please continue to send me comments.

Vintage Sears in Midtown Houston

This old school three story Sears is one of the very few vintage department stores left in Houston. This store on the outside has not been updated very much and still retains the classic neon red Sears logo. The inside has been updated with the most recent colors and styles of most Sears stores. This post is part one of a two part series. Part two will be delayed for a while; see above post.



The auto center is vintage as well.




Here are some close up shots of the Sears at 4201 Main Street.

Sharpstown Mall Change on the Horizon + update on Westheimer Square

Check out my update on the Westheimer Square shopping center and this update on Sharpstown Mall.




There is change in the air at Sharpstown Mall. The owners are aggressively filling the nearly empty food court with new restaurants. There are four outlets with signs advertising new restaurants coming soon and there is one new restaurant that opened next to the formerly only restaurant in the food court. There are also a couple of new tenants on the first floor since our last visit. An improved food court will help to attract new business to the mall, and this is a step in the right direction. If they can get the empty Macy's building filled or demolished; the mall will really improve. I think that it would be in Sears best interest to swap their land with Macy's and move the store from the Southwest Corporate Center to the mall. Then the corporate center could expand into the Sears site and the development would be complete. The former JCPenney site is much harder to fill and would be better off demolished since the store has been empty for over a decade. I am excited because this mall and the nearly dead Almeda Mall are potentially rebounding. I need to take a trip to the Northwest and San Jacinto Malls to see if those malls are rebounding as well.

Pictures from 10/14/2009

Belle Promenade Mall at Night 1999

Here are my videos of Belle Promenade Mall taken at night in May of 1999. The first video is Dillard's just after the store closed. The second video is the former Picadilly entrance and JCPenney after the store closed. Note JCPenney still had the lights on after the store was empty. The United Artist Cinema is in the JCPenney video as well; the cinema lasted a year after this video was taken. Please excuse the focus; the camera did not have a manual focus setting to prevent the camera from losing focus at night.

This is a list of some of the stores that graced the mall. JCPenney, DH Holmes (Dillard's), Champs, Kay Bee Toys, Claire's, Bourbon Street Candy Store, GNC, Eckerd's, Picadilly Cafeteria, Spencer's, Dollar Tree, Waldenbooks, B Dalton Books, Things Remembered, Sbarro's Pizza, Chik Fil A, Fun Arcade, and the United Artists Cinema. The Fun Arcade was in the center court and had entrances that led to the food court and the center court of the mall. The Fun Arcade later moved outside of the mall. I think the arcade moved in the renovation in 1993 to make way for the carousel, but I am not 100% sure on that. The renovation was when the food court had the raised seating area removed. There were so many stores that were in this mall over the years, but I can only remember these. I have another video of me and my brother at the mall that will not be uploaded; in 1986 when our parents took us to get a child identification video. The video shows very little of the mall and it is very embarrassing since I was eight years old at the time.

Here is a not to scale basic layout of the mall.

Gulfgate Shopping City

Welcome to the Gulfgate Shopping City. Originally opened in the mid 1950's at the intersection of what is now I-45 and I-610. This center was originally constructed as an open air mall with four anchors; the mall was later enclosed. This mall was very popular for many years, but declined in the early 1990's. One of the reasons for the mall's decline and eventual demise are the numerous amount of malls in southeast Houston. Along a 25 mile stretch of I-45 south there is Gulfgate, Almeda, Baybrook, and Mall of the Mainland. Throw in Pasadena Town Square and the Galleria nearby and this small mall could not compete. The mall was not updated much after the 1980's and had lost two anchors that were never refilled. I only remember Service Merchandise and Dillard's as being open in the 1990's there. There was also a small cinema that was accessible from a footbridge over I-610 that was part of the mall. I visited this mall in 2000 just before it was shut down completely. At this point all of the anchors were closed and only a small section of the mall still had stores in business. Outside of this area a foot locker was all by itself in an empty corridor. Strangely, the hallways were completely open in the empty sections and they made no effort in closing them off. I should have brought a camera with me since the mall is now completely gone. There are many historical photos of this mall available online. Check out the following link for an overview of the site before the mall was enclosed http://www.texasfreeway.com/Houston/historic/photos/images/i45_i610s_undated.jpg . The line of stores from HEB to Anna's Linen's were the first to open in 2004 and the Best Buy section opened in 2008. There is also a Lowe's across the street that is included in the development, but it was not in the original mall footprint. The site is bustling with activity and the new stores do well here. I still wish that they could have revamped the mall because the site is one of the best and most accessible in central Houston.

Here are some of the signs around the shopping center. The two tall signs are updated versions of the original mall signs. The original signs had pink and blue neon and read Gulfgate Shopping City. The bridge in the last picture went to the cinema which has been replaced by a bus terminal.






Here are photos of the new development that has been built over the former mall site.

Welcome back to Almeda Mall

Almeda Mall has come back in a big way. Macy's and Burlington are now open and the mall was much busier today than I have seen it for a while. Great news for this once declining area of Houston.




Macy's has re opened and the store has been completely rebuilt. The new design is very similar to the Macy's at Deerbrook Mall that was re built after Hurricane Ike. Macy's invested a ton of money into this store, so they intend to stay.



Burlington is now open; the layout of the store is very strange. They took up a little more than 1/2 of the first floor of the old JCPenney and they only re opened one exit door facing I-45. They also only opened up half of the old entrance to leave room for another store to take the remaining space available in the old building. I am very surprised that Burlington did not take all of the space available like they did in Sharpstown Mall.




This is a photo of the corridor outside of Burlington. Steve and Barry's was located on the left of this picture.



Burlington only took up a little more than a quarter of the old JCPenney building. Here is a labelscar from the former catalog entrance.



As a bonus.
The boards have been removed from the old Circuit City and the lights are on again. There are no signs advertising the new development yet.

Prien Lake Mall Lake Charles Louisiana

Welcome to Prien Lake Mall



Prien Lake Mall opened in 1972 and it is owned by Simon Malls. I am not sure of the original anchors since there is very little information available online for this mall. In the mid 1990's JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, and the White House were the anchors. The mall was nearly doubled in size in the late 1990's and added Sears (moved from downtown Lake Charles) and Dillard's. The new anchors are much larger than the older anchors and both are two stories tall. Montgomery Ward closed with the rest of the chain in 2001, and the site was completely remodeled and replaced by Foley's a couple years later. Foley's also opened a home store in front of the mall. Foley's was re branded as Macy's and closed shortly thereafter. Now Kohl's has remodeled half of the former Macy's and is set to open later this month. The White House closed and was replaced by a Cinemark Theater. The mall is the only one in the Lake Charles metro area and does very well. The Simon website shows an old picture of Prien Lake Mall with a Kay Bee Toy Outlet in the middle of the photo.

Here is the directory of this simple mall. The entire left or west half of the mall was added on in the late 1990's.



This half of the former Macy's is still waiting redevelopment. There are several labelscars on this former anchor.



This is a view of the JCPenney and Picadilly entrance.



At this mall Sam Goody still lives! This store is located in front of the new Kohl's.



Here are some interior photos from my phone camera. The Aladdin's Castle is closed but the 1980's era neon is still on for now.

Town and Country Mall: City Centre at Town and Country

Welcome to City Centre at Town and Country formerly known as Town and Country Mall.

Opened in 1983 and closed June 30, 2004 this was the only completely three story mall in the Houston area and one of my favorites. The mall was located on Beltway 8 near the I-10 interchange. Town and Country Mall was built a mile away from Memorial City Mall to compete as a luxury high end mall. Shortly after the mall opened; both of the freeways nearby began lengthy reconstruction. The mall was very hard to get to and shoppers went elsewhere because of the traffic. The mall began to decline and never recovered from this setback. The anchors were Neiman Marcus (closed 2005), Joske's later Dillard's (closed 2003), JCPenney (closed 2001), and Marshal Fields later Saks Fifth Avenue (closed 2000) were the anchors at this center. I remember going to this mall in the early 1990's with my family a few times and the mall was not crowded at all. The mall at this time did not have many stores on the third level except for the Tilt arcade. All of the anchors had three level access except JCPenney; the third level near JCPenney had a bunch of seats but no restaurants open even in my first visits there. Another uniqueness about the JCPenney was that it was designed exactly the same on the inside as the Belle Promenade JCPenney in Marrero Louisiana. Joske's was bought out by Dillard's and changed over. Dillard's had expanded the store across a significant portion of the third level of the mall. The Saks Fifth Avenue anchor opened as a Marshal Fields and shut down, but was quickly replaced by Saks. Neiman Marcus was a typical store with a clearance center on the third floor. The mall did not have a food court but there were a few fast food outlets on the first and second floors near the center of the mall. Upon my return to Houston in 1999; this mall had suffered tremendously. The mall had roughly 25% of the in line stores in business and the third floor was empty except for a few offices and Tilt. We went to this mall on Black Friday in 2000 and most of the clerks we talked to were making jokes about how dead the mall was. They also were talking about the mall probably closing soon and being demolished. Within three years of our visit; three of the anchors had announced plans to close or just shut down with no notice (Saks). Memorial City Mall expanded and added more space to their mall taking away most of the customer bas of Town and Country. The mall was bought in 2003 with plans to convert the space to other uses, and a renovation began. In late 2003 I took my wife to Town and Country to show her how slow it was. We walked around the mall and by around 8pm that weekday; we noticed that we were the only people left in the mall. We tried to leave but all of the doors were locked. We finally found a janitor and he let us out. My wife was very pregnant at this point, so our misfortune did not please her one bit. The renovation stopped shortly thereafter and then plans of demolishing the mall came out and the mall tenants were given a two month notice to leave. We went to the mall during the last month in business and in the former JCPenney building a company was having an open auction, so I got to check out the store one more time before it was demolished. The mall was down to around ten stores. The mall closed in the summer of 2004 and was demolished while the Neiman Marcus stayed open. Neiman Marcus signed a lease for fifteen years to stay, but closed before the redevelopment of the property began. The Neiman Marcus building was demolished and it is now a Studio Movie Grill. I guess they were able to unload their lease for a hefty price because they have not returned to that location. The parking garages were left intact from the mall but the entire structure has been replaced by a mixed use development called City Centre that opened in 2008. Town homes have been built on top of what was the JCPenney and a lifestyle center was built on the rest of the property. There is also a high rise condo building on the edge of the property facing Beltway 8. The new development is very nice and upscale just as the mall was when it opened, but the new project will have much greater success.

Behind the blanket is the red neon sign from the old mall; you can see the outline of the old logo. One of the parking garages also had the same red neon sign.



Here is a rudimentary diagram of the layout of this mall; that is not to scale. (Don't laugh!)



This is the one and only picture that I took of the mall just before it was demolished in 2005. This was the entrance from the Beltway to Dillard's; the former Dillard's is to the right.



The three parking garages are all that remains of the former mall. Each garage was attached to the mall on each of the three levels, so this mall was huge.



These fountains in the center of the complex are a huge improvement over what was here before.




Here are some more pictures of the City Centre development.