Oxford Mall (Former), Oxford, MS

Today's post highlights Lafayette County, MS, retail.

 

 

Today is a special day for the Mid-South Retail Blog, as I'm finally featuring a post outside of DeSoto or Shelby Counties! The Memphis metropolitan area is of course the heart of the Mid-South as defined by the blog's logo, so it makes sense that those two counties are featured the most, but I've been looking to branch out to other blogworthy retail within the region for some time now. Luckily, Lafayette County has a unique complex that really fits that bill!

 

I have plenty of photos coming later in this post, but first I wanted to share some history, as I (as well as Albertsons Florida Blog, retail researcher extraordinaire!) have spent quite some time trying to uncover this place's past. The Oxford Mall opened at 1111 West Jackson Avenue in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1983, with anchor stores Wal-Mart Discount City and JCPenney. Also present were a small four-screen Cinemark movie theater, Beall's junior department store, and, of course, the many inline mall tenants. Located practically right across the street from the University of Mississippi (better known as Ole Miss), the Oxford Mall had a guaranteed customer base of both Lafayette County locals and college students hailing from multiple locations around the country.



Original Oxford Mall land plat, courtesy Lafayette County online records



By the late 1990s, however, Wal-Mart - who had expanded its location at the mall since its opening - was rumored as wanting to build one of its hot new Supercenters in Oxford. A 5.7-acre property adjacent to its existing Oxford Mall store went up for sale in 1999, but neighboring residents were unhappy about the prospect of Wal-Mart cutting down the native trees which also served as a buffer between the mall and their street. Ultimately, the University of Mississippi (the seller of the parcel) only received one bid, and wound up deciding not to part ways with the land after all. So by 2000, Wal-Mart revealed plans to build a Supercenter elsewhere in Oxford: on a 37-acre tract farther west along Jackson Avenue.

 

The Supercenter announcement did not come without contention. Many locals were again offended at the prospect of Wal-Mart tearing down native woodland in favor of their large commercial structure and parking lot. In addition, the "construction...drew opposition from critics who said the 'big box' at one of Oxford's main entrances would detract from the city's small-town ambiance and undermine locally owned small retail businesses," a hallmark of Oxford's famous town square. But the Supercenter was nevertheless approved by the city, and was constructed in conjunction with a widening to five lanes of Jackson Avenue out front. Today, Jackson Avenue is a congested retail strip with very little forested area remaining.

 

The $12 million Oxford Wal-Mart Supercenter opened on August 14th, 2002, with "a Tire & Lube Express, a Vision Center, Radio Grill quick-order restaurant, a pharmacy, a 1-hour photo and portrait studio, and a food center with groceries." At 204,000 square feet, the store, at least at the time of opening, had "'the biggest Wal-Mart sales area floor in the state [of Mississippi] for a town this size'" - "17 square feet for each of Oxford's 12,000 residents." In part thanks to the bargaining power gained by this fact, local critics wanting to preserve the natural look of the site convinced Wal-Mart to "[accede] to city requests that the Oxford store not mirror the blue, gray, and red look of Supercenters everywhere. The Oxford store [instead featured] a buff textured exterior wall with a green ribbon encircling the building that will resonate with environmentalists" when it opened in 2002.

 

The original look of Oxford's Wal-Mart Supercenter. The store has since featured a predominantly brown paint job, and presently sports a blue and gray color scheme - both exactly like the evolved designs of "Supercenters everywhere." Image source unknown

 

The Supercenter was adjoined by a 125,000 square foot shopping center, known as Oxford Market Place, which allowed even more new businesses into the town. But as that commercial growth took off, the existing Oxford Mall had just received the first nail in its coffin. The existing general merchandise Wal-Mart there, dwarfed in size by the new Supercenter (at only 93,000 square feet), closed for good at 6:00PM on August 13th, 2002. And since the traditional Wal-Mart building was owned separately from the rest of the mall, management could not control when - or whether - it would be leased. Oxford's mayor at the time said this regarding the situation:

 

"We're certainly concerned about the immediate future [of the Oxford Mall]. Long term, we don't believe it's an issue. That property is so well-located both within the town and in proximity to the university, that it's going to be in great demand. Whether it will continue to operate as a mall or be converted into some mixed-use facility...I don't know. I've heard a lot of things discussed as possibilities that could be interesting. But I think it's too early to tell."

 

The mayor had reason to be concerned. Just one year later, the Oxford Mall, having seen its vacancies steadily increase since Wal-Mart's closure, went up for auction. This time, rather than be the seller as in the 1999 scenario, the University of Mississippi was rumored to be the buyer of the property, with hopes to use the parking lot to "ease a parking crunch on campus" and "'[i]f not the whole mall, at least the old Wal-Mart location'" to relocate certain departments or programs in need of additional space. In this way, Oxford's mayor's 2002 quote about the long-term future usage potentials of the property was also validated. Ole Miss finally purchased the former Wal-Mart building and its portion of the Oxford Mall parking lot for $2.6 million in late 2004.

 

In the meantime, the mall itself continued to operate, albeit with increasingly fewer stores. A former Waldenbooks store had become home to the offices for Oxford-based FNC, Inc. Similarly, the Beall's store - which later likely became Stage sometime in the 1990s - was also vacated, leaving JCPenney as the lone operating department store at the mall. The four-screen movie theater, then known as Ciné 4, remained in operation, but enough fellow mall stores had departed by December 2003 so as to allow Malco Theatres to announce plans to demolish the former Beall's and inline tenants across the corridor in the very center of the mall and construct a new eight-screen cinema on the same spot. After some delays, construction commenced on the new Malco in 2004, with the grand opening held in November 2005. The Ciné 4, which Malco had also come to own prior to constructing its new theater, was to be converted into a showplace for "art and foreign films, [genres] which [are] underserved in the local market."

 

At the time of the new Malco's opening, Oxford Daily Journal writers noted that the planned "large fountain and plaza in front of the building which will connect retail space and restaurants have not yet been finished, giving the entrance a nondescript appearance." Still, things were looking up for the Oxford Mall, which was reportedly "being renovated into a regional 'lifestyle' center." But that fountain and plaza never came about, and likewise, the mall remained in stasis despite the renderings and high hopes. Some additional redevelopment was planned, including a skate rink and bowling alley, but ultimately the remainder of the Oxford Mall was purchased for $6.9 million in 2009 by the group who already owned one of its anchors: the University of Mississippi.

 

A rendering of proposed renovations to the Oxford Mall, converting it into an outdoor lifestyle center known as either "University Village" or "Oxford Village Mall," with the Oxford Studio Cinema (Malco) as the centerpiece. These plans never came to fruition. Courtesy LoopNet

 

These two additional renderings were added to this post after it was initially published, and appear to come from a separate firm than the first rendering shown in this set of three. These both come from an artist who worked with Levinson Associates and was tasked with creating these renderings back in December 2004. I don't know how I ever missed finding these images before; this one is literally the fifth image that shows up on a Google search for the mall! Note the fountain and plaza adjoining the Malco (which does not match its present architecture, unlike in the first rendering). Courtesy archacid on deviantart

 

The middle rendering of the three shown here looks east down the Malco storefront towards additional shops which were to have been built out (southward) from the cinema, i.e. more in line with the existing mall footprint. The bottom rendering (which this caption goes to) shows a more drawn-back aerial view of the property's projected redesign into an outdoor, "lifestyle" shopping center. Note the addition of shops along the left (west) edge of the property beyond the JCPenney (which itself would also have gotten a façade facelift) as well as the reconfigured parking lot. Courtesy archacid on deviantart 

 

What little retail remained inside the mall was still allowed to operate under Ole Miss's ownership for some period of time; it's unclear when exactly the interior portion of the mall closed for good. Campus Book Mart, which had both exterior and interior entry points, closed in 2015, leaving only JCPenney and Malco in operation; both of those chains lease their sites from the university. JCPenney will close at the end of this month, July 2017. Ole Miss has steadily converted the mall into space for itself, beginning with 40,000 square feet of the former Wal-Mart in 2011. By 2013, that Wal-Mart space - and, by extension, the rest of the Oxford Mall - officially became known as the Jackson Avenue Center at the University of Mississippi. Renovations at the J.A.C. continue today, including the remainder of the former Wal-Mart building as well as the inline mall corridor between the Wal-Mart and the Malco. Malco will likely stay in business, but with JCPenney's closure and the fact that Ole Miss will have used up all of its space on the right half, the left half of the old Oxford Mall will soon become fair game for additional university expansion, solidifying the conversion of this complex from mall to mixed-use.

Oxford Mall road sign at the complex's main entrance, seen in 2011. A similar one at the other entrance was removed by 2014. This sign lost its Oxford Mall and Ciné 4 branding that same year. Courtesy Google Maps Street View

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So... that's what history we've been able to locate on the dead Oxford Mall. Now, here are a few more images before we move on. Directly below is a Google Maps simulated-3D aerial view of the mall as it appears today. Note the size of the parking lot: the majority of it has been used for Park-and-Ride students at Ole Miss since the university's purchase of the former Wal-Mart and, later, the remainder of the mall.

Courtesy Google Maps

Next, another aerial view, this one in 2D and showing what's still in the complex today. As you ought already to have guessed from the detailed history above, there's not much at all! JCPenney is the left (west) anchor of the mall, and operates out of a rather small store: likely another factor that it is closing, besides the fact that it's in a dead mall. Malco is in a carved-out space in the center (note how empty the area in front of its building is, where the fountain and plaza were planned). The former Wal-Mart on the far right (east end) of the mall is now home to the university's Jackson Avenue Center. The Barnes & Noble College store is only temporarily occupying Campus Book Mart's former space while the Student Union on campus, its usual home, is being renovated and expanded; I simply included it on my rendering just to help it not look too depressing!

Original image courtesy Google Maps; edits done by me

And finally, here are a few better indications of how the mall was laid out while it was still in operation, using the same aerial image as above as well as additional resources, for your visualizing pleasure... :)

 

First, an overlay of the land plat featured earlier in this post pasted on top of the aerial image. You can see that the JCPenney is 33,796 square feet, and that the inline mall space was 133,150 square feet prior to Malco's construction. You can also see the outline of what all Malco demolished in order to build its new theater.

 

 

Next, I've added (in blue) a schematic of the interior corridor of the mall, as found elsewhere on the Lafayette County online records website. Also shown are the homes of the former Ciné 4 and Beall's junior anchor.

 

This final overlay includes Wal-Mart's "future expansion area" as seen in the original plat, which carried the building from 62,990 square feet to 93,000 (or 80,000 - I've found conflicting totals) sometime prior to its move out of the mall, likely in the 1990s. Also in blue between the Wal-Mart and Malco are a few of the inline tenant spaces, which I found in online construction documents. Ole Miss is currently renovating that area, as noted previously.

 

Last but not least, here is a tenant list that I found in yet another Lafayette County online record, as neatly transcribed by AFB. This is from 1991, so it doesn't include all of the stores ever to operate in the mall, but it's nevertheless a good glimpse at the stores operating at that point in time. I'm also willing to bet that 31 stores was indeed the total number of tenants that the Oxford Mall had, given that it was on the smaller side.

 

Oxford Mall Tenant List (as of 1991):

1. Wal-Mart

2. JCPenney

3. Beall's

4. K&B Drugstore

5. Corn Dog 7

6. Waldenbooks

7. Promises and Praises (local religious store, moved to 2210 W. Jackson and is still open)

8. Yesterday's (an arcade chain)

9. The Factory Connection

10. Claire's Boutique

11. Payless Shoesource

12. Classic Cookies of Mississippi

13. Far East Restaurant

14. King's Den (haircut place)

15. Foot Action, USA

16. Kinney Shoes

17. Foot Locker

18. United Artists Cinema 4 (aka Ciné 4)

19. Merle Norman

20. Sound Shop

21. Radio Shack

22. Circus World Toy Store

23. Emphasis (not sure what that was, but it was a chain of some kind. I'm thinking it was a clothing store)

24. Amy's Hallmark

25. Worth's Store (clothing store)

26. Annette's Jewelers

27. Campus Book Mart

28. Zales

29. Shoe Connection

30. another Yesterday's Arcade

31. The Gym

  

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And now, with all that out of the way, we finally get to move on to all of the pictures! :)  Unless otherwise specified, all of the images to follow are mine, and of those, the majority were taken on April 13th, 2017. First though, some overviews of the complex from January 12th of this year before we move on to taking closer looks at the state of things. 

At the left end of the mall is JCPenney. The parking lot is empty here due to Ole Miss being on winter break. I'd assume that it's much more full of students' Park-and-Ride vehicles when classes are in session!


 

In the center, Oxford Studio Cinema (the Malco building)

 

Between Malco and the old Wal-Mart lies one of the former mall entrances (same as the layout between JCPenney and Malco). It is seen here adorned with Barnes & Noble's paint color and "now open" banner.

And at the right end of the center, the former Wal-Mart building. All the construction barricades in the above two photos are there for the installation of "bookstore customer parking only" signs at what were formerly Ole Miss Park-and-Ride spaces.

Now for the good stuff! We're beginning our on-foot tour of the mall's exterior at the mall entrance between JCPenney and Malco in this post. Since the JCPenney is closing, I went inside there and got plenty of photos. Those will be the subject of a separate, future blog post, so be sure to watch out for that!

Angled more toward the right/east end of the mall, with the Wal-Mart building in the picture this time

Closer-up on the left (west) side mall entrance beside JCPenney. Love the sidewalk lamp and funky windows!

 

Moving up to the actual doors for the mall entrance, to the left we find the mall management office and accompanying mailbox. Looks like both the mall and the office have lights on, which is somewhat surprising! I forgot to try the doors, but I'm 99% certain they are locked. After all, the mall corridor is empty and closed! In fact, these doors are only opened to the public on voting day now, with this half of the mall used as one of the local precinct polling stations.

 

Peeking into the left-side entry doors down the mall corridor. Vacant storefronts can be seen; only one still has its signage (The Sound Shop). Ole Miss has erected a fenced-off area. And is housing a golf cart inside. :P

 

 

Leaving the entrance now, and moving on to those funky windows. This would've been the Ciné 4 in the past. I'm sure it had an interior mall entrance, but there's clearly an exterior one as well.

 

The windows acted more like mirrors then see-through glass. This is actually a close up of one of the windows, not simply a reversed image, believe it or not!

I had to literally press my phone up against the glass to get a look inside. This shot looks at the lobby from the side of the theater. If you zoom in, you can see that that mid-level horizontal border stripe on the wall actually consists of thin movie posters. I see Capote, Just Friends, The Producers, Memoirs of a Geisha, Tristan & Isolde, Cheaper by the Dozen 2, The Family Stone, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe... all but one of which are from 2005. It's possible that Malco didn't go through with their plan to keep this theater operating as an indie-film cinema after all, and instead closed it soon after opening their new Oxford Studio Cinema.

And a similar look through a front window of the cinema. It was definitely tiny! Just look how small the lobby and concession stand were...

Moving onward down the sidewalk, we find the new Malco: much larger! Kinda awkward looking, however, given how it's tucked back into the mall without that fountain or plaza out front. If you look at the rendering of the proposed lifestyle renovation to this mall featured earlier in the post, you can see that the angled design of the right pillar is actually on purpose: it was meant to be incorporated into the new layout of the complex, had it ever taken shape.

A look at where the mall resumes to the right, as well as a couple shots back to the left at the Malco and JCP. The Barnes & Noble banner on the exterior is over the spot where Campus Book Mart formerly had exterior signage...

...while as you can see, B&N simply decided to put their exterior signage over the mall entrance façade itself :P  Why not, there's no one inside anymore! I did say that this relocation is temporary, but in this case "temporary" translates to about "two years," hence why they sprung for permanent signage and all. I've got an album with interior shots of both this relocated store and the original on-campus Student Union bookstore over on flickr, which you can check out here.

Instead of reusing Campus Book Mart's exterior entrance, Barnes & Noble commandeered the mall entrance, meaning this corridor could be fully accessed in the early months of its operation. I'm kicking myself for not exploring further down this hallway back in January, because as of April, it's now been closed off with a tiny hallway constructed to get to B&N's entrance :(

Courtesy Mike Kalasnik on flickr

 

I figure I probably didn't go down the corridor any more than I did in that above photo because I was disappointed not to find this old Oxford Mall tri-sided relic in there anymore. This photo was captured in April 2015 (zoomed in through the entryway glass, as the doors were locked) by Mike Kalasnik, who you might know from the Dead and Dying Retail Facebook page. He has a short album on the Oxford Mall over on flickr here. I was really hoping to see this gem, only to find that it'd been removed and replaced with a bunch of tables and chairs! I'm assuming there was a directory on one of the other sides, which would have been even cooler to see...

 

For now, though, this is the view we're stuck with. Like I've said previously, this space is now closed off and under construction to house more Ole Miss offices, labs, and swing spaces ("Phase III" of their Jackson Avenue Center renovations). All of the flooring, ceiling, and walls have been ripped out and will be redesigned accordingly. I don't think the old Wal-Mart mall entrance is still intact, but it's cool nonetheless to think that this space will at least likely connect to that building in the same fashion.

As we prepare to move on from the Barnes & Noble and its associated corridor, here's another exterior shot as well as a little blast from the past that I found on its interior mall entrance window. AFB dug up the history on this space: before Campus Book Mart, it was home to Ole South Cafeteria. Across the hall (the space signed "Living Blues" several photos above) was a more traditional sit-down restaurant called Sadie's. Long story short, Sadie's was promised by the mall developers that they would be the only restaurant in the mall when it opened, only for the mall in turn to allow Ole South to open right across from them! This led to a court battle; I'm unsure who won, but Sadie's closed in January 1987, and Ole South was gone prior to 1991 since Campus Book Mart was already open in this space by then according to that tenant list featured earlier in the post.

Finally, we've made it down to the former Wal-Mart building at the right (east) end of the mall. Ole Miss may have taken ownership of the place and given it (and the rest of the mall, for that matter) a new paint job, but other than that, very little has changed here! In fact, the biggest change is the extension of the sidewalk out into the parking lot, on which the university has placed that awning-like piece.

Courtesy cflretail on flickr

 

For fun, here's another shot of the store university-front, sandwiched between (above) what it would likely have looked like when it opened (except reversed), as seen in Seminole, FL, in 1989, and (below) what it might have looked like today had it stayed in operation, as seen on a store from the same era operating at a similarly-dead mall in Branson, MO. (I got additional pictures of that store recently that I'll post to flickr one day...)

 

Note that the J.A.C. lettering is not where the Wal-Mart signage would have been, but rather sits over what would've been the former home of the words "Discount City." Those same words would likely have been removed when the Wal-Mart expanded, if not earlier, so having this signage placed here takes the store back to its roots!

 

Some views of the right portion of the building reveal an additional double set of double-doors, just like the ones pictured on the opposite side of the entrance, and both of which direct people to the main entrance. It appears that of the doors on the front of the building, only those main entrance ones underneath the façade and this final pair right on the far edge of the building are accessible from the outside... and even they (the latter, that is) are closed off right now pending additional construction to the former Wal-Mart garden center!

Courtesy Ole Miss

Courtesy Ole Miss

Courtesy Ole Miss

Courtesy Ole Miss

I know you're curious (I was!), so here are some pictures I pulled from Ole Miss's website to give you a little bit of an idea of what the interior of the former Wal-Mart looks like now. As you can see, it's mainly classroom and lab space, so there's not much recognizable from Wal-Mart. But it's interesting to see nonetheless.

Courtesy Luke on flickr

Courtesy Luke on flickr

Courtesy Luke on flickr

 

Perhaps what you'll find a little more interesting are these three photos I found within the photostream of flickr user Luke! These photos were taken in July 2007, so they are a decade old this month (!). They were all taken from the former Wal-Mart side of the mall. The top photo shows an old shopping cart return/corral message to customers. The middle pic shows the former Wal-Mart back dock delivery bay filled with water after a rainfall, and the bottom shot shows the mall as viewed looking west, still clad in its original paint scheme. 

I didn't realize it at the time, but it looks like I matched this shot up fairly decently with the above shot from ten years prior! Note the new color scheme and shrubbery.

A few more overview pictures taken from the parking lot of the J.A.C., including one attempted panorama-style shot. Here you can see the crowd of Park-and-Ride vehicles that I was talking about earlier in the post! The spring semester was in full swing at the time this photo was taken.

These two shots take a look around the side and back of the mall, respectively. In the top one, you can see the former Wal-Mart garden center surrounded by fencing; I'm unsure what Ole Miss is planning to do with the area, but I'm hesitant to say that they're expanding the building into that space (though I could see that happening in the future). The bottom one peeks around the back from the JCPenney side of the mall. The parking back here is likely for employees only (although if the university gets really desperate, they might make some of these Park-and-Ride too, haha!).

 

A quick look at the JCPenney storefront (since I ought not to leave it out!), followed by a final glance over at the rest of the mall from the JCP side. As promised, I will have many more photos of the JCPenney, including multiple interior shots, in a separate blog post that will go up later this month (if all goes as planned)!

 

And to wrap up our tour, here's a shot of the Jackson Avenue-facing road sign for the former Oxford Mall, which is still standing today but sans the mall branding. This is the exact same sign pictured via Google Street View earlier in the post. Note how one of the white stripes that used to surround the words "OXFORD MALL" remains between the newly-added Barnes & Noble and Rebel Shop signs. (Rebel Shop is not a separate store, but is simply the name for the non-book selection inside B&N.) And the smaller black rectangle is covering up the old Ciné 4 branding!

 

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Well, that'll do it for this lengthy post. I know I wrote and photographed a lot, but I hope you enjoyed the backstory and images of this dead mall and its unique reuse! Finally, I'd like to conclude by saying that if you are from Oxford or Lafayette County and have memories, photos, directories/store listings, and/or any additional info of/on the former Oxford Mall or any of its stores that you'd like to share, please feel free to send them in to us at midsouthretailblog [at] gmail [dot] com. There is very little about this mall to be found on the internet, so I hope that this post will help change that, and I invite you to help change that as well if you can! I will happily post your contributions as either edits/comments to this post or as their own separate blog post, as warranted, with credit to you in either scenario.

 

For now, that is the former Oxford Mall/current Jackson Avenue Center in Oxford, MS. Look for a more detailed post on the closing JCPenney soon. Until then, have fun exploring the retail world wherever you are!

 

Retail Retell