Carolina Circle Mall and Pyramids Village had an article in today’s edition of the Greensboro News & Record. Pyramids Village gets the majority of the attention, making mention of some of the new stores and restaurants that have opened there in late 2013 and early 2014.
You can see this article here.
I’ve had this article in my possession for the past 4 years. This article is from the Greensboro Daily News talking about the grand opening of Carolina Circle Mall dated August 4, 1976, aka “The Day Human Life Changed Forever”.
As you will see, this article gives a list of all 22 stores that were open that day, as well as a list of businesses that were planning to open near the mall, all of which did open the same year.
Somewhere amongst my junk, I have an article from the Greensboro Record (Greensboro’s evening newspaper) from the same day. It includes a badly library microfilm compressed picture of large balloons being lifted into the sky by the main entrance. If I ever find it, I’ll post it as well.
Also keep in mind that at this time, Circle Six Theatres and Piccadilly Cafeteria and not opened yet. Both didn’t come along until November 1976.
Here it is, in its full length. No challenge to copyright intended.
Carolina Circle Mall officially opens today, and both the shopping and entertainment aspects of the 750,000 square foot complex will be featured.
Twenty-two stores will be in operation when the mall opens at 10:00am. Among these are Belk Department Store and Montgomery Ward, both of which have been open for several months, and Ivey’s, which will be opening its first Greensboro store today.
These three stores together account for 428,000 square feet of the enclosed, two-tiered complex, which features natural sky lighting, interior landscaping with live trees and a climate-controlled environment.
Architecturally, the mall centers around a sunken ice rink, called the Ice Chalet, where free public skating will be scheduled this morning, in addition to two skating exhibitions.
Other activities scheduled for the next three days at the mall are concerts by an Eastern Music Festival and “Bluegrass Experience,” visits by characters from Alice’s Wonderland and a hot air balloon exhibition, weather permitting.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony will take place at 10:00am today with Mayor Jim Melvin and Bob Alpert, president and chief executive officer of the mall’s development firm, Alpert Corporation, officiating.
Built over a two-year period, the $25 million-plus mall is the first phase in the full development of the 220-acre tract located on US-29 at Cone Boulevard, north of downtown Greensboro. The properties surrounding the mall are available for commercial and residential development.
Among the business establishments already slated for construction on this peripheral property are a Kmart, Weiner King, and Shoney’s.
Access to the enclosed mall, which is expected to attract shoppers from 10 North Carolina and Virginia counties in addition to Guilford, is by US-29, 16th Street, or Cone Boulevard. Parking for more than 4,000 cars is available.
The mall will generate more than 1,000 jobs and sales of more than $50 million annually are projected.
In addition to the three department stores which anchor the mall, stores open for business today include three fast food restaurants- Chick-Fil-A, the Karmel-Korn Shoppe, and Orange Julius of America; three jewelry stores- Kay Jewelers, Gordon’s Jewelers, and Carlyle & Company; three shoe stores- Kinney Shoe Corporation, Thom McAn, and Butler’s Shoe Corporation and two clothing shops- County Seat and Foxmoor.
Other stores opening include Radio Shack, a stereo equipment and electronics store; Camelot Music Store, Ridgeway Optical Company, the General Nutrition Center (a health food store), K&K Toys, Waldenbook Company, and Champs (a sporting goods store).
Electronic America, a family entertainment center featuring electronic arcade games, is located on the lower level near the ice rink and will also be open.
Some 21 businesses are scheduled to open in the mall during the coming months. Total occupancy of the mall is 76 stores.
Ever since I began my Carolina Circle studies in 2005, I’ve gone by the date given in the July 31, 1996 edition of the Greensboro News & Record, June 1988. I would look and look through every single newspaper from June of 1988 and find absolutely nothing about the renovation completion.
Today, I was going through the November 1988 newspapers trying to find some Carolina Circle Mall Thanksgiving/Christmas ads from that year. I got to the Wednesday, November 16, 1988 edition and I came across this article talking about Carolina Circle Mall’s renovation completion!
Obviously, the date given in the July 31, 1996 newspaper was incorrect.
So anyway, this article gives a good deal of information regarding the renovation, including the improvements made to the mall.
The renovation has always come off as “stupid”, regarding of course to the removal of the Ice Chalet. I, of course, have always preferred the Carousel because it was what I grew up with. I’ll still never forget that afternoon in 1995 when I was eating lunch at the Carolina Circle food court and trying to find scuff marks left from the Ice Chalet!
So here it is, from November 16, 1988, the renovation completion article. FINALLY!!! If only I had the above picture in color.
Tess Morris has one word for the Carolina Circle Mall of yore.
“Drab.”
The lights were low, the floor was dark, and walking from one end of the mall to the other was like negotiating an obstacle course.
“The walkways were kind of like a maze,” says Morris, the mall’s assistant manager. “You’d go left and go right and go left and go right”.
Given those descriptions, hindsight is 20-20, especially after you’ve gotten rid of any problems. It’s no surprise that mall officials are eager for this weekend’s celebration to show off the fruits a $7.5 million renovation.
They hope the renovation, and an eventual “upscaling” of merchandise, will allow them to make a run at Greensboro’s two largest shopping centers: Friendly Shopping Center and Four Seasons Town Centre. Ever since Carolina Circle opened 12 years ago, it has lagged behind the other two shopping centers in size and money-making.
Amidst a two-day festival of song and dance starting Saturday, Carolina Circle shoppers will see a lighter, brighter mall.
Giant pink-and-blue butterflies and banners hang from the ceiling. A brown terrazzo floor was ripped up to make room for a light gray tile floor. Interior support columns have been covered with mirrors and ringed with neon. Brown handrails have given way to chrome, and walkways cross splashing water fountains.
Inside, the mall is five times brighter than it used to be with just 60 lighting fixtures.
“During the nighttime, it was incredibly dark,” says Morris. “Now over a thousand lights illuminate the center. It looks a lot more alive than it ever has”.
Lighting in the parking lots has been upped by 30 percent for safety reasons. Exterior entrances have been spiced up with prism towers and the mall’s new logo: a crescent and circle inside a larger circle.
Back inside the mall, newly nicknamed The Circle, concourses have been straightened. Before, store fronts jutted out in a jagged pattern, blocking customers’ views of some stores and making a crooked path from one end of the mall to the other.
Store fronts have been cut back, allowing a wider, straighter path from one end of the mall to the other. More stores are using glass fronts to display more items and, therefore boost the chances that they’ll sell more.
Shopper convenience is important, but the bottom line is the bottom line, which can be seen in seemingly small changes.
Before the renovation, there was a pair of escalators at one end of the mall. Post-renovation finds the up escalator at one end of the mall and the down escalator at the other end.
“You have to walk past more stores,” Morris says, adding that mall officials are considering putting escalators in the middle of the mall.
The stairs remain where they were, at both ends of the mall, but their angle has been lowered. “They were so steep, and rather dangerous,” Morris says.
The renovation also means more stores. The controversial removal of the lower-level ice-skating rink, skaters wanted it to stay, the mall wanted the unprofitable rink to go, ahs allowed for an additional 4,000 to 4,500 square feet of space that can be leased.
The area around the former rink will be known as the “food court”, and will be highlighted by a $250,000 custom-made carousel that features scenes from Greensboro’s past. The carousel, which was made in Italy, should be set up and ready to ride by November 26.
Some individual stores are still finishing their own renovations. At least two more stores, a 5-7-9 and Jeans West, are scheduled to open soon.
About 75 percent of the mall’s available space is occupied, compared to 69 percent at the lowest point, says mall manager Larry Berry.
Most stores are undergoing “remerchandising” with greater “disposable income” in mind, according to Berry. That means look for more expensive goods.
Berry works for Strouse Greenberg & Co. of Philadelphia, a management company hired by Sunshine-North Carolina Investments, which bought the mall for about $20 million two years ago.
Berry and others have said the mall suffered from poor management before the buyout. Other problems included a stench that wafted to the mall from a city sewer treatment plant, which has been cured.
Berry thinks the renovation is the first step in the mall’s about-face.
“You’ve gotta crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run,” he says. “We’re at the stage now where we’re just getting the shopping center to walk, getting it into motion”.
Inset:
The renovation celebration starts at the center of Carolina Circle Mall’s lower level at 9:45am Saturday. Singers will offer the “Hallelujah Chorus” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” before speeches by Greensboro Mayor Vic Nussbaum and mall officials. Entertainment, acting, beach music, gospel, bluegrass, spoon playing, will continue on three stages Saturday and Sunday.
The article describes how malls were basically taking over the world. Keep in mind that this was 20 years ago, years before the open air shopping center and big box stores began to over-dominate malls.
Carolina Circle Mall, Four Seasons Town Centre, and Friendly Shopping Center are mentioned in this article. In fact, the above picture of Carolina Circle Mall (the second floor corridor) happened to come out of this article. The picture was republished on July 1, 2005 when Carolina Circle Mall began its demolition.
So here it is, from November 12, 1989, It’s a Mall World After All! Wait till you get to the part about what Friendly Shopping Center almost did in 1992! No challenge to copyright intended.
Greensboro is a mall town that’s getting maller.
Its true town center-or should I say centre?-is Four Seasons Town Centre, three stories and three city blocks of Radio Shacks, Chick-Fil-As and Electric Eels. According to Four Seasons’ surveys, most people in Guilford County, at least 67 percent, visit the 1.2 million square-foot mall off Interstate 40 at least once a month.
On the other side of town, recently renovated Carolina Circle Mall is making a comeback, drawing shoppers with its well-stocked department stores and carousel centerpiece.
And the owners of Greensboro’s mall alternative Friendly Shopping Center, say chances are good Friendly will go the way of gurgling fountains and Muzak, Starmount Company has tentative plans to convert the shopping center into an enclosed mall in 1992.
There’s no doubt, it’s a mall world. Teenagers socialize there; fitness buffs walk laps there; kids even trick-or-treat there.
The National Research Bureau reports there are 82,560 malls nationwide. In a typical month, 170 million American adults shop at a mall.
In Rome, cities were often centered around entertainment structures such as The Coliseum. In medieval Europe, the cathedral embodied the religious spirit of the age. Our era of malldom is really the logical conclusion of a society moving from an industrial base to a service-oriented consumer one.
The transition has been hard for some. Writers bermoan the emergence of shopping mall culture, a character in Sam Shepard’s play “Curse of the Starving Class” calls the mall that will replace his home “a zombie city”, and academics build careers studying the phenomenon.
Even Chrissie Hynde lamented the change in The Pretenders’ song, “My City Was Gone,” when she sang “All my favorite places had been replaced by shopping malls”.
As in many cities, Greensboro’s suburban shopping centers and malls have taken the place of the downtown shopping district. The department stores that once drew shoppers downtown moved out in the ‘70s. Department stores such as Thalhimers, Ivey’s, Belk, Sears and Montgomery Ward are now the anchors that draw shoppers to Four Seasons, Friendly, and Carolina Circle Mall.
David Mitchell, an urban sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, says a city loses something when it centers itself around a mall instead of downtown.
“The mall owners have the ability to control activities and they have a strong desire to maximize buying potential,” Mitchell says. “A downtown has much more diverse activities, festivals, and parades.”
Malls tend to separate people, Mitchell says. When department stores were downtown, he points out, suburban homemakers would mingle with lawyers at lunch, but now the two groups are separated in city and suburbia.
In his 1985 book The Malling of America, William Severini Kowinski argues that malls are still in their infancy and will continue to grow and expand in the next “mallennium”. He predicts a culture of “mallcondo continuum” where you can eat, shop, work, and play in one huge “mallolithic” structure without ever needing to know the outside temperature.
He also believes we will eventually retreat to the mall if natural or man-made disasters threaten our cultural security, just as medieval huddled in castles during the Dark Ages.
“Malls are already becoming the citadels of our time, fortresses protecting the dream worlds of our culture,” Kowinski writes.
America grew attached to the mall in only one generation. Baby Boomers’ car-driven culture addiction to air-conditioning and desire to consume paved the way for the suburban mall.
Malls, in turn, borrowed from television. Boomers’ central culture guide, to create a sanitized version of the American ideal they would eventually replace, Main Street. Four Seasons, for example, is designed to be a mini-Main Street complete with simulated old town square.
Greensboro’s real main street became obsolete as a retail hub when it was physically bypassed by the new paths of the car culture, Interstates 40 and 85. These days, although downtown is basking in the dust of three new office towers and umpteen parking decks, shopping is mostly limited to antiques.
Greensboro got its first glimpse of the mall in 1961, when award-winning architect Edward Durell Stone came to town to show the first architectural plans of a new shopping center named Four Seasons.
Stone promised it would be free of the “neon vulgarities” that characterized much of the architecture of the day. And he said the center would not house businesses out to “catch a penny and a quick buck. It will be a place of beauty, interest, and enjoyment”.
Stone’s plan was dumped in favor of a mall design and construction began in 1972, early enough to make it Greensboro’s first mall. Carolina Circle Mall followed two years later. Before long, even old textile mills were being converted to malls such as Cotton Mill Square.
Four Seasons owner Joseph Koury had wanted a three-story mall back in the early ‘60s but had trouble convincing folks it would work. When the mall was built in the early ‘70s, it included a third story that was used for storage. A third story of shops was opened in 1987 and Four Seasons Mall became Four Seasons Town Centre.
With its 175 stores, 23 restaurants, and four movie screens, Four Seasons has become Greensboro’s shopping and entertainment hub.
“We’re really a town within a town,” says Linda Jones, marketing director for Koury Corp. “We have everything you need here from a post office to a drivers’ license office.
And the mall is still growing. Koury plans to eventually connect the mall and its sister Four Seasons Holiday Inn. The proposed 30-story hotel tower would be the city’s tallest building.
Since it is an enclosed, climate-controlled bubble, the mall frees shoppers from the weather. Despite its name, Four Seasons is seasonless, always bright with plants growing year round.
In the summer, shoppers come to escape heat and humidity. In the winter, teens can check each other out without the cocoons of heavy coats. Every morning, legions of mall walkers stomp through the windless, rainless corridors without dirtying their shoes.
Climate control has helped the mall knock off its predecessor, the shopping center, as the dominant facet of suburban culture.
Shopping centers were born out of the car culture of the post-World War II era. As Mom and Dad were busy procreating and moving to the suburbs, they began purchasing automobiles in record numbers.
Meanwhile, television advertisements showcased the spoils of the post-war boom. But in burgeoning suburbia, there weren’t enough places to buy such wonders as vacuum cleaners, lava lamps, and polyester suits.
The shopping center, and eventually the mall, completed the link between television and the highway. As major department stores and national chains moved to the suburbs, shoppers had no trouble finding right in their own neighborhood everything they’d seen advertised on television.
Friendly Shopping Center was born in 1953 when it was just outside the city limits.
In the beginning, Friendly was to be a modest project designed to look like a Williamsburg Village. It grew through the ‘60s and early ‘70s as downtown department stores followed customers to the suburbs. Forum VI, a small mall with exclusive shops and restaurants, was added to the Friendly complex in 1975.
Even as it grew, Friendly retained a neighborhood shopping center feel that lived up to its name. Free from the fake ambience and overwhelming structure of the mall, it’s still a place where you can run into neighbors at their cars and meet friends for a quick cup of coffee.
It also is a unique retail hybrid that blends the outside and inside, the car and the pedestrian, the mom-and-pop stores of downtown and the national chains of the mall.
But Friendly’s days as a shopping center may be numbered.
Friendy’s owners, the Starmount Company, have said chances are good the shopping center will be made into a mall beginning in 1992. The conversion would come in several phases. In each phase some of the existing buildings would be torn down and parking lots ripped u, replaced by a mall section.
“The years are taking their toll, and it is becoming obsolete,” says Elvin Parks, president of Starmount. “We must do whatever it takes to keep this a top scale center”.
A mall would allow for more stores and more diversity for shoppers. But it won’t be as easy for shoppers to pull up to the store they want, dash in and out in a few minutes. Malls keep shoppers contained, forcing them to walk around more and, merchants hope, purchase more.
What about shoppers who aren’t mall friendly?
One hopeful sign for them is the rebirth of open-air markets. At Greensboro’s Quaker Village, for example, a remarkable unmalling happened recently when the developer pulled the roof of the mini-mall and returned it to an open air center.
Mall loathers also have to ally themselves with the shopping center. These strip centers, with their grocery stores, video rental shops, and hair salons, continue to draw shoppers in search of everything from garden hoses to styling mousse.
What shopping centers lack in beauty, they make up for in honesty. While a few try to pass themselves off as quaint towns in concrete clothing, most simply get people in and out quickly with no-nonsense style.
And then there’s downtown. A few civic leaders are tossing around a new idea they say would be just the thing to reinvigorate downtown.
They want to build a mall.
I was a kid in the early to mid- 1990s and would go to the old Carolina Circle Mall, shop at the many Kmarts, eat at Sally’s Hot Dogs and Western Steer on High Point Road, and play miniature golf at Putt-Putt Golf and Games. The ’90s were a very nice decade for our city.
Unfortunately, many of the places I grew up going to no longer exist. The only Kmart left has downsized considerably over the past years, leaving nothing but a shell of its former self. Where did Little Caesar’s Pizza and the store’s grocery section go?
There’s one place where you can still play miniature golf, Celebration Station on Wendover Avenue. Mini golf is a dying trend, but many people here still enjoy it. The problem is Celebration Station isn’t only dedicated to miniature golf, which just about ruins the feel.
I won’t forget going to Sally’s Hot Dogs for the first time in 1994. I remember my first footlong hot dog. They had a wonderful variety of food and a fun Pac-Man arcade machine. Unfortunately, Sally’s closed in the early 2000s. Some foreign restaurant uses its building now.
I remember Western Steer having just about everything, including a full buffet. It closed in the mid-1990s and was demolished. A doctor’s office is in its space.
And, of course, there was Carolina Circle Mall. I would go to the mall to ride the carousel many times a week, as well as eating at the large food court, shopping at Montgomery Ward, and seeing movies at Circle Six. The mall was demolished in 2005 and a Walmart is in its place, which includes no interesting features at all.
Greensboro needs some new businesses for people to hang out and have fun. Emerald Pointe is only open five months a year and costs $30. Think about that.
Well, there you have it. Some stores didn't last long and some stores like Camelot Music (20 years) and Montgomery Ward (25 years) lasted a good long run. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Wednesday, August 4, 1976 was truly the beginning of an era.
Other things found at the library include a 1972 artist rendering of what Four Seasons Mall might look like and Wendover Avenue under construction in the '60s.
