22 May 2013

University Mall, Tuscaloosa, AL

An extant asset

-UPDATE BELOW-
26 December 2021

Tuscaloosa is Alabama's fifth largest municipality and serves as the home of the main campus of University of Alabama. Along with this notoriety comes droves of the most passionate, crazed and obsessed football fans in the world. The entire town revolves around the 101,821 seat Bryant-Denny Stadium, home of the Crimson Tide. Everything else in the small west Alabama city is secondary to this institution, including the insignificant yet adequate University Mall.

 
University Mall Mallmanac ca. 2000. View the full PDF version here.

University Mall opened in 1980 as west Alabama's largest enclosed mall, exceeding the community's older facility, MacFarland Mall. It was designed in the shape of a cross with an anchor bookending each of the four corridors. These original anchors included Sears, JCPenney and Parisian. McRae's was also a part of the complex, though I'm unsure if the Jackson, Mississippi based retailer was preceded by Pizitz before being taken over in that chain's buyout. McRae's became Belk when Saks sold their mid-market division to the Charlotte-based chain, followed by their opening a second location in the old Parisian space when they purchased that division as well.

 
L- University Mall's layout through much of the nineties and early 2000s. R- University Mall as of this writing.

As pretty much the only enclosed shopping venue in the college town, its success and dominance goes unchallenged. Unchallenged by man-made factors, at least. The famous and well documented major tornado of April 27, 2011 barely missed the red brick institution, and University Mall survived with only moderate damage. Besides no one's being hurt in the building, which is of the utmost importance, it was also fortuitous that the facility was left standing and structurally sound. Had it been irreparably damaged, considering the size of the market and today's retail trends, the replacement would have surely been neither traditional nor enclosed in nature.

-UPDATE-

-26 December 2021

University Mall pamphlet ca. 2011. View the full PDF version here.

University Mall's official website

1 comment:

  1. Yes, the mall opened with a Pizitz. http://lookingback.blogs.tuscaloosanews.com/10135/pizitz-had-a-long-history-in-tuscaloosa/

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