Mall comes tumblin’ down

By Donald W. Patterson, Staff Writer
Greensboro News & Record

GREENSBORO — The old Carolina Circle Mall property looks like a battle scene from “War of the Worlds.”

Piles of rubble stand where cars once parked. Gaping holes pock the walls of long-empty stores. Inside, long metal strands dangle from beams exposed by the destruction.

This scene belongs to EME, a Greensboro company hired to demolish the ill-fated building off U.S. 29 North. EME began gutting the former mall last week. The exterior will begin coming down next week.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Kenneth Grimes, the company’s operations manager, said of the tear down. “I like demolitions.”

Most of the work, which will prepare the site for a 200,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter, will be finished by September.

The mall, which opened in 1976 with considerable fanfare and promise, won’t reach its 30th anniversary. What went wrong?

“Nobody knows,” said Charlie Melvin, a local attorney who represented the company that developed the mall. “That thing went fine for a while.”

But in the end, no one could save the mall. Certainly not Alice in Wonderland. In the mall’s early days, UNCG students played the roles of Alice, the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat, who interacted with customers.

The initial owners wanted the mall to appeal to children, a notion which some saw as a mistake. In the end, critics say, the mall — like Alice — just fell down a hole.

Not even the Lone Ranger could save it. Clayton Moore, who played the famed masked man, came to mark the mall’s second anniversary, one of countless promotions a succession of owners tried to attract customers. Not Handel. A choir sang his “Hallelujah Chorus” after the mall underwent a $6 million renovation in 1988. But the new look didn’t bring in sufficient customers.

And not Don Linder. The local anesthesiologist and entrepreneur had grand plans for the place, but in the end he would end up selling it for $3.3 million.

Efforts to reach Linder Thursday were unsuccessful. Wal-Mart officials referred questions about timetables to him. Linder’s plans for the site call for the abandoned mall to be replaced with the Wal-Mart, a home improvement center and other retail spaces.

City officials and nearby property owners say such a development will be a boon for the northeastern part of the city. But that’s also what they believed when developers announced plans for Carolina Circle in 1972.

The prospective owners offered impressive numbers: a 60-acre building covering two levels, a 220-acre tract, nearly 80 stores, $25 million to develop, 1,000 jobs created and the promise of more businesses around the mall that would generate another 900 jobs.

They envisioned attracting shoppers from Reidsville, Eden, Burlington and southern Virginia.

City officials loved the prospects and pushed successfully for money to improve Cone Boulevard and 16th Street, which would provide easier access to the mall.

They hoped to spur development in the northeast so the city would grow away from High Point to the southwest. So developers built the mall, but customers didn’t come. At least not in sufficient numbers to compete with what is now Four Seasons Town Centre, the city’s first enclosed mall, or Friendly Center, an open-air shopping complex.

Some say Carolina Circle was the wrong mall in the wrong place.

“It wasn’t a good location for a mall,” the late Joe Koury, the developer of Four Seasons, once said of his competition. “I knew that then.”

Others contend Carolina Circle got off to a slow start and never recovered.

When it opened, only about a quarter of its stores were occupied. Other businesses moved in later, but the mall never reached the occupancy levels of Four Seasons.

From the beginning, the mall had to contend with odor problems from the city’s nearby landfill and wastewater treatment plant.

“In a lot of ways, it seemed doomed from the start,” said David Gwynn, who first went to the mall as a 12-year-old and later managed a jeans store there in the mid ’80s. “The whole neighborhood stunk to high heaven. And there was the fact that it was only marginally occupied.”

Gwynn, who has written about the mall on his Web log, said the mall catered too much to kids.

“They never figured out who their audience was,” Gwynn said. “Was it kids? Was it adults? Was it upscale? Was it middle class? They didn’t know who they were playing to.”

On top of that, teens would hang out at the mall, he says, but wouldn’t spend money. And their presence kept older customers away.

Some customers complained of not feeling safe, even after the mall opened a satellite police station. In addition, the mall didn’t have a look that lasted.

“From Day One,” Gwynn says, “it was a very trendy mall that looked instantly dated a month and a half after it opened.”

Gwynn said that when he worked at the mall in the mid ’80s “the rumor was that it was dying.”

Others say the mall began to decline in ’88 when it closed its skating rink, the only one in Greensboro at the time, to expand its food court.

“I think it was a bad idea to close that rink,” Charlie Melvin says. “That was very popular.”

It didn’t help that Koury expanded Four Seasons to 200 stores in ’78.

In the end, Carolina Circle couldn’t compete.

“They overmalled Greensboro,” said George D. Zamias, whose Johnstown, Pa., company bought the mall in 1993 for $16 million and an agreement to take over its $21 million mortgage. “It was just too much competition for a mall like Carolina Circle to survive.”

One by one the stores closed. And so did the mall.

Now, it’s coming down.

A phalanx of EME’s machines — like something out of War of The Worlds — have descended on the building, their long arms eating away one big chunk after another.

“It’s grown men playing with big toys,” said Edward Malone, EME owner and CEO. “It’s not a complicated deal.”