The PopCulteer
January 9, 2026

Earlier this week Charleston’s Mayor, Amy Goodwin, announced that the city has been engaged in talks with The Hull Group, the owners of The Charleston Town Center Mall, to acquire the mall and attempt to either revitalize it, or develop it into something more useful.

Even though this was all over the local news, it wasn’t exactly news. She said the same thing eleven months ago on 580 Live on WCHS Radio, but this time it was in an official address, so folks are needlessly excited.

This has led to endless talk and speculation about the future of The Town Center, so I figured why not join in? It’s fun! The mall is currently operating with less than 15% of its available retail space actually being used. The rest is comfortably cocooning behind drywall, hoping to be reborn. It’s estimated that as much as 70%  of the current foot traffic at the mall is from people making “ghost mall” videos for YouTube or Tik Tok.  This does not seem sustainable.

There are a few facts that have to be recognized before you jump feet-first into any discussion about the future of the mall.

First of all, you’re not just dealing with one owner. Each anchor store owned their own land, and now with all four of the original anchor stores gone, things are more complicated than they had been.

And they were already plenty complicated. The parking buildings are owned by a separate entity. I believe it’s a group of the original bondholders who bought them back out of an auction to keep them from being sold for less than they thought they were worth. Also, a different entity, one controlled by the city, owns the land those parking building are on.

I think the city also has a stake in the land that was the former Macy’s, which has been demolished to make way for the now-questionable Aquatic Center (with all the aquatic elements excised), which may never happen. The city may have bought the JC Penny, which closed last year. I’m not clear on that.

The former Sears is supposed to be a hotel. Plans were filed about a year ago, but I don’t think any ground has been broken yet. That should still happen. It’s a great location.

Is it a prize, or a boondoggle?

Doing anything with the rest of the property is going to require some serious consolidation. The Hull Group, who owns the actual mall, seem to be perfectly content to use what is now essentially a ghost mall as a tax write-off to offset profits from their thriving mall properties in other states. They don’t seem too interested in doing what might be best for the city. This is a company that bought a mall in Reading, Pennsylvania, and eventually tore it down, leaving a fenced-in grassy field between the two still-operating anchor stores because that was cheaper than trying to refurbish it and attract new tenants. In order to pry this property from their hands, it’s going to take more money that they’re getting now from their accounting gymnastics.

Making the leap into a fantasy world where all of that land: the mall; the parking buildings; the former Macy’s and JC Penny–let’s say all of that winds up in the hands of one entity, then you have to figure out what the best use of the property would be.

I see a lot of posts on social media suggesting that this land be used for low-income housing for the elderly or disabled. There are so many reasons that will never happen, many of them being very ugly reasons, that it’s not worth discussing. There would just be too much money involved to expect it to be used for any purpose that doesn’t generate revenue.

The folks who were pushing big for a sports center so they could grab some of those “sports tourism” dollars may have come back to reality now that there has been a glut of sports centers in nearby areas, and many are struggling. That market is saturated.

I just freaking hate the idea of a downtown casino. Charleston needs to do more than cater to harmful vices in the pursuit of economic development. The same goes for breweries or distilleries. Charleston has plenty of those now, even as nationwide alcohol consumption is dropping and craft breweries and distilleries are starting to shut down.

And that leaves us with retail, which is a shaky enough proposition. Let’s say they try to go with the path of least resistance and keep The Charleston Town Center as a retail space.

First, both parking structures need to be replaced. They are over forty years old and it’d be more efficient to replace them with a new design than it would to keep trying to fix their many issues. New parking buildings should incorporate retail space into the ground floor, just to boost the potential for revenue, because they should not be charging much, if anything for parking. There’s plenty of shopping down Corridor G with free parking.

Charging for parking hurts foot traffic, and foot traffic is vital to attracting tenants, and new tenants are vital to bringing in more foot traffic. It’s a cycle. Right now they charge five bucks for anybody to park at the Town Center, which is why hardly anybody ever goes there.

Lets look at what the Town Center has now. Not counting restuarants, cellphone stores or offices, there are thirteen stores, an art gallery, The WV Music Hall of Fame and The Post Office.

I’ve been to strip malls with more retailers than that.

Any new retail devleopment is going to face serious challenges to get people to even considering going to the mall. Potential anchor stores aren’t exactly clamoring to come to Charleston. The best hope for the JC Penny space would be a second-tier department store, like Dillards, Boscov’s or Belk.

Meijer would be a fantastic addition, since they also have a grocery store, but I just don’t seem them picking Charleston to be their first West Virginia location. Besides, they demand free and plentiful parking. Getting them might require bulldozing the rest of the mall.

H&M is a possibility, but I doubt they’d want both floors of the space.

Old Navy would also be a terrific choice that would bring in a lot of traffic, but they may make the more sensible choice of locating at the new Park Place shopping center currently being built in South Charleston.

The idea of bringing in local retailers is delightful and a wonderful dream. It just does not mesh well with the reality of how much rent the mall would have to charge and how big a burdon that would be on non-chain retail stores.

I have a dream list of stores, but they either aren’t likely, or just not even remotely realistic. I’d love to see Barnes & Noble, Half-Price Books, Sir Troy’s Toy Kingdom, Lush, Miniso, FYE, Van’s, Box Lunch, Duluth Trading or any of the many cool stores that they have in other cities that Mel and I travel to now because Charleston is so devoid of current hot retailers.

Add to that Panda Express, Insomnia Cookies, Potbelly, Noodles & Company, Pie Five and some newer food retailers, and you could actually see more people going to the mall again.

The problem is, everybody has a wish list, and everybody’s wish list is different, and–at least in my case–too far outside the mainstream to attract much mainstream foot traffic. I’m a bit weird that way. If a mall doesn’t have a book or toy store, or a place that sells vinyl, I have no use for it. Ask Mel. I’m sure it’s annoying.

There are plenty of thriving malls in this country that have nothing to interest me. While I’m sure some of my readers will look at the stores and restaurants I listed and think it looks great, others will shake their heads and ask about clothing, shoe, jewelry, and accessory stores that I honestly couldn’t care about less.

“Completely uncontaminated by humans” is not a selling point for prospective new tenants.

All of this speculation ignores the major issue: Nothing’s going to happen any time soon. If, by some miracle, all of the land involved in The Charleston Town Center could be consolidated tomorrow, it would still take at least three to five years before any plans could be drawn up. The only thing we can count on is that more retailers will leave The Town Center. In the eleven months since it was annnonced that plans have been submitted to build the long-expected hotel where Sears used to be, a dozen retailers have exited the mall.

By the time any development could start, the entire retail and economic landscape could change drastically. We could wind up in a great economic boom, or more likely a depression.

We’ve seen how long it’s taken to demolish the old building and break ground on the hotel on the former Sears. We’ve also seen the Aquatic Center plans, announced three and a half years ago, quietly go off the rails, first eliminating the aquatic aspects, and then putting the entire idea on hold due to a funding gap.

Unless they decide to try to preserve the old mall structure, there’s not a thing that’s going to happen with that land for at least a decade. And trying to revive the mall as it is might simply not be worth the investment.

It’s a harsh reality, but we are living in harsh times. I’ve been trying to figure out what the future of the Charleston Town Center would be in this blog for at least seven years, and I haven’t come close with any of my predictions.

That is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for fresh content every day, plus all our regular features.