Macon Mall

Macon Mall

Macon Mall entrance facing Mercer University Drive.
Location	Macon, Georgia, United States
Opening date	1975
Management	Hull Storey Gibson Companies, LLC
Owner	Hull Storey Gibson Companies, LLC
No. of stores and services	44
No. of anchor tenants	5 (2 open, 3 vacant)
Total retail floor area	1,080,000 sq ft (100,000 m2).
No. of floors	2
Website	www.maconmall.com

Macon Mall is a two level, 1.1 million square foot shopping mall located in Macon, Georgia. The mall features Macy's, and Burlington, as its anchor stores, as well as a food court. It has a vacancy rate of over 70% and rising.

The mall opened in 1975 as a 1.08 million square foot shopping mall anchored by Davison's, Belk, JCPenney, and Sears. A Woolworth was added later which went bankrupt and today sits as the upstairs food court. The opening of Macon Mall led to the demise of Macon and Georgia's first enclosed mall, Westgate Mall down the street. At opening date the mall was filled with hundreds of light bulbs in a disco-style theme. This appearance quickly became dated and was expensive to maintain, leading to the mall's first renovation in 1983. The food court was added in 1986 and Davison's changed over to Macy's, when Macy's decided to rename all of their stores at the time under the same name.

For fourteen years Macon Mall was one of the largest malls in the state of Georgia encompassing 1,448,200-square-foot (134,540 m²). The mall underwent a huge renovation and expansion in 1997 that nearly doubled the size of the mall and added Dillard's and Parisian as anchors. This made the mall more upscale and added over forty new stores in a wing on the other side of JCPenney. This expansion made Macon mall the largest mall in the state of Georgia for two years until Mall of Georgia opened in 1999 in Gwinnett County. Two parking garages were constructed on the new wing to handle the increase in business and decrease in parking. An extra level was also added to the food court that brought in Atlanta Bread Company, Sbarro, and Time Out Arcade. Macy's changed over to Rich's in 1998, several years after Macy's itself merged with Rich's parent company Federated Department Stores. In the years following the expansion, Macon Mall ran a near monopoly on regional retail. A new power center named Eisenhower Crossing opened down the street in 2001 and took the Old Navy from the mall. Federated integrated Macy's into Rich's as Rich's-Macy's in 2003, and in 2005 announced they were eliminating all of their regional names in favor of Macy's in 2005. This resulted in Rich's at Macon Mall changing back to Macy's. Belk also dropped the "Matthews" name from their store and Steve & Barry's opened a large store on the upper level of the Sears wing in 2005.