Regency Square Mall - Jacksonville, FL

Jacksonville's Regency Square Mall answers an important question in the modern retail leasing landscape: just how long can you puppet around the husk of a once successful center, as the walls literally fall down around you?

Jacksonville, having long embraced suburban sprawl, is awash with malls, with 7 current and former malls inside it's city-county borders. While most have been repurposed, completely abandoned, or demolished entirely, Regency Square has instead had the unfortunate luck to shamble, zombie-like, onwards into the 21st century. Opened on March 2nd, 1967 by the appropriately named Regency Centers^[1], Regency wasn't originally a mega-mall; while always considered a powerhouse, the original mall was a distinctly 1960s affair, anchored by JCPenney and May-Cohens^[2] at either end, with a mix of small and large tenants inbetween, including another local department store, Furchgotts, South Carolinan department store Ivey's, a F.W. Woolworth discount store, and a Walgreens.  The mall held it's own in this state, relatively unchanged, for over a decade until a major 1981 expansion that doubled the mall's footprint to a whopping 1.2 million sq ft, adding Sears and an expanded Ivey's.  Furchgotts would move across the hall into Ivey's old space, leaving their original location at the back of the mall to be carved into a small food court and a 6-screen AMC^[3] movie theater.

As the 1980s progressed, activity began to pick up at the mall. Furchgotts, like most small, local department stores that hadn't sold out to a national conglomerate^[4], fell behind the times and declared bankruptcy in January 1985. While the chain was almost bought by discounter Stein Mart, the deal collapsed after Regency Square management refused to allow them into the mall, saying a 'low-end' chain wouldn't fit the mall's demographics. May-Cohens would be rebranded several times as department store buyouts and mergers stacked up, racking up 5 separate nameplates^[5] before finally becoming a Belk in 1998. Dillards, despite buying out and converting Ivey's in 1990, would build a brand new store in 1992 alongside a small number of extra stores, forming the malls 'north wing', selling the old Ivey's store to Montgomery Wards. As the world crept towards a new millenium, work began on the mall's next major remodel, closing the small, 6-screen cinema for a freestanding 24-screen megaplex in 1998. The opening of The Gallery, a new food court themed to the history of Jacksonville transportation^[6], capped off the remodel in 2001. 

Unfortunately, this would be about where the good times end. Montgomery Ward closed it's Jacksonville location as part of it's bankruptcy, and the building wouldn't be retenanted until 2006, and only by a locally owned furniture store, the beginning of a series of 3rd-rate tenants that ended in 2017 with an automobile museum that never fully opened as the aging building's roof began to leak like a siv, resulting in mold, mildew, and eventually electrical fires. Dillard's would downsize their store to a clearance center in 2008, the same year many inline stores, such as The Disney Store, The Gap Outlet, KB Toys, and Kirklands would leave the mall due to bankruptcy or relocation. 

The next decade would only be harsher; General Growth Properties, itself in financial straights, would sell the mall in 2014 to a venture of Namdar Realty Group and Mason Asset Management, an infamous pair of Long Island based real estate companies that own over 100 dying or dead malls. They are, in my opinion, some of the most prolific mall slumlords in the country, their properties peppered with millions of dollars in unpaid taxes and utility bills, water main breaks and other structural failures, all while the company often actively resisted buyout offers and redevelopment attempts by other more honest local developers. Belk, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, closed their store in February 2015, followed shortly by Sears in 2016. 

Just at Regency Square, Namdar was on the receiving end of two lawsuits from prospective tenants due to mold, cockroaches, water leaks, lacking security, and non-functional air conditioning making the properties uninhabitable. Banners and signage for one of these retailers, a furniture retailer called International Decor Outlet, still haunt the mall's now-shuttered western wing, where they once planned to operate dozens of storefronts^[7]. As the decade ticked over and the world fell apart, Regency traded highs and lows; Impact Church, who purchased the former Belk in 2016, would finally move forward on the property and open in late 2020, only shortly before JC Penney, a charter tenant since 1967, finally threw in the towel amidst a 154-store closure wave. 

These last few years have reduced the mall to a decaying, zombie like state. My visit to the mall in 2022 found clusters of trash cans and plastic totes huddled underneath holes in the ceiling of a largely vacant mall, largely hanging on by it's food court- itself struggling to stay afloat as even Florida's lackluster Covid policies kept many of the office workers who patronized the restaurants working from home. By 2023, with open air visible through tears in the ceiling and the A/C knocked out by a lightning strike, the number of tenants inside the mall had been whittled down to a pitiful six. 

Today, the mall has fallen even further, with only two tenants inside the mall^[8]- Tokyo Sakura sits alone in the cavernous food court, and Rogers Jewelers remains open right outside it. Appropriately, the mall has been cut down to just that food court and a small path to the jewelers. The rest lays cordoned off behind wet floor signs and tensabarriers, the once stylish main entrance closed to shoppers. 

Lake City based Blackwater Development has been in talks to purchase the mall since late 2023, a deal that still appears to be in the works despite missing it's original Q3 2024 closing date. While the mall once suffered greatly due to the area's reputation as neglected and crime-ridden, it's since rapidly gentrified, and those potential new owners want to redevelop the site with new residential, retail, and even a soccer stadium.

A list of sources and further reading can be found here.
An album with 90+ extra photographs can be found here.
Thank you for reading!

[1] Who are still in business today, but no longer own this mall
[2] Cohens, a homegrown Jacksonville store, was bought by May Department Stores in 1958 and rebranded May-Cohens; read more here
[3] Did you know 'AMC' stands for 'American Multi-Cinema'? I didn't, and I think that's a fun fact, but I have no way to insert it into the text.
[4] Such as Federated Dept Stores (now Macy's), Allied Dept Stores, or Mercantile Stores
[5] May Cohens, renamed May Florida (Sept. 1987), sold and renamed Maison Blanche (1988), sold and renamed Gayfers (1992), sold and renamed Belk (1998)
[6] God I love the early 2000s sometimes.
[7] though it's important to mention they were also the receipient of several lawsuits themselves
[8] IRIS, a Christian lending library of braille books, was still at the mall as of February. As they are located in a part of the mall not open to shoppers, I can't say if they were still present as of October 2024. Impact Church and Dillard's Clearance Center are not counted as they only use their external entrances.