Laurel Mall (Maryland) - History

History

The Laurel Centre Mall was developed by Shopco Inc. and included two anchor stores, Montgomery Ward and JCPenney, with a third anchor, Hecht's, added in 1981. The 167,000-square-foot (15,500 m2) Montgomery Ward store opened for business on April 16, 1969. The 83,000-square-foot (7,700 m2) JCPenney store opened in 1979, with the 265,000-square-foot (24,600 m2) Laurel Centre expansion. The Hecht Company moved its store from its previous location in the Laurel Shopping Center. In 1991, the 662,000-square-foot (61,500 m2) mall received a $2 million face lift and update. Though it was small in comparison with most malls today, Laurel Mall had two levels and, when it opened, had modern innovations such as a slowly rotating two-story island in the middle of a fountain known as the "Carousel" with room for seven kiosks on the bottom and a stage on top. Time Out Tunnel arcade had a location near the main entrance on the second level. Other features at the mall were a glass-sided walkway over a roadway and parking lot and an enclosed bridge between JCPenney and Woolworth's at the Laurel Shopping Center. The food court "Inner Circle", later changed to "Circle Eatery", was located at the mall's south end. Here the mall split into a one level mezzanine section to accommodate Montgomery Ward, which had no second floor. Connecting it all were Maryland's shortest escalators at the time, one rising to a height of only 13 steps. A double-door elevator transported customers between the three levels and to a management office in the basement.

On November 1, 1980, Congresswoman Gladys Spellman collapsed at a campaign appearance at the Laurel Mall after suffering an incapacitating heart attack. She represented the 5th congressional district of Maryland from January 3, 1975 to January 3, 1981.

By the 2000s, the Mall had been in decline. In 2001, anchor store Montgomery Ward went out of business, and JC Penney vacated the mall in 2002. Around the same time, the expansion and renovation of the nearby Mall in Columbia added restaurants and movie theaters to its existing tenants. Big-box stores at U.S. Route 1 and Maryland Route 198 opened and expanded offerings over the decade. As a result, business at the Laurel mall dwindled. A Burlington Coat Factory occupied most of the former Montgomery Ward space, and Macy's replaced Hecht's in 2006. On two occasions, sections of the aging parking decks had crumbled and fallen onto the parking lots below, resulting in their closure.

In January 2012, Macy's announced it would close five underperforming stores with final clearance sales beginning January 8, and would run through early spring, including the Laurel Mall location, which left Burlington Coat Factory its last remaining anchor store. During this phase, the mall advertised its transformation with cryptic messages printed across some of the shuttered store fronts, such as "Don't judge a book by its cover", "Looks can be deceiving", "Beauty is more than skin deep", "If nothing ever changed, there'd be no butterflies", and "It's what's inside that counts".