The Woodlands Mall

The Woodlands Mall

Location	The Woodlands, Texas,  USA
Opening date	1994
Developer	Homart Development Company and The Woodlands Corporation
Management	General Growth Properties
Owner	General Growth Properties
No. of stores and services	160 [1]
No. of anchor tenants	5
Total retail floor area	1,355,000 square feet (125,900 m2)[2]
No. of floors	2
Website	http://www.thewoodlandsmall.com/ [3]

Inside The Woodlands Mall

Information Desk

Inside The Woodlands Mall

The Woodlands Mall is a two-story, enclosed shopping mall located at the intersection of Interstate 45 and Lake Woodlands Drive in the community of The Woodlands in unincorporated Montgomery County, Texas, United States, north of Houston. The Woodlands Mall features five anchor stores: Dillard's, JCPenney, Macy's, Nordstrom and a two-story Forever 21.^[4] With a gross leasable area of 1,350,000 square feet (125,000 m²),^[4] The Woodlands Mall is considered a super-regional mall by industry definitions.^[5] The Woodlands Mall is managed by General Growth Properties.

History

Having grown from its initial roots as a resort-oriented master-planned community first begun in 1974, developer George P. Mitchell's The Woodlands began to rapidly grow with an influx of new families from Houston and other areas, and had also gained national prominence from the community being both host to the Shell Houston Open and home to the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, which opened in 1990. By the 1990s, the community (and Montgomery County) had grown enough to the point where a new super-regional mall became a key priority of the community's developer, The Woodlands Corporation, who sought to develop the mall as part of its Town Center development.

The Woodlands Mall opened on October 5, 1994 with over 120 stores, including anchor tenants Dillard's, Foley's, Mervyn's and Sears, whose Homart Development Company jointly built the mall with The Woodlands Corporation.^[6][7] This would be the final development by Homart, which would be acquired by General Growth Properties the following year. In addition, the mall also contained a carousel and adjacent food court on its upper level, and several restaurants and smaller retailers on the periphery.

Before The Woodlands Mall opened, many residents of The Woodlands and Montgomery County (as well as the nearby community of Huntsville further north) traveled to Greenspoint Mall, Willowbrook Mall and Deerbrook Mall for retail services. Greenspoint would be the mall most directly impacted by The Woodlands Mall's opening, as Greenspoint consequently lost virtually all of its most critical (and most upscale) customer base, though Greenspoint already had been in decline due to competition from the more upscale Willowbrook and Deerbrook malls (which sustained themselves due to sizable suburban populations in their respective trade areas), as well as increased criminal activity within the Greenspoint area that further contributed to Greenspoint Mall's decline.

In 1998, JCPenney opened in an empty anchor space situated between Sears and Dillard's in the mall's northeast corner. In 2004, a 150,000-square-foot (14,000 m²) outdoor section was added featuring a Barnes & Noble bookstore, several upscale shops, and Class A office space, as well as a 1.4-mile (2.3 km) waterway, which features a water taxi.^[8][9] In April 2007, the mall partnered with NearbyNow, a digital applications company based in California, to offer shoppers a service that allows them to search for items at the mall through their cell phones or home computers.^[10]

Since The Woodlands Mall's opening, three anchor changes have commenced:

• The first came in 2005, when Mervyn's closed all its locations in Greater Houston; the chain would eventually go out of business in 2008. Mervyn's space would be filled by both the Woodlands Children's Museum, and the Woodlands Xploration Station (the latter a satellite facility of the Houston Museum of Natural Science); ^[11] both were later replaced in August of 2010 with the largest Forever 21 location in Greater Houston.^[12]
• In September 2006, another original anchor, Houston-based Foley's would be converted to Macy's as a result of the latter's parent company Federated Department Stores acquiring Foley's parent company May Department Stores.
• The most recent anchor change commenced at the beginning of 2013, when Sears closed its location at The Woodlands Mall after selling its lease back to General Growth Properties. Replacing Sears would be the more upscale Nordstrom, which opened its second full-service location in the Houston area in September 2014 along with a number of new specialty stores, some of them in new specialty space carved out of the former Sears store.

Anchors

• Dillard's (229,866 sq. ft., opened 1994)
• Forever 21 (85,150 sq. ft., opened 1994 as Mervyn's, closed 2006, reopened August 2010 as Forever 21)
• JCPenney (146,553 sq. ft., opened 1994)
• Macy's (199,019 sq. ft., opened 1994 as Foley's, became Macy's in 2006)
• Nordstrom (167,480 sq. ft., opened 1994 as Sears, closed in 2013, replaced in 2014 by Nordstrom) ^[13]

In addition, the mall also has an open anchor pad site located between the main entrance and Dillard's in the mall's southeast corner.

See also

• List of shopping malls in Greater Houston

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Shopping malls in The Woodlands Texas.

• The Woodlands Mall Official Site