A movie theater sits where a Dillard's used to be. That's the short version of what happened to Decatur Mall, the enclosed regional center at 1801 Beltline Road SW that opened in 1978 as Beltline Mall.
It was built around department stores: JCPenney, Castner Knott, Rogers, and later Sears. Locals also knew its first movie house, Beltline Cinemas, three screens that opened two days after the mall with "Animal House" and "Grease."
The department-store lineup narrowed to Dillard's and Belk; Dillard's left in 2011, Sears closed in 2014, and the JCPenney outlet began closing down in 2013.
The fix was a 47,000-square-foot, 12-screen Carmike theater, now AMC, dropped into a former anchor area in 2013, plus a renovated Belk. Bought by Hull Property Group in 2016, the mall still runs on Belk, the theater, a Chuck E. Cheese's, and the cars on Beltline Road.
A mall opens on Beltline Road in 1978
On a Wednesday in mid-August 1978, Decatur got its first enclosed shopping mall.
Beltline Mall pulled department stores and small shops under one roof on the southwest highway corridor, away from downtown and the older shopping centers.
The name said exactly what it was: a mall on Beltline Road, which is part of Alabama State Route 67 and still one of Decatur's main retail strips.
The format did what enclosed malls were doing across the country that decade. It concentrated the shopping in one weather-protected box on a corridor that still reads as retail.
Two days after the doors opened, a movie theater joined it. The mall was built for a region, not just a neighborhood. And for a while, the region came.
Three screens, 285 seats each, and "Animal House"
Beltline Cinemas opened on Friday, August 18, 1978, with three auditoriums and 285 seats each.
The first films were "Hooper," "Animal House," and "Grease." Every screen had Dolby Stereo.
Two of the three rooms had small VIP boxes tucked beside the projection booths. For 10 years, it ran inside the mall.
Then on October 15, 1988, it played its last night there and moved to the Gateway area, reopening that December.
Entertainment kept mattering to this property. The address where you watched a movie just kept moving. That pattern repeats later, on a much bigger scale.
The anchors that became other anchors
The original department-store lineup didn't so much close as get absorbed. JCPenney, Castner Knott, and Rogers opened the mall.
Almost none of those names survived the consolidation that swept regional department stores in the South.
In 1987, JCPenney relocated to a new store inside the mall and sold its old building to Parisian.
Parisian ran there from 1988 to 2006, when Belk bought the Parisian stores from Saks Incorporated and the Decatur location became Belk.
That building, JCPenney to Parisian to Belk, is the one anchor that's still standing as a department store today. The other boxes wound up under Dillard's.
Dillard's bought Castner Knott's parent company in 1998, taking over that anchor. It also held a second box that had started as Rogers.
So Decatur Mall ended up with two Dillard's stores in one building, an odd setup that came straight out of decades of mergers.
Both closed in 2011. Dillard's Decatur Mall location measured 128,000 square feet.
Their exit pulled out two large department-store anchors in a single year, and left two large boxes still waiting a year later.
A bankrupt seller and an $8.5 million mall
By the mid-2000s, the mall was running as Colonial Mall Decatur, one of several names it cycled through.
It had been Beltline Mall, then River Oaks Center, then Colonial, and eventually just Decatur Mall.
In 2007, First Republic Group Realty bought it. First Republic later went into bankruptcy, which pushed the mall into the distressed-property cycle.
In August 2010, Garrison Opportunity Fund won it with an accepted bid of $8.5 million. For a 576,000-square-foot regional mall, $8.5 million is almost nothing.
It's the price of a property with empty space to fill and a future that had become a question.
Garrison wasn't buying a steady mall. It was buying a reclamation project, and within two years it went to the city for help paying for the redo.
Decatur agrees to help pay for the fix
In 2012, the City of Decatur signed a development agreement with Garrison.
The premise was blunt: the mall was about 34 years old, hadn't had a full renovation since 1989, had two empty anchor boxes, and needed work to attract tenants.
The whole renovation program was estimated at $27.5 million.
The city's piece was a limited deal: a warrant capped at $6.8 million, no interest, paid only from specific mall sales-tax revenue.
If the redevelopment didn't produce the tax dollars, the city didn't owe them. Anything unpaid by the end of 2022 was simply discharged.
The council approved it 4 to 1. The public pitch was jobs, tax base, and business growth around the mall.
Not everyone on the council was sold, but the package passed. So what did the money build?
A 12-screen theater where a department store used to be
The biggest new piece was a movie theater, dropped into space that used to be retail.
Garrison's plan put a 47,000-square-foot, 12-screen Carmike near center court, carved partly out of the old Rogers/Dillard's area.
The Carmike 12 opened on March 7, 2013, at 7 p.m. It had digital projection, 3D, stadium seating, and a BigD auditorium with a 60-foot-wide screen.
Around the same stretch, the older theaters around town went dark: Regal River Oaks Cinema 8 on the mall property closed in December 2012, and the off-mall Carmike 8 closed soon after the new theater opened.
The mall theater later became AMC, listed now by AMC as AMC Decatur 12.
The logic was simple. The old department-store pull was fading and wasn't coming back.
A theater brings people on nights and weekends without needing anyone to buy a sofa. It became one of the mall's two surviving anchors.
Belk digs in while Sears and JCPenney leave
The other survivor spent money to stay. In December 2011, Belk committed $5 million to renovate and expand its Decatur store.
The project redid the 90,000-square-foot main store and added a separate 13,000-square-foot Belk Home Store inside the mall.
New floors, new lighting, new fitting rooms, a reworked juniors and dresses section, and ladies' shoes expanded by 75 percent to nearly 6,500 square feet. It reopened in October 2012.
While Belk invested, others gave up.
On October 1, 2013, JC's 5 Star Outlet/JCPenney Outlet announced a nationwide wind-down of all 15 outlet stores, and the Decatur location went with it.
Sears went next. It started liquidating on January 10, 2014, and closed that April, taking 91 jobs with it after the lease wasn't renewed.
The building sat empty for three years and was demolished in early 2017.
Two former anchor boxes also got partial reuse along the way: Electronic Express moved into part of an old Dillard's area in late 2014, Bed Bath & Beyond followed in 2015, and Bed Bath & Beyond then closed in 2021.
The scoreboard by the late 2010s: Belk and a theater in, Sears gone, and the old Dillard's space partly reused.
Hull buys in, and the value moves to the parking lot
In February 2016, Hull Property Group bought Decatur Mall.
Hull's whole business is buying struggling enclosed malls in smaller markets and running them long-term, the same playbook it uses at Auburn Mall and Florence Mall.
The city signed off on transferring the 2012 development agreement to the new owner, 4 to 1 again, with Garrison still on the hook for what it had already promised.
Some of the clearest signal about where retail value went sits at the front door.
In 2017, a small 8,100-square-foot strip center called Decatur Mall Shops went up at the mall's main entrance, filled with Aspen Dental, ATI Physical Therapy, and Chicken Salad Chick.
None of them are mall stores in the old sense.
They're service and food tenants that live off road visibility, parking, and the 30,000 cars a day passing the intersection, not off the foot traffic inside.
In January 2022, that little strip center sold for $4.6 million. The mall it serves had cost $8.5 million 12 years earlier.
The numbers say something about which kind of retail real estate the market still wants.
What's still open at Decatur Mall now
Decatur Mall is open in 2026, Monday through Saturday from 10 to 9 and Sunday from 1 to 6, still the only enclosed mall around Decatur, a city of about 58,000 with a metro area of roughly 157,000 and a city median household income of $61,560.
Belk still anchors it. AMC runs the 12 screens. Chuck E. Cheese's covers the kids.
Around them sit the chains that hang on at malls this size: Hibbett Sports, Finish Line, Maurices, Zales, American Eagle, Claire's, Shoe Dept., plus a Great American Cookie and a nail studio.
ATI Physical Therapy and Chicken Salad Chick work the perimeter.
The building still shows the losses. The Sears building is gone. Dillard's is long gone. The JCPenney outlet is gone. Bed Bath & Beyond is gone.
What's left is one department store, a movie theater, a kids' arcade, and a road full of cars, which in 2026 is enough to keep the doors open on a mall built for a much fuller house.
