Anyone who shopped in north Tampa in the 1980s knew University Mall: Maas Brothers, Sears, J.C. Penney, Robinson's, and Burdines, all under one roof at 2200 East Fowler Avenue, beside USF.
University Square Mall opened in 1974 and grew past a million square feet. Five department stores anchored it by 1983. Every one of them is now closed or demolished.
What stayed was the movie theater. General Cinema opened screens in 1974, and the spot has shown films through six operators since, down to Sun-Ray Cinema's 10 screens in 2024.
The rest of the site is becoming RITHM at Uptown, a 100-acre mixed-use district of housing, research, and a grocery store. The anchors that defined the mall are the part that did not last.
University Square Mall opened in 1974 next to USF
University Square Mall opened on August 15, 1974, at 2200 East Fowler Avenue in north Tampa, Florida, just west of the University of South Florida.
The developer, the Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation, leaned on the campus for the whole identity.
The mascot was Hootie, an owl in a graduation cap.
That first day, you could walk into Maas Brothers, a two-level department store of 127,000 square feet, and browse 32 stores and services off the enclosed, air-conditioned concourse.
A General Cinema theater opened down the corridor that October.
It was built to be one of the biggest shopping centers in the Tampa Bay region.
Within 13 months, Sears pushed it past 1 million square feet.
University Square grew to five anchors by 1983
J.C. Penney opened its two-level store that same October.
Robinson's of Florida followed in August 1975 with the largest of the original anchors, 158,700 square feet, and Sears opened a month after that.
With Sears in place, the mall crossed a million square feet of leasable space and more than 100 stores, four full-line department stores holding down the corners.
It was the standard formula for a big Florida mall built for cars and air conditioning.
Then Burdines made it five.
The Miami-based chain opened in July 1983, turning a large mall into one of the biggest in the Tampa Bay area, and Fowler Avenue thickened around it with restaurants and strip retail chasing the traffic.
The five names on those anchor boxes wouldn't stay still for long.
University Mall's department-store names kept shifting
The shuffle started with Robinson's.
It became Maison Blanche, and in 1991 the Maison Blanche store turned into Dillard's.
Burdines slid over into the old Maas Brothers space.
Montgomery Ward took the building Burdines vacated, opened there in 1992, and closed in 2001 when the chain shut down nationwide.
Burlington Coat Factory moved into that same space later that year.
All of it was part of a wave of department-store mergers rolling across Florida and the Southeast, less a set of local decisions than a national reshuffle landing on one mall.
Dillard's, meanwhile, built itself a new two-level store just north of the old one in 1995.
The space it left behind became new mall space, with a food court upstairs.
The mall was larger and more crowded with uses than it had ever been.
Ownership was about to change hands, repeatedly.
Who owned the mall, and the $10 million fix
DeBartolo built the mall and held it for 18 years.
In 1992, the company sold it to an investment trust managed by Heitman, and the property passed into institutional hands.
Glimcher Realty Trust took over in 1997.
In 2007, a partnership of Somera Capital Management and Rockwood Capital bought it for $145 million, right before the recession, and put $10 million into a 2008 renovation: rebuilt entrances, family restrooms, a new escalator, Wi-Fi, and a soft-play area for kids.
The numbers still looked fine that year.
The mall ran 1.2 million square feet at 96 percent leased, with sales near $350 per square foot.
The occupancy held even as national stores drifted out and second-tier tenants took the empty slots.
When JCPenney left for Wiregrass
The first real loss came with a date attached.
JCPenney closed at University Mall on October 1, 2005, and reopened at The Shops at Wiregrass, a new open-air center going up in Wesley Chapel.
One of the four original anchors was gone, and it had picked a newer corridor on the way out, taking a chunk of north-suburban traffic with it.
Newer corridors were the whole problem.
Brandon Town Center opened in 1995, Citrus Park Town Center in 1999, and Wiregrass in 2008, each one pulling shoppers and tenants outward.
The empty JCPenney box got a brief second life as Steve & Barry's, which closed in 2009 when that chain collapsed.
The anchors close: Macy's, Sears, and Dillard's
After that, they went down in a row. Dillard's dropped to a clearance-center format in 2008.
Macy's, in the old Maas Brothers space that Burdines had taken over, closed in March 2017.
Sears was bought out by the mall's owner and closed in November 2018, ending 43 years on the site.
The Dillard's clearance store closed in 2022, and its building was marked for demolition.
By then, not one of the department stores that opened the mall was still trading there.
One owner had already seen where this was headed.
RD Management bought most of the enclosed mall in 2014 for $29.5 million, then spent years acquiring the separately owned anchor parcels, the Sears lot included, until it held a single 100-acre site.
A mall that size, mostly empty of department stores, made more sense as a redevelopment site.
Demolition begins, and RITHM at Uptown takes shape
On February 19, 2019, the equipment went in on the west side, near the old J.C. Penney.
The Sears building came down in 2020.
That same year, the redevelopment got a name: RITHM at Uptown, taken from the word algorithm and aimed at research, technology, and medicine.
The pitch fit the location.
The site sits among USF, the area hospitals, Moffitt Cancer Center, and defense research tied to nearby MacDill Air Force Base.
The USF Institute of Applied Engineering, working on cybersecurity, energy, and defense, moved into former retail space.
A virtual-production studio, VU Tampa Bay, took another section, and an insurance firm, Open Access, joined the tenant mix.
S9 Architecture of New York and Tampa's Gresham Smith handled the early design.
The owner now describes RITHM as a $4 billion build-out on a 10-year timeline, with room over the years for more than seven million square feet and several thousand homes.
The movie screens that survived every anchor
Through all of it, the movies kept coming back.
General Cinema opened the first screens in 1974.
A 16-screen multiplex replaced them in 1996, built as part of a new parking garage and pushing the property to 1.3 million square feet at its largest.
Then the operators cycled. Regal ran the multiplex until 2010.
Frank Theatres reopened it as University 12 in 2011 and closed it in 2013.
Studio Movie Grill came in 2014 with dine-in service and lasted until 2021.
LOOK Dine-In Cinemas took the room next.
In December 2024, Sun-Ray Cinema opened 10 screens at 12332 University Mall Court, the latest tenant in a spot that has shown movies, off and on, since the mall's first autumn.
What stands on the old mall site now
What stands there today has little to do with the 1974 mall.
A Sprouts Farmers Market opened along East Fowler Avenue in 2023.
Burlington left its old mall space in 2025 for a new 50,000-square-foot store right beside Sprouts.
An LA Fitness, a 30,000-square-foot club, was under construction in 2026.
The bigger shift is that people live here now.
The first Hub student-housing community opened in 2022 with 359 units and about 890 beds.
A second phase, a $185 million project with about 1,200 beds and about 800 parking spaces, is due in 2027, part of a plan for roughly 2,000 student beds across the campus.
Pad sites along the road are filling with Portillo's, Miller's Ale House, and RaceTrac, beside the LongHorn Steakhouse and Panda Express already there.
So a student can wake up where Sears stood and buy groceries on ground remade from the old mall.
Hootie the owl is long gone.
The name University Mall mostly survives on the street signs, on University Mall Court, where the movie screens and the research institute sit today.
