Peachtree Mall in Columbus, Georgia Was Built in Three Pieces and Never Once Torn Down

Walk the corridor at Peachtree Mall in Columbus, Georgia and you're walking through three different decades of construction.

The mall opened in 1975 as one straight line: Gayfers at one end, Montgomery Ward at the other, shops in between.

In 1985 the mall added Parisian and its first food court, which gave the corridor a second destination and pulled shoppers off the original walk.

In 1994 a JCPenney wing went on, along with 60,000 square feet of shops, and the plan stopped being symmetrical for good. The original anchor buildings and both later wings stayed put.

The 2016 conversion of the old Parisian store for At Home cut a new exterior entrance into the southeast wall facing Manchester Expressway, and Beauty Master reused that same building in 2025.

Peachtree Mall spans more than 821,000 square feet, still open in August 2026 under Brookfield ownership, with Dillard's, Macy's, and JCPenney trading.

The 1985 and 1994 additions are still standing, and the original 1975 anchor buildings remain in use.

Peachtree Mall opened in August 1975

In August 1975, Peachtree Mall opened at 3131 Manchester Expressway in Columbus, Georgia, with Gayfers at one end and Montgomery Ward at the other.

One floor. One long air-conditioned corridor with shops down both sides, and a field of parking wrapped around all of it.

You parked, you walked in, and you drifted between the two department stores while the shoe shops and jewelry counters caught you on the way through.

In a city with hot summers and heavy rain, an indoor place to walk was worth something by itself.

Jim Wilson & Associates, out of Montgomery, Alabama, built the mall.

Its founder had put up shopping centers around the Southeast and knew the format cold.

The site made sense.

It sat 3.5 miles northeast of downtown, just west of I-185, directly across the expressway from Columbus State University, and within 12 miles of Fort Benning.

Columbus already had a mall. Columbus Square had been open since 1965.

After that August, more of the city's shopping started sliding toward Manchester Expressway.

The food court arrived in 1985 with Parisian

Ten years in, the building grew for the first time.

The 1985 expansion brought a third department store, Parisian, the Birmingham chain still led by the Hess family, and something the mall had not had before: a food court.

Before that, eating at the mall meant a snack counter here and a small restaurant there, scattered down the corridor.

The food court pulled the counters together around one shared block of tables. Kids could be handed a few dollars and turned loose. Parents could sit.

It changed how people moved through the place, too.

The original plan ran on a single line, Gayfers to Montgomery Ward, and every shop in between lived off that walk.

Parisian and the food court gave the corridor a second destination and pulled traffic away from the original axis.

The mall was added to in pieces from then on, never knocked down and rebuilt, so the floor plan kept branching off the original 1975 corridor.

Parisian stayed for more than two decades.

When JCPenney left the other mall

The second expansion finished in 1994. Jim Wilson & Associates added roughly 60,000 square feet of shop space and, with it, a JCPenney.

The store came from Columbus Square, the older mall on the other side of town.

Anchors were the whole economy of a building like this.

A department store pulled thousands of people through the doors every week, and the small shops survived on the traffic those doors created.

Losing one left a hole in the middle of the building that nothing else could fill.

Columbus Square lost JCPenney and never found an answer for it.

The older mall closed and was eventually torn down, which left Peachtree as the only enclosed shopping mall in Columbus.

Peachtree now had four anchors and a wing that did not line up with anything built before it.

A year earlier, Carmike had reopened the theater beside the mall with eight screens, on December 9, 1993, so the property had a bigger movie draw too.

By the mid-1990s this was where the city shopped.

The names on the anchors kept changing

For the next decade the buildings stayed where they were while the signs on them kept getting swapped out.

Gayfers went first. Dillard's bought Mercantile Stores in 1998, and the Columbus Gayfers became a Dillard's.

Same store, same doors, new name over them.

Montgomery Ward went a harder way. The chain announced its national liquidation at the end of 2000, and the Peachtree store closed with the others.

The building sat until 2002, when Rich's opened in it.

Federated Department Stores combined the Rich's and Macy's names in 2003, so the store spent a couple of years as Rich's-Macy's before it simply became Macy's in 2005.

Then Parisian. Belk bought the chain in 2006 and closed the Columbus store in February 2007.

Belk never put its own name on the building. The doors stayed shut.

In 32 years the mall had gone from two anchors up to four and then back down to three, and the empty one sat at the end of the 1985 addition.

Sold for $87.6 million, then a bankruptcy

Jim Wilson & Associates co-owned and ran Peachtree Mall for 28 years.

On April 30, 2003, it and its investment partner sold the mall to General Growth Properties for $87.6 million, with the center 92 percent leased.

General Growth was one of the biggest mall owners in the country.

Peachtree went into a portfolio of dozens of similar properties, with leasing, financing, and management decisions now made hundreds of miles from Columbus.

Then the credit markets froze. General Growth had borrowed enormous amounts against its malls, and the company filed for Chapter 11.

The entity holding Peachtree Mall came out of bankruptcy in December 2009. The parent company came out on November 9, 2010.

Through the whole thing the mall stayed open, and a shopper walking past the food court would not have seen a sign of it.

The old mortgage, with $77.8 million still owed, was paid off in February 2015, which left the property with no mortgage at all for most of the year.

A new $88 million loan was written on November 24, 2015.

Brookfield Property Partners bought General Growth on August 28, 2018, and Peachtree went with it.

A decade empty, then a home store

The Parisian building sat empty for 10 years.

Dillard's controlled that parcel, which made it complicated to do anything with, and an entire anchor of the mall stayed unlit while shoppers walked past its shuttered mall entrance.

General Growth bought the empty store from Dillard's for $2.2 million in late 2015.

At Home signed a lease on June 1, 2016, for 86,000 square feet, with $1 million of work planned on the space.

Crews started that June.

They cut a new exterior entrance into the southeast side facing Manchester Expressway, opened up the old department-store floor, and the store opened on February 2, 2017.

Everything else looked healthy from the inside. Forever 21 opened its Red format on May 9, 2015.

H&M took the old Campus Spirit space on July 9, 2015, and brought around 30 jobs with it.

Two years earlier the main entrance had been closed for two months of construction, and shoppers had simply used the other doors.

Outside the empty anchor, occupancy told the same story: 85 percent in 2013, back up to 90 percent by June 2016.

The theater closed, then the anchor emptied

In December 2023, AMC permanently closed the eight-screen theater beside the mall. Thirty years of movies, done.

In October 2024, At Home announced that its Columbus store would close. The last day was December 30, 2024.

The 86,000-square-foot building that had been Parisian, then empty for a decade, then a home store, went empty again after eight years.

2025 took two more. Forever 21 closed when the chain liquidated its US stores.

On June 21, American Eagle shut its Peachtree location ahead of a move to Columbus Park Crossing, the open-air center 2.5 miles up the road that had been pulling tenants away for years.

The money got harder at the same time.

When the mortgage came due in December 2025, $59 million was still owed, and the loan transferred to special servicing before maturity while the borrower asked for an extension.

Occupancy had fallen to 83 percent that June, down from 90 percent when the loan was written.

Special servicing means a specialist takes over the loan and works out what comes next: an extension, a modification, a sale, or foreclosure.

Through all of it the mall kept its regular hours and kept signing leases.

What's still open at Peachtree Mall in 2026

Beauty Master held a soft opening on October 3, 2025, and a grand opening on November 1.

The beauty-supply chain took the whole 86,000-square-foot box, so the building that opened as Parisian in 1985 is on its third life.

Four large stores were operating in August 2026. Dillard's is in the old Gayfers.

Macy's is in the old Montgomery Ward. JCPenney is still in the wing built for it in 1994.

Every anchor building ever put up here has a retailer in it, and three of the four carry a different name than the one they opened with.

Five spaces totaling 15,000 square feet were listed for lease.

The mall was still leasing space in August 2026, with no public announcement of demolition, redevelopment, or closure.

Parking is free. METRA Route 5 stops out here.

On a weekday the mall draws from Columbus State across the expressway, Phenix City and the Alabama side, and the Fort Benning trade area.

What they walk into is a working mall with three department stores and a beauty anchor.

In the food court, one 1,800-square-foot counter is still dark, and the leasing page was still advertising it in 2026.