Locals know it as the mall that made Stonecrest a name.
The Mall at Stonecrest opened in 2001 near Lithonia, Georgia, the retail core of a 1,100-acre town-center plan in east DeKalb County.
The mall got built. The convention center stayed stuck in plans.
The rail terminus never came. The bigger pieces mostly didn't. Power centers and hotels came instead.
300 acres around the mall were still being pitched for development two decades later.
The project had been kicking around since the 1980s, when the Turner Hill mall plan was still led by Scott Hudgens Cos.
Cadillac Fairview's affiliate was in the Stonecrest picture by the 1990s. Forest City later joined as a co-developer.
The ground under the mall remained tied to a DeKalb development authority lease dating to 2001.
The mall opened on schedule, and the town center is still arriving 25 years later.
This is the story of a 1.2 million-square-foot mall that ran ahead of its own master plan.
The land and the names that didn't stick
In 1983, Cadillac Fairview bought 1,450 rural acres south of Interstate 20 in east DeKalb County, Georgia, about 20 miles east of downtown Atlanta.
The land sat around Turner Hill Road, and metro Atlanta's malls were marching east, away from older centers like South DeKalb and Lenox.
The gap on the east side was plain.
A full department-store mall there would catch shoppers from Lithonia, Stone Mountain, Conyers, and Covington, plus the I-20 traffic headed toward Augusta, none of whom would have to cross Atlanta to reach one.
But the plan kept stalling.
It cycled through names before it had a single wall: Turner Hill Mall, Interstate East Mall, Metro East.
Planners floated a convention center, an outdoor theater, a MARTA rail terminus, and a satellite college campus.
The county built a library nearby. The biggest ideas stayed on paper.
Forest City Enterprises later joined Cadillac Fairview in a joint venture.
The mall they finally drew was a 1.2 million-square-foot regional center, the retail piece of a 1,100-acre town-center plan that was supposed to fill in around it with offices, hotels, apartments, and power-center stores.
The Mall at Stonecrest opened weeks after 9/11
The Mall at Stonecrest opened on October 24, 2001, at 2929 Turner Hill Road in what was then unincorporated DeKalb County near Lithonia.
It arrived a few weeks after the September 11 attacks, into an Atlanta market already thick with enclosed malls.
Five department stores anchored it from day one: Dillard's, Rich's, Parisian, Sears, and JCPenney.
That gave Stonecrest an unusually full opening day for Georgia: it was billed as the state's first mall to open with five anchors.
Dillard's was the largest box at the start, with nearly 199,000 square feet.
RTKL drew it as a two-level crescent instead of a straight enclosed corridor, and VCC, a Little Rock-based contractor, built the mall.
There was an open-air plaza, a food-court pavilion, restaurants around it, and tall glass entrances.
Inside, the curved two-level plan kept the escalators off the main run rather than centered in a straight hall.
The whole thing was wrapped in surface parking, about 6,100 spaces at the start, fed by a ring road off Turner Hill and Mall Parkway.
A separate power center, Stonecrest Marketplace, went up nearby with Marshalls, Ross, Staples, Linens 'n Things, and Babies "R" Us, bringing big-box traffic right next door.
Borders had two front doors
Borders Books & Music had two entrances, one into the mall and one to the parking lot, which suited a building trying to be an indoor mall and an outdoor center at the same time.
The early roster read like a 2001 time capsule: The Gap, Forever 21, Victoria's Secret, Casual Corner, Charlotte Russe, Sam Goody, American Eagle, Express, Ann Taylor Loft, and plenty more.
More than 100 smaller stores showed up in all, with a 16-screen MegaStar theater beside them.
Victoria's Secret was one of the few names on that early list still in the building 25 years later.
When the anchor names changed
The anchor names started turning over fast because the chains behind them were merging and disappearing.
Rich's became Rich's-Macy's in 2003, then plain Macy's in 2005.
The store stayed; the sign changed.
Parisian took a stranger route. Belk bought it from Saks in 2006, and the Parisian name vanished across the South.
The Stonecrest box reopened as Kohl's.
So, before the decade was over, two of the five original anchors were running under names that weren't on the 2001 directory.
A weekend curfew for shoppers under 18
In 2009, the mall told anyone under 18 they couldn't come in without a parent or guardian after 4 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.
The escort policy answered merchant and customer complaints about youth behavior, the kind that several malls were dealing with then.
The problems were real. In April 2010, a fight over a parking space led to a stabbing and a shooting.
In December 2011, about 200 people gathered outside before an 8 a.m. opening for a limited-edition Air Jordan release, forced a door, and rushed the store selling the shoes.
For a mall pitched as a place for families to shop, dine, and be entertained, the headlines were starting to work against the pitch. [Source]
The entertainment push and the dark theater
Round1 opened in March 2017 in a 50,000-square-foot space carved from several smaller shops, with bowling, arcade games, billiards, karaoke, darts, a restaurant, and a full bar.
It was the kind of non-retail draw enclosed malls were chasing as their inline stores thinned out.
The theater had its own string of operators.
AMC took it over from MegaStar in 2003 and added an IMAX screen in 2011.
New Vision Theatres took the keys in 2017 and ran it as New Vision Stonecrest 16 + IMAX.
Then both went dark.
New Vision closed in March 2020 during the COVID shutdown and never reopened; the chain went out of business that July.
Round1 held on until December 2022, then closed too, while keeping its larger location at Cumberland Mall.
Kohl's left, then Sears
Kohl's closed in the former Parisian box on November 1, 2016.
Sears lasted a little longer, landing on a closure list in late 2017 and shutting down in January 2018.
That was nearly 300,000 square feet of department store going dark beside the enclosed mall in barely more than a year.
The anchors had never been part of the mall loan's collateral, but the empty boxes still changed the mall's value and how the place looked to anyone walking in.
Two of the five original anchors were now empty behind their own parking lots, waiting on whatever came next.
The mall that gave Stonecrest its name
For years, Stonecrest was a mall-area name with no city government behind it.
It was unincorporated DeKalb County near Lithonia, known mostly by the mall in the middle of it.
A business alliance started organizing around the corridor in 2011, the East Metro DeKalb CID followed in 2014, and a Lithonia annexation push ran into local opposition.
Then, in 2016, voters approved a new city and called it Stonecrest, after the commercial district the mall had anchored since 2001.
The first city elections came in March 2017.
The mall's name became the city's name, and the commercial district around it became the center of the biggest redevelopment fights that followed.
The first of those fights was Atlanta Sports City, a $200 million sports and entertainment complex announced in 2017 that put its Tournament Central building in the empty Kohl's.
By late 2018 the questions had piled up around its financing and its partners.
It collapsed in 2019 and ended in lawsuits from vendors, consultants, and investors.
The Sears box and the aquarium
The empty Sears became the most fought-over building on the property.
The City of Stonecrest bought it in October 2019 for $2.1 million, planning a public safety headquarters and a police precinct that was supposed to be working within months.
The precinct never happened.
In 2021 the city sold the building back into private hands for $2.3 million, and the public-safety plan was abandoned.
What came next grew into Priví, a $17 million reuse of the old Sears complex pitched as a family entertainment and lifestyle destination.
Its first piece opened in November 2021: SeaQuest, an indoor aquarium in about 25,000 square feet of the old store, with bigger plans behind it for a food hall, a bookstore, a coffee shop, and a hotel.
SeaQuest drew a zoning fight almost at once, since animal exhibits weren't clearly allowed in that commercial district; the city later changed the language to fit.
Animal-welfare advocates kept up the pressure.
In June 2023 SeaQuest closed for renovation and an ownership change, with the animals moved out first.
By 2026, even the status had gotten weird: Priví still listed SeaQuest as closed for renovations, while a separate Sea Quest Stonecrest site said the ZooQuarium was back.
The mall was worth less than its loan
By 2018, the inline core of the mall, the corridors, food court, and theater space, was worth $67 million.
The loan written against it back in 2005 had been sized on an appraisal of $144.5 million, and started at $108.5 million.
The mall stayed open the whole time the math fell apart.
The five department stores owned their own pieces of the mall and stayed clear of the CMBS debt, so the trouble sat on the non-anchor space in the middle.
Forest City had already handed nearly half the property to an outside partner in 2011 and taken it off its own books; Urban Retail Properties had been managing it since 2012.
A foreclosure was looming in February 2020, with a sale set for early March.
A Florida firm announced it was buying the mall in March 2021, then walked away that July.
The deal that finally cleared came in July 2022, when GreenLake funded a $42.5 million payoff and the old CMBS trust took a $53.1 million loss.
What's open at Stonecrest now
Three of the five original anchors are still open: Dillard's, Macy's, and JCPenney.
The old Kohl's box reopened in 2021 as Lisa Young, a 145,000-square-foot, two-level beauty and apparel store.
H&M is still inside, along with Bath & Body Works, Victoria's Secret, Foot Locker, Champs, LensCrafters, and food-court tenants.
The mall keeps regular hours, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. most days and noon to 6 on Sundays, across 1.2 million square feet of retail.
The 1,100-acre town center, the mall was meant to anchor, never fully arrived; roughly 300 acres around it were still being pitched for development years later.
The old Sears, empty since early 2018, has become the property's running experiment in what comes after a department store.
Akoma Coffee + Books opened there in October 2025.
A 40,000-square-foot food hall with 13 restaurant and bar concepts is under construction inside it, due to open in fall 2026.
