North Hills Mall sat on Six Forks Road in Raleigh, North Carolina, and North Hills, a mixed-use district, now covers its ground. An RH Raleigh store stands where the mall's JCPenney was.
The mall began in 1960 as North Hills Shopping Center, a small strip of stores. In 1967 the center was enclosed as a two-level, air-conditioned mall, and it was Raleigh's first enclosed one.
It closed in January 2003, and most of it was torn down that spring for open-air streets and plazas lined with shops and offices. The JCPenney store was spared and kept trading in the new district.
The district now holds about 3,000 residential units. Its office towers, apartments, senior housing, and a hotel have spread east across Six Forks Road, into the Park District.
A strip center becomes a two-level mall
In 1960 the first stores of a small strip shopping center opened on Six Forks Road, beside a new Raleigh subdivision called North Hills.
The developer Ed Richards built the two together, as one suburban package with hundreds of homes, while the city's northern edge moved outward.
The center kept growing after those first stores, and its JCPenney building was finished in 1964.
It was already standing when, in 1967, North Hills Shopping Center was converted into an air-conditioned mall with JCPenney, Ivey's, and Woolworth as its anchors.
Known as North Hills Mall, the center was the first enclosed mall in Raleigh, North Carolina, and its ground now holds the Main District of the mixed-use North Hills.
The slope let the long, rectangular mall meet the ground at both levels.
On the Lassiter Mill side, shoppers came in from the parking deck to the lower floor; from Six Forks Road, they entered the upper one. Shops lined both floors.
A bigger mall opens to the west
Crabtree Valley Mall opened in 1972 a short distance west of North Hills, and it was much larger. North Hills kept its compact plan.
In 1979 the fountain across from JCPenney disappeared, and Ragamuffin's restaurant absorbed that part of the mall.
Five years later, North Hills refreshed the center with new stores but still did not add another anchor wing, even as that kind of expansion became a common competitive move for regional malls.
The renovation gave the center only a short-lived lift. The site stayed strong, but the building kept aging.
Ivey's became Dillard's in 1990, after Dillard's bought the Ivey's chain, and the store kept its place as one of the mall's two department stores.
Dillard's went on to plan a move to the new Triangle Town Center, which would leave JCPenney as the only one.
Buying an occupied mall to tear it down
Kane Realty began at North Hills in 1999 with North Hills Plaza, the strip center across Lassiter Mill Road from the mall, which it took over, renovated, and renamed The Lassiter.
In late 2000 the company negotiated to buy the 31-acre mall parcel, where roughly 90 to 92 percent of the space was still leased.
Financing the deal was difficult because petroleum from a leaking service-station tank had reached the groundwater.
Kane brought in Cherokee Investment Partners, a Raleigh firm that specialized in brownfield redevelopment.
The leases posed another problem. The seller terminated most of them and amended JCPenney's lease, clearing the way for demolition.
North Hills Mall closed in January 2003. Demolition began that spring, and almost all of the enclosed building came down.
The JCPenney block and the parking deck were left standing.
Outdoor streets replace the corridor
The Main District opened on the old mall parcel in November 2004, with its stores facing outdoor streets, walks, and plazas where the enclosed corridor had been.
Target took a large lower-level space, and a 14-screen cinema was built on top of it, run first by Eastern Federal and later by Regal.
Offices, restaurants, and public gathering space went in among the shops.
The redevelopment put two parking levels below the Main District.
The 1964 JCPenney building sat at the south side of the new center, with Target across the parking structure.
In 2005 the old store had 169,500 square feet, and Target had 130,100.
Across Six Forks Road
The Park District took shape east of Six Forks Road.
CAPTRUST Tower opened there in 2010, a 17-story building with office floors over a multi-level parking structure and restaurants at street level.
Around the same time Harris Teeter moved into a two-level grocery store built with new apartments, where elevators linked the store, the apartments, and a parking structure.
Five Park District projects broke ground in 2015. The Cardinal added senior housing and care, and Park Central added apartments.
Bank of America Tower and The Dartmouth opened in 2016, and the AC Hotel in 2017.
By then the people coming to North Hills included residents, office workers, and hotel guests as well as shoppers.
The 1964 JCPenney block comes down
JCPenney kept operating inside the rebuilt center for another 16 years.
In 2019 the chain announced that the North Hills store would close, and it closed on April 24, 2020.
Its building, the last major piece of the mall from before 2003, was razed by March 2022.
Kane's expansion there, a project of roughly $350 million, added four buildings for offices, apartments, restaurants, and shops, along with structured parking and a public plaza.
Highland North Hills went up as a 12-story apartment building, and One North Hills as a 10-story office tower.
RH Raleigh took the former JCPenney part of the site and opened on November 1, 2024, with two retail levels and a third-floor rooftop restaurant and wine terrace.
Height limits and land to the east
In 2021 Kane asked the city to allow taller buildings on about 11 acres west of Six Forks Road.
Nearby residents objected over traffic, building height, the transition to their houses, and the lack of affordable-housing commitments.
On March 7, 2023, Kane withdrew the case before the council decided it.
Kane returned in 2025 with a new rezoning request for nine properties west of Six Forks Road.
It kept the total amount of building the old zoning allowed and moved that capacity into taller buildings, under a combined cap of just under 3 million square feet.
Conditions added before the final vote included an affordable-housing contribution, and the adopted package also carried money for the Raleigh Fire Department.
The City Council approved the rezoning 6-2 on January 20, 2026.
That April, Kane filed plans for a 15-story tower of 246 apartments on a parking area next to RH Raleigh, a site where the new zoning would allow a taller building.
East of Six Forks, Kane and McCourt Partners bought 28 acres along Navaho Drive in early 2026 to carry the district toward Wake Forest Road.
By 2026 North Hills held about 3,000 residential units.
In 1967 the mall had two levels, the upper one opening on Six Forks Road and the lower one toward Lassiter Mill.
Since January 2026, selected parcels on those two roads can take buildings up to 37 stories.
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