The last two department stores at Salisbury Mall in Salisbury, North Carolina, are public halls now. The old JCPenney hosts weddings and elections. The old Belk holds a conference hall.
Both stores opened with the mall, and Belk had moved there from downtown. They outlasted every other department store the mall ever had, one by 20 years. Then both left in 2013.
The county bought the empty mall that December. The old JCPenney had a wide-open floor, so the county started using it for big events. Shops were still open along the concourse.
The building is Rowan Community Center now. Early voting is scheduled in the old JCPenney this fall. Part of the original concourse is closed for construction at the same time.
Salisbury Mall opens on the west side
The movie theater came first.
A three-screen cinema opened on December 13, 1985, on a parcel in front of the mall site at Jake Alexander and Statesville boulevards, and the mall behind it opened seven months later, on July 30, 1986.
A week after that, the mall was advertising 50 stores, open 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Sunday.
It opened with three anchors.
Belk-Harry moved its Salisbury department store out of downtown to take one of them, and JCPenney and Roses took the others.
Eckerd Drugs had a large store of its own, and the smaller shops opened onto one enclosed level between them: Cato, Rave, Hallmark, Merle Norman, Peanut Shack, and Gorin's Homemade Ice Cream & Sandwiches.
Salisbury already had a mall.
Rowan Mall had been open on East Innes Street near Interstate 85 since 1967, 19 years before this one, with a Roses and an Eckerd of its own.
For the next few years, both companies ran stores in both of Salisbury's malls.
Roses closes and its box is split three ways
Roses was the first anchor to leave. It closed its Salisbury Mall store in 1993, and the big box was divided into smaller spaces.
Parts of it became Big Lots and Dollar Tree, while another part became Goody's.
Badcock Furniture replaced Goody's there in 2013. Big Lots, Dollar Tree, and Badcock were not department stores.
By 1998 the mall's department stores were Belk-Harry, JCPenney, and Goody's. Goody's, an apparel chain, never had the old Roses box to itself.
Rowan Mall had it worse. It closed in 1995 and was demolished the next year for the Innes Street Market redevelopment.
After nine years of two malls, Salisbury was down to one, and it was the one on the west side.
The 2004 renovation and the stores that left
By the early 2000s, the mall still had its brown brick walls and small yellow-brown floor tile, and the tile was worn.
The cinema out front, expanded to six screens in 1988, was boarded up, and the parking lot was in poor shape.
The owners started a renovation in late 2003. The small tile came up and marble-look flooring went down.
Outside the main entrance went a new fountain and statue; inside, the food-court fountain was repaired and running again.
Books-A-Million and Tuesday Morning moved in, along with a Great American Cookie Company and TCBY and indoor miniature golf.
The new tenants didn't stop the old ones from leaving. Goody's closed when its chain collapsed.
Hibbett Sports left for a big-box location, while FYE and Chick-fil-A closed.
By 2012, of the three 1986 department stores, two were left: JCPenney and Belk. Local restaurants were filling more and more of the food court.
JCPenney and Belk leave, the county buys
JCPenney went first. It closed in August 2013, and no department store came for its box. Belk followed.
On October 16, 2013, Belk opened a new 75,000-square-foot store at Wallace Commons, on Klumac Road near Interstate 85, and its 27 years at Salisbury Mall were over.
The new Belk cost about $7 million.
Two months later, in December 2013, Rowan County bought the entire mall for $3.4 million, about half of what Belk had just spent on its new store.
The county planned to move some of its own departments into the empty space and keep private tenants in the rest.
In January 2014, the building became West End Plaza. It still looked like Salisbury Mall, and parts of it still ran like one.
Badcock Furniture kept selling, and Books-A-Million stayed open under the new name until it closed in 2014.
County offices move into West End Plaza
The county's plan needed the city's permission.
Government offices in a former shopping center required a special-use permit from Salisbury, and in September 2014 the city planning board voted 7-2 to recommend one.
The city council then voted 4-1 to deny it. County leaders announced plans to appeal.
By June 2016, Board of Elections and Veterans Services were operating from renovated space inside the old mall.
Roof work covered about a third of the building. A structural review found no major problems with its structural frame.
The offices opened among businesses that were still trading.
Thelma's Down Home Cooking was operating in the building, a veterans coffee shop had opened in 2014, and Badcock was still selling furniture.
The county was running its elections office inside a mall that hadn't stopped being a mall.
Two department stores become two event halls
The former JCPenney turned into the county's big room.
Its open floor, 33,800 square feet with room for 1,300 people, has held weddings, trade shows, dinners, public meetings, and elections.
Commissioners looked at a larger renovation of it and dropped the idea in 2017 because of the cost, so the hall kept going as it was.
Belk got the opposite treatment. By 2019 the county had picked the former Belk and the shops beside it for its next project.
The job stripped the old store back inside and out.
The 1980s retail front came back with a covered drive-through drop-off, space outside for events and classes, and new entrances with canopies.
The rebuilt side covers 90,100 square feet. Its hall seats 1,000 and can split into four rooms of about 250 seats each.
At one end, folding glass doors open onto a covered patio.
Cooperative Extension, the Forestry Service, and Soil & Water Conservation have offices there too.
The project cost about $27.5 million, eight times what the county had paid for the whole mall.
By 2024 the building was going by Rowan Community Center, and the ribbon on the renovated side was cut on March 20, 2025.
The old concourse held a library bookshop, a Rowan Museum store, veterans groups, and a veterans social center and military museum.
The old concourse at Rowan Community Center
That concourse was the last part of the building still laid out like a mall, and in 2026 the county started rebuilding part of it.
Five tenants in the work area were given until August 4 to leave: The Family Closet 2 Consignment Shop, Friends of Rowan Public Library, Lisa's Salon, Piedmont Players' Eastern Costume Company, and Rowan Museum.
The concourse closed for remodeling the next day.
Project Light, the Soldiers' Angels food pantry, and the veterans groups were allowed to stay, and so was Board of Elections.
The elections office moved its public entrance to temporary doors on the outside of the building, and early voting for the 2026 midterms was scheduled for Cardinal Hall, the county's name for the old JCPenney.
The fountain added in the 2004 renovation was still out front, dry, in July 2023.
The fountain is gone now. The main entrance is there instead, beside the flagpole roundabout.
The building going through all of this is Rowan Community Center, a county-owned civic complex at 1935 Jake Alexander Boulevard West in Salisbury, North Carolina.
It opened in 1986 as Salisbury Mall, an enclosed shopping mall, and went by West End Plaza after the county bought it.
The Health Department is expected to move in during fall 2026, and new tenant applications are on hold until the construction is done.
The Veterans Social Center, which opened in the old mall in April 2022, is one of the tenants still inside.
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