Kinston once had an enclosed mall with department stores, offices above the main corridor, a nearby cinema, and about 2,350 parking spaces. That place was Vernon Park Mall.
The former regional shopping mall stands at 834 Hardee Road in Kinston, North Carolina, where Hardee Road and Vernon Avenue connect with U.S. 258.
Opened on March 13, 1969, it served Kinston, Lenoir County, and nearby eastern North Carolina communities from a west-side commercial district.
The property measured about 624,000 square feet. It no longer operates as a mall and now competes for reuse as industrial space.
Vernon Park Mall: The Enclosed World Built on Kinston's Farm Land
On March 13, 1969, the land that had been the Temple and Hardee farms opened as Vernon Park Mall. Kinston had no enclosed shopping mall before that day.
Walking through the doors from the Hardee Road parking lot meant entering something eastern North Carolina had not yet seen.
The interior was a climate-controlled corridor with stores on both sides and a second floor of office spaces looking down from above.
The main corridor connected two anchor department stores under high ceilings.
Parts of the floor ramped where the level changed. The Belk side had tall windows that let natural light into the interior.
A ThyssenKrupp elevator installed on July 3, 1974, served both floors, rated at 2,500 pounds, and was still clearing routine inspections in 2010.
A cafeteria near the entrance gave shoppers somewhere to sit between stores. A Firestone outparcel on the adjacent lot served JCPenney's auto customers.W. Roy Poole built Vernon Park Mall on 34.2 acres.
Belk Tyler anchored one end and JCPenney the other.
A strip center opened the same year with Winn-Dixie and Eckerd Drugs, and the Hardee Road cluster became the primary retail destination on Kinston's west side.
A Theater Built for Kinston's New Commercial Corner
Mall Cinema opened on March 19, 1970, at the northwest corner behind Vernon Park Mall.
Stewart and Everett, a regional theater company, built it as a single auditorium with about 530 seats. Through the 1970s, it was one of Kinston's primary movie theaters.
"Star Wars" ran there in 1977.
In 1985, the layout was divided into two auditoriums with about 225 seats each. The following year, Carmike Cinemas acquired the Stewart and Everett chain and took over operations.
The cinema closed around 1996. After Hurricane Floyd in 1999, a church used the former theater building temporarily. By the 2010s, the structure had deteriorated badly.
Roses had operated near the JCPenney end of the mall as a five-and-dime since opening day.
The Firestone outparcel, the strip center with Winn-Dixie and Eckerd Drugs, the theater, and the enclosed mall formed a commercial cluster that functioned as a destination rather than a single store.
Shoppers could cover a full Saturday's worth of errands without leaving the Hardee Road intersection.
Kinston's downtown offered no equivalent combination of enclosed retail, automotive services, grocery shopping, and first-run movies.
The 1978 Expansion That Brought Brody's Home to Kinston
A west-wing expansion added 16 stores to the mall in 1978. On November 6, 1980, Magna Properties purchased the property, and a renovation followed.
Brody's had started in Kinston in 1928 and grown to operate stores in Greenville, Goldsboro, Rocky Mount, New Bern, and its hometown.
When Vernon Park Mall opened in 1969, Brody's remained downtown. The west wing changed that. Brody's built its store onto the new wing and opened on February 26, 1981, occupying about 30,000 square feet.
The chain's hometown origins gave the move a particular weight; the commercial center of the city had shifted from downtown to Hardee Road.
During the same renovation, Roses was reconfigured from a five-and-dime into a full discount-store format. Roses surrendered its original mall-frontage space.
That frontage was divided into smaller in-line stores, adding tenant variety near the JCPenney end and changing how customers moved through that section of the building.
The mall had three identifiable department-store anchors by 1981: Belk Tyler, JCPenney, and Brody's.
Vernon Park Mall at Its Busiest: 65 Tenants, an Upper Office Floor
At full capacity, Vernon Park Mall was a 624,000-square-foot shopping center. The retail gross leasable area was 521,700 square feet, with the second-floor office component adding 34,600 square feet.
About 2,350 parking spaces surrounded the building, and the center had 65 tenants.
JCPenney and Belk each occupied 51,000 square feet at opposite ends of the corridor. Goody's held a junior anchor position in the center section.
Sears Hometown, a smaller-format store operating in part of the former Roses footprint, filled 11,300 square feet.
Badcock Home Furniture & More held 29,300 square feet.
Smaller tenants included Hibbett Sports, Foot Locker, Hallmark, Payless Shoes, Cato, Rainbow Apparel, Shoe Show, H. Rubin Vision Center, Firestone, and Dollar General.
Food tenants included Chick-fil-A, RJ's Famous Chicken & BBQ, and Stacy's.
The office level above the shopping floor held local businesses and professional tenants. The property management office operated from Suite 814 at 834 Hardee Road.
Hours ran Monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. and Sunday from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. The nearest enclosed-mall competitors were in Greenville and Goldsboro.
From Brody's to Proffitt's to Belk: Three Names, One Space
Proffitt's acquired the Brody's chain in 1998. The west-wing store at Vernon Park Mall became a Proffitt's location.
The approximately 50,000-square-foot Proffitt's store ran through the end of February 2005, when the transfer to Belk was completed.
The deal covered four North Carolina stores: Greenville, Rocky Mount, Kinston, and Goldsboro.
Belk was already operating at Vernon Park Mall at the time. After the transfer, Belk took over the leasehold for the former Proffitt's space but did not open it as a second active store.
The space closed rather than being added to Belk's existing footprint, and Belk became the mall's principal department-store presence from its original location.
From Brody's opening in February 1981 to the Belk transfer in February 2005, three retail chains held the same west-wing footprint across 24 years.
The chain that had started in Kinston in 1928 had been replaced twice.
What began as a locally rooted department store passed through a mid-size regional acquirer and ended as part of the Charlotte-based Belk organization, which closed the space rather than running it.
Anchor Closures Left Three of Four Mall Positions Dark
Roses closed by the early 2000s. Part of the former Roses footprint later reopened as Sears Hometown, which closed in mid-to-late 2015.
Vernon Park Mall's JCPenney store closed in early 2014, one of 33 underperforming locations the company shut in the same period, with total job cuts reaching roughly 2,000 across those stores.
The Kinston location was expected to shut down by early May 2014. That space had been one of the mall's two original anchors since 1969.
Three of the mall's four anchor positions had gone dark by 2015: JCPenney, Sears Hometown, and Goody's.
The upper-level office area was mostly vacated around the same time. Mall directories near the entrances still listed tenants that had already left.
Some visitors consulted those old boards, looking for stores that no longer existed.
Shoppers increasingly drove to Greenville and Goldsboro. Tobacco and textile employment that had supported Kinston and Lenoir County's economy for decades had contracted.
The large-format stores on Hardee Road outside the mall stayed active.
Inside the enclosed corridors, Belk kept its lights on while the rest of the building went quiet around it.
A $9.5 Million Asking Price That Became a $2.7 Million Sale
In 2017, Vernon Park Mall Holding Corporation of Flushing, New York, put the property on the market for $9.5 million.
Kinston architectural firm Dunn & Dalton had spent about a year developing a redevelopment concept, completing final plans around February 1, 2017.
The plan called for a roughly $25 million project with a sportsplex, a trampoline center, a recreational center, and a flagship hotel, while keeping Belk and several retail spaces in place.
Construction never began.
The property returned to market in July 2021 through an online commercial auction with a starting bid of $750,000. Belk was the only remaining active store in the largely vacant building.
The property sold for $2.7 million to David and Lois Tsui of Chapel Hill, whose plans for the building were not public at the time of the sale.
The building had been unsecured for years before the purchase.
The gap between the $9.5 million asking price in 2017 and the $2.7 million that changed hands in 2021 reflected what four additional years of vacancy had cost the property.
Break-Ins, Juveniles, and a Man Found on Ductwork 25 Feet Up
Between the evening of September 10 and the morning of September 16, 2021, unknown suspects broke into the closed mall at 834 Hardee Road.
Police learned of the break-in on September 20.
A glass door on the west side was broken, fire extinguishers were discharged inside the building, graffiti appeared on the east exterior walls, and glass doors at the former Vick's Cleaners and Duck Bingo locations adjacent to the mall were broken.
The city increased patrols, and the new owners turned on the parking-lot lights.
A second incident followed before the end of September. Officers then found evidence of a third break-in during routine checks on October 3, 2021.
Surveillance footage helped identify five juveniles from Greene County in connection with the incidents.
Juvenile court proceedings followed for all five.
On April 11, 2025, police responded to another break-in at the former mall. A person was found trapped on the ductwork approximately 25 feet above the floor.
After about 25 minutes of negotiation, he climbed down. He was charged with misdemeanor breaking and entering.
Two additional adults were charged with breaking and entering and larceny in the same incident.
Industrial Leasing at $6 Per Square Foot, Ten Units Available
The asking lease rate for available spaces in the former mall is $6 per square foot per year on a triple-net basis, with every unit requiring renovation before occupancy.
Ten units are available, ranging from 1,000 square feet to 23,500 square feet. Unit A1 is 10,800 square feet. Unit A10 is 1,000 square feet.
The lot size for 834 Hardee Road is 104 acres. Zoning is SC. Flood-zone designations place portions of the site in zones B and X, covering moderate-hazard or 500-year-flood areas.
The main building's recorded size is 424,400 square feet in the current property data.
It is less than the 624,000-square-foot whole-center figure from the mall's operating period, a difference that reflects how the property has been divided for recording purposes.
The broader property address is 800 Hardee Road. Individual leasable spaces carry the address 836 Hardee Road.
Pedestrian and trail connections to Fairfield Park, Caswell Center, and Vernon Avenue sidewalks have been proposed for the site, but have not been built.
Dunn & Dalton's 2017 sportsplex and hotel concept also existed only on paper.
