Dutch Square is an enclosed shopping center at 421 Bush River Road in Columbia, South Carolina, opened in 1970 as the city's first indoor mall and once promoted as the largest in the Carolinas.
The bones are still there. Three anchors at the start: J.B. White, Tapp's, Woolco.
About 510,000 square feet of stores, a Morrison's Cafeteria, and an A&P grocery that beat the mall to the site by two years.
Then four decades of subtraction. Woolco closed in 1983.
Tapp's shut down in 1995, then came down for the movie theater that opened in 1997.
J.B. White grew to four floors, became Belk, shrank back to two, and closed in January 2015.
By 2017, the place had 20 empty stores out of 59. The 14-screen theater closed in 2025.
A Planet Fitness now fills part of the old Belk box. Burlington and Office Depot stay open, and a Chick-fil-A has taken a slice of the parking field.
The whole story sits between those two facts: a biggest-in-the-Carolinas claim, then a gym in the old anchor.
When the first store opened six months before the mall did
J.B. White opened its doors at Dutch Square on February 26, 1970.
The rest of the mall wasn't ready.
Shoppers walked into a two-level, 135,600-square-foot department store from Augusta, Georgia, months before the concourse had its own opening day.
The full grand opening came on August 6, more than five months later.
When the whole thing finally opened, the pitch was the largest mall in the Carolinas.
It sat on 56 acres in St. Andrews, an unincorporated patch of Richland County about four miles northwest of the South Carolina State House, close to the spot where Interstates 20, 26, and 126 tangle together.
Columbia had never had a true indoor mall before. Now it did.
Three anchors, one discount store off the side
The original lineup mixed local and regional names under one roof.
J.B. White was the big one. Tapp's, a Columbia department store, took a single-level 60,000-square-foot space.
And Woolco, the discount arm of F.W. Woolworth, ran a more-than-100,000-square-foot store that pulled in a different crowd than the department shoppers.
Three anchors gave Dutch Square about 510,000 leasable square feet wrapped in surface parking.
A Greenville company, the Caine Company, developed it with Columbia's Cotter & Company.
The early tenant list reads like a time capsule: Morrison's Cafeteria, Record Bar, Eckerd Drug, Cricket Shop, Butler's Shoes, Browz-a-Bit, Merle Norman Cosmetic Studio.
A Woolworth store sat inside too, a few steps from its own Woolco cousin.
The grocery came first. The movies stayed outside.
A freestanding convenience center with an A&P grocery opened in 1968, two years ahead of the enclosed mall.
The movies arrived in 1973.
That February, the Irvin-Fuller Dutch Square Ultra-Vision Theatre North & South opened as a twin theater on its own outparcel.
It got split into a three- or four-screen house in 1983 and ran until late 1997.
So before the mall ever had a cinema under its own roof, it had one in the parking lot.
J.B. White kept growing while other anchors started shrinking
By the mid-1980s, J.B. White was the anchor still growing.
The store stretched to four floors and about 203,400 square feet, with retail on the third level and offices and advertising staff on the fourth.
For a while, that growth made Dutch Square feel like it was still winning.
When Woolco walked out in 1983
Woolco closed in March 1983. It was the first of the original anchors to go, and it left a 103,000-square-foot hole.
The space was carved into smaller stores.
Brendle's Catalog Showroom took the largest chunk.
The single-level box became a patchwork of inline tenants, and the mall's three-anchor shape started to come apart.
A new owner with a big plan that never happened
Edens & Avant, a Columbia real estate firm, bought Dutch Square in June 1988.
They had ambitions.
The plan called for a second retail level and two more department-store anchors, Rich's and Miller & Rhoads.
None of it got built.
The early 1990s brought the bill instead.
By 1993, the mall was struggling. Then Tapp's, the local anchor that had been shrinking for years, closed in late 1995.
Two of the three original anchors were now gone, and the expansion that was supposed to add a second level and two anchors existed only on paper.
The $12 million reset
A new ownership group, Phillips Edison & Company paired with the Koll Company, took over and tried to turn the property around.
In April 1996, they announced a $12 million renovation.
New entrances. A refresh throughout. And a new name: Dutch Square Center, not Dutch Square Mall.
The name change pointed to the new strategy.
This was no longer a three-anchor department-store mall.
It was becoming a retail-and-entertainment center, and the tenant mix was about to show it.
Burlington moved into Woolco's old footprint
By the late 1990s, Burlington Coat Factory had opened in an 84,000-square-foot piece of the reworked Woolco space, with Office Depot in a 30,000-square-foot store beside it.
The box that lost Woolco in 1983 had finally found its second life, this time as big-box value retail rather than a single discounter.
A 14-screen cinema replaced Tapp's entirely
After Tapp's closed, the vacant department-store space didn't get another life.
It got torn down. In its place rose the General Cinema Dutch Square 14, which opened on December 19, 1997.
The theater added about 18,000 leasable square feet under the mall roof and pushed the total to roughly 595,400 square feet.
The same week, the old outparcel theater out in the lot went dark after 24 years.
The movies moved indoors, and Dutch Square had a brand-new entertainment anchor where a Columbia department store used to stand.
J.B. White became Belk
The mid-1980s expansion that made J.B. White four floors tall turned out to be the store's high point.
In 1998, the Mercantile Stores chain merged into Dillard's, and the Dutch Square J.B. White store was sold to Belk.
It reopened under the Belk-Simpson name in April 1999.
Belk put money in. A $3 million renovation came in mid-2000.
But the foot traffic that justified four floors wasn't there anymore, and in June 2009 the store dropped to two floors.
The top half of the building that had carried the mall's biggest original anchor simply switched off.
Belk closed the Dutch Square location in January 2015, pulling its dollars toward Columbiana Mall.
The last traditional department-store anchor was gone, 45 years after J.B. White unlocked its doors before the mall was even finished.
The gym inside the department store
By 2017, the mall had 20 vacant stores out of 59.
That same year, Nassimi Realty, a New York firm, bought the 580,000-square-foot center.
One large piece of the old Belk wasn't a retailer. It was a gym.
Planet Fitness had been a Dutch Square tenant since 2013, and in April 2018 it expanded into about 25,000 square feet carved out of the first floor of the old Belk building.
Where the department store once rose to four levels, people now lifted weights on the ground floor.
Other names in that building in 2017 included West Marine, Foot Locker, Rainbow, Ashley Stewart, and Catherine's.
How a church mall deal turned into a federal lawsuit
In August 2023, Word of God Church and Ministries International signed a contract to buy Dutch Square for $14 million.
The plan behind it was enormous: more than $100 million in investment, an innovation center, an animation and media studio, convention space, hotels, restaurants.
They called it I.S.E.E. Silicon South, and the mall piece alone was drawn up at 200,000 square feet.
The project stalled amid a public-funding fight.
According to the federal complaint, the group sought county partnership, hospitality-tax dollars, and tax abatement to make the numbers work.
The complaint says the City of Columbia approved roughly $2 million in hospitality-tax funding over four years, JEDA approved up to $18 million in bonds, and the mall's then-current assessed value was $4,896,400.
The sale never closed.
In September 2025, the church group sued Richland County Council and county officials in federal court, alleging the proposal was blocked because of the church affiliation.
The county denied wrongdoing.
An April 2026 scheduling order put the case on a path toward mediation and a possible 2027 jury trial.
When the big plan stalled, the same group opened a smaller 20,000-square-foot innovation center, the I.C.A.N. Innovation Center, in the former Service Merchandise Plaza.
What's left at 421 Bush River Road
The theater is closed.
The 14-screen cinema, run by Bow Tie Management since 2022 after AMC left, shut its doors after business on April 20, 2025.
It had been the mall's entertainment anchor since it replaced Tapp's in 1997.
Burlington, Office Depot, and Planet Fitness are still listed as operating at Dutch Square or along Bush River Road, alongside smaller shops, service businesses, and outparcel tenants.
The newest concrete change to the site is a fast-food restaurant: Chick-fil-A opened at 425 Bush River Road in December 2025, after city zoning officials backed a drive-through on about 2.5 acres of the mall's oversized parking field, replacing the old Chick-fil-A a quarter-mile east.
The enclosed mall that opened with a largest-in-the-Carolinas claim now runs on a gym, two big-box stores, and the parking lot it can spare.
