Old Hickory Mall is an enclosed regional mall at 2021 North Highland Avenue in Jackson, Tennessee.
It opened in 1967 as an open-air center and was roofed over around 1978.
The anchors did the pulling.
Sears and JCPenney brought national names, and Kisber's carried a downtown store out to the parking lot.
A single-screen Malco theater opened in 1967, closed in 1991, and later gave the room to Blockbuster.
Kisber's started in Jackson in 1905.
It closed downtown in 1985, hung on at the mall, and shut for good in 1991 at 86 years old.
Parks-Belk was set to take the space, and Belk is still an anchor today.
Now Sears and Macy's sit empty at the ends, and CBL has the 44.6-acre site listed for sale.
The mall that helped pull shopping out of downtown is now the one looking for a second life.
Sears opened two years before the mall did
On October 27, 1965, Sears opened on a lot off North Highland Avenue in north Jackson, Tennessee.
There was no mall around it yet.
It was just a department store on a highway tract, with parking out front and U.S. 45 traffic rolling past toward the new Interstate 40 interchange.
The store stood there alone for almost two years before the rest of the center caught up.
Jackson's big retailers were already drifting out of the old downtown business district toward the highways and the parking, and Sears got there first.
Built open-air, with a roof in mind
The project began with Engel of Birmingham, who introduced it in the mid-1960s.
The local development team included Hewitt Pegues, Tomlin Jr., and Frances Tigrett.
Groundbreaking started in November 1964.
What they planned was an open-air shopping center, strip-style, with anchor stores and a concourse left able to be roofed and expanded later.
Because of that design, the center could be covered and grown without being torn down and rebuilt.
Old Hickory Mall's grand opening, July 1967
Old Hickory Mall held its main opening on July 27, 1967.
JCPenney came in as a national anchor next to Sears.
Kisber's brought a local department-store name out from downtown.
Around them stood Woolworth's and an A&P grocery, with smaller shops in between.
It gave Jackson a suburban shopping center at a time when downtown stores still had their own identity and the national chains were busy building bigger boxes on highway land.
Shoppers no longer had to drive into town for a department store.
A single screen and 585 seats
Malco opened the Mall Theatre on June 29, 1967, a few weeks ahead of the mall's main day.
It had one screen and 585 seats. The first feature was John Wayne in "The War Wagon."
Malco had signed on as the theater operator back in 1966, in the last stretch before opening.
For the next two decades, the single screen ran as part of what kept families at the mall instead of heading home.
The downtown store that moved north
Kisber's had been part of Jackson since 1905, when the family started out as Frank Bros.
and Kisber. The Kisber's name came in the 1920s.
By 1951, the store had moved to Lafayette Street downtown, and in 1964, it added a third floor there.
Then, in 1967, it opened a branch at the new mall, and that branch was as big as the downtown store it came from.
A 62-year-old downtown business had planted a full-size copy of itself out on the highway.
That was the direction Jackson retail was heading.
When the roof went on
The open-air center became an enclosed mall around 1978.
The concourse got covered, the tenant count went up, and the property turned into the conventional indoor mall Jackson would know for the next 40 years.
Kisber's used the moment to expand again, moving into larger quarters built behind its original mall space that same year.
The local department store now had larger mall quarters, while the old downtown store held on until 1985.
After that, Kisber's was all mall.
The last days of an 86-year-old store
Kisber's closed its downtown Jackson store in 1985 and kept going at the mall, ending a downtown run of 34 years on Lafayette Street.
Six years later, the rest of it ended too.
In 1991, the family set the closing of the 86-year-old business, by then competing inside the mall against Sears, JCPenney, Goldsmith's, and Woolworth's.
Parks-Belk, which had run a store across the street, was expected to take over the empty Kisber's space.
The Belk name has been at the mall ever since.
From the big screen to Blockbuster
The Mall Theatre had already started changing in 1985, when Malco added a video-rental operation to the lobby on March 22.
The movies kept running while renting tapes became part of the same space.
The screen went dark in 1991, after nearly 24 years.
The room became a Blockbuster, a very 1990s second life for a small theater.
Two years after that, the whole mall got a refresh, a 1993 renovation that gave the late-1960s center another pass at the 1990s.
CBL takes over in 2001
For its first decades, the mall ran under earlier owners, then under the Richard E. Jacobs Group, a big mall operator out of Ohio.
That changed in 2001.
CBL & Associates Properties, now CBL Properties, picked up interests in 21 malls and two associated centers from the Jacobs group in a deal that closed on January 31, 2001.
The whole portfolio carried a price of $1.30 billion.
Old Hickory Mall was the Tennessee property in the stack, and it has stayed under CBL, run from Chattanooga, ever since.
Goldsmith's becomes Macy's
The mall's other big anchor carried a Memphis name for years: Goldsmith's, the department-store chain that ended up inside Federated Department Stores.
In 2003, the sign changed to Goldsmith's-Macy's.
In March 2005, it dropped the local half and became Macy's.
A Memphis department-store name was off the mall directory for good.
Sears files for bankruptcy and closes
Sears had anchored the property since before the mall existed, for more than 50 years on the same site.
Sears Holdings filed for Chapter 11 in October 2018, and that December, the Jackson store landed in a round of 80 Sears and Kmart closings.
It shut in 2019.
The oldest store on the property, the one that opened almost two years ahead of the main mall, left one of the largest anchor boxes at the mall sitting empty.
The landlord files Chapter 11, and Macy's leaves
On November 1, 2020, CBL filed for Chapter 11 protection itself, weighed down by debt across its enclosed-mall portfolio.
A bankruptcy court approved the reorganization on August 11, 2021, and it took effect on November 1.
The plan cut corporate debt, and the mall kept operating through all of it.
Macy's was on its way out at the same time.
The chain put Old Hickory Mall on its 2021 closure list, and once it left, the former Goldsmith's space became the mall's second empty anchor.
Two of the four department-store boxes now stood vacant.
Old Hickory Mall goes up for sale
In May 2026, CBL put Old Hickory Mall on the market.
The listing went out on May 8, handled by NAI Global and NAI Charter, with the real details held behind a confidential deal room.
What's for sale is 44.6 acres and 538,600 square feet of building: two structures, one outparcel, 2,791 parking spaces, SC-1 zoning, and an opportunity-zone tag.
The pitch is a redevelopment tract two miles off Interstate 40, next to the city's planned Jackson Plaza Events and Entertainment District.
Belk owns its own building under a ground lease, so that anchor comes with conditions attached.
The city had been working on that corridor for years.
Jackson bought the closed Jackson Plaza shopping center across the way and started planning an events district with an arena, a hotel, convention space, and structured parking.
The mall's mostly open surface lot fits right into that conversation.
Who still shows up
The mall still opens at 11 every morning, six days a week, and at noon on Sunday, with the address still 2021 North Highland Avenue.
Belk and JCPenney are still the working anchors.
The former Sears and former Macy's boxes sit empty at either end.
The small shops have thinned out. Kay Jewelers is moving to Vann Drive.
Finish Line ran its last day on April 18, 2026, with no Jackson replacement named.
Plenty of storefronts are shuttered, and some of the traffic has shifted to the newer power centers along Vann Drive.
What's left still runs like a mall: Aeropostale, Hibbett Sports, Journeys, Lids, Reeds Jewelers, Claire's, Rainbow, a nail salon, and a Peking Express.
There's a children's play area in the mall's recent mix and Mercy Ministries in the directory too, so the place now does duty as retail, food, ministry space, and somewhere to take the kids.
CBL's current sheet lists 55 stores, 1.1 million annual visits, and a trade area of 178,000 people.
The anchor boxes are emptier than they were at the peak, but the doors still open, and the mall still has tenants waiting inside.
