The Mall at Johnson City Opened as Miracle Mall in 1971 and Outlived Every Anchor It Started With

The Mall at Johnson City, the regional mall at 2011 North Roan Street in Johnson City, Tennessee, has pulled shoppers from outside the city since it opened as Miracle Mall in 1971.

They come from Kingsport, Bristol, the small towns of Northeast Tennessee, and across the line from Virginia. An estimated 6.4 million visits a year land on one property.

The history is a long list of names changing over the same doors. Britt's, Parks-Belk, Miller's, Hess's, Proffitt's, Goody's, Forever 21, Sears. The buildings mostly stayed. The signs kept coming down.

All five anchor spots are leased today to Belk, Belk Men and Home, JCPenney, Dick's Sporting Goods, and HomeGoods.

Sears closed in January 2020 after nearly 49 years, and HomeGoods opened on part of the former Sears site in 2021.

Malls this size closed all over the country during the same 20 years this one kept refilling its biggest spaces. Here's how it got here, name by name.

Miracle Mall opens on St. Patrick's Day

At 9:30 on the morning of March 17, 1971, a ribbon came down on North Roan Street and Johnson City got its first indoor shopping street.

The Science Hill High School band played. Local officials stood around for the cutting. Miss Johnson City was there.

The sign said Miracle Mall Shopping Center.

The developer, Arlen Shopping Centers, had put it on a wide site north of downtown, on a road that was only starting to fill up with businesses.

That building is the same property people now call The Mall at Johnson City, the enclosed regional mall at 2011 North Roan Street.

One enclosed level, one long climate-controlled corridor, Sears anchoring one end and Britt's the other. Free parking was part of the pitch.

It was the second enclosed mall in the Tri-Cities.

Downtown Johnson City was still where you went for a suit or a washing machine, and it stayed that way for another decade.

Groceries, a five-and-dime, and one screen

For most of the 1970s this was an errand stop as much as a shopping trip. Kroger had its own entrance from the parking lot.

SupeRx filled prescriptions. McCrory ran a five-and-dime. Sears sold the clothes, the appliances, the hardware, and kept an auto center on the site.

Britt's spread over two floors. Groceries, prescriptions, clothes, and hardware on one trip, without moving the car.

The movies came three months after the stores.

The Mall Ultravision Theatre opened on June 24, 1971 with "Love Story," a single screen that got cut into two on December 21, 1979.

Plitt Theatres ran it later, then Cineplex Odeon.

Then the first pieces started coming loose. Britt's closed its Johnson City store in the mid-1970s.

Kroger moved out to a freestanding store across North Roan Street, and Piccadilly Cafeteria took over part of the old grocery space.

Parks-Belk left downtown and moved into the old Britt's anchor.

The year it became The Mall at Johnson City

The 1982 expansion more than doubled the place.

Crews extended the center at the Sears end and built an upper mall nearly as big as the whole original building, then joined the two with escalators, an elevator, and a lower-level connection.

Because the addition sat on higher ground, the two halves meet at a step up in the middle of the building.

The place has never been a normal two-story mall, and it still isn't.

JCPenney came up from downtown. Miller's Department Store opened alongside it.

With Sears and Parks-Belk already there, the mall now had four department stores under one roof.

The new name went up during the same period: The Mall at Johnson City.

Downtown had now lost two of its biggest stores to the same building, and North Roan Street became the street where the city shopped.

CBL took on management work at the property during the decade, though the mall itself stayed in other hands.

When one chain held three buildings

By the 1990s, the names over the anchor doors were still changing. Miller's had become Hess's.

The old cinema switched off for good on March 11, 1990, and the building came down in 1993.

Proffitt's built a brand new store behind the mall in the fall of 1992.

Then it bought a group of Hess's locations, which handed it two buildings in the same mall.

It split them by merchandise: women's and children's in the new store, men's and home in the old Hess's.

In April 1995 Proffitt's took a majority stake in Parks-Belk and picked up a third building. The departments moved again.

Men's, children's and home merchandise went into the former Parks-Belk store, the Hess's space was emptied out and leased to Goody's Family Clothing, and the 1992 building kept the women's departments.

One chain briefly held three separate buildings in one mall. Then it settled into two, sorted by what you were shopping for.

The same stretch brought a renovation and a food court, placed right at the level change where traffic from both halves met.

Glimcher Realty Trust bought the mall in 1996 for $44 million.

Belk takes over, and Dick's takes the front

Belk agreed to buy the Proffitt's and McRae's chains in 2005, and the Johnson City signs changed over in 2006.

The strange two-building split survived the name change and survives it still: one Belk for women's, one Belk for men and home.

Then came the biggest construction job in years.

Glimcher spent $12.9 million on the property through 2007, most of it on Dick's Sporting Goods, which opened that September in the front-side space where the grocery store, the cafeteria and a row of small shops had been.

JCPenney gained 35,000 square feet and a full interior remodel, finished in late 2008.

Goody's let its lease run out and closed in January 2008, and its box was rebuilt into a new corridor with 40,000 square feet of shops.

Forever 21 opened in that wing in the fall of 2009.

Ruby Tuesday closed in January 2009, and its space was combined with the unit next door for Charming Charlie in 2011.

The work began in a nearly full building. In 2007 its smaller stores were 97.3 percent occupied and averaging $442 per square foot.

The mall becomes a line in a merger

On January 15, 2015, Washington Prime Group completed a $4.2 billion merger with Glimcher, and the Johnson City mall changed owners without anyone in Tennessee touching a door handle.

Five months later it changed again, partly.

Washington Prime put the mall into a joint venture with O'Connor Mall Partners covering five properties worth $1.63 billion, keeping 51 percent for itself and selling 49 percent.

The numbers underneath were fine.

The property was recorded at 571,900 square feet and 100 percent leased in 2015, the biggest it has ever looked on paper.

By the end of 2019 it was 96.6 percent leased.

In December 2019 the loan on the property was extended to May 2023, with a required $5 million payment against the principal due the following spring and $10 million set aside in reserves.

The owners were tidying up the finances for a reason. They had already made arrangements to take control of the Sears building.

Sears leaves after 49 years

Sears announced the Johnson City store's closure in September 2019, and the doors shut on January 5, 2020.

It had been there since opening day, nearly 49 years, the last original anchor in the building.

The replacement plan landed three weeks later. HomeGoods would take part of the old Sears site, its first location in the Tri-Cities.

The Sears Auto Center would be knocked down and replaced by a restaurant building facing North Roan Street.

Then March 2020 arrived and the mall closed to the public.

Construction kept going anyway. Palmetto Moon opened on June 5, 2020.

By that July, Chipotle and Chicken Salad Chick had signed for the new building out front, both of them first-in-the-region stores.

HomeGoods opened on the former Sears site in 2021.

Outside, next to Dick's, the space by Entrance B became a lawn with outdoor seating, fire pits, decorative lighting, yard games and room for food trucks.

The mall turned 50 on March 17, 2021. Pandemic delays and construction pushed the party to October.

New owners, and what's open now

Washington Prime filed for Chapter 11 on June 13, 2021, and came out on October 21 after clearing nearly $1 billion in debt.

The mall stayed open through all of it. Stores in Johnson City kept their usual schedule while their landlord worked through a Texas courtroom.

By April 2025 the company was selling everything it had left.

Spinoso Real Estate Group and Tryperion Holdings bought the mall in November 2025, announced it on December 1, and did not say what they paid.

Their plan runs several years and covers building systems, cosmetic upgrades, and underused space.

What they bought is 544,700 square feet with more than 70 businesses in it and all five anchor spots leased: Belk, Belk Men and Home, JCPenney, Dick's Sporting Goods and HomeGoods.

An estimated 6.4 million visits come through in a year. The nearest enclosed mall of the same kind is more than 30 miles away.

Boot Barn and J.Crew Factory both opened here inside the last two years.

And people keep turning up for reasons that have nothing to do with anchors.

There are 262 apartments and townhomes next door now, completed in 2021 within a short walk of the mall, the restaurants and the theater.

Build-A-Bear is still open inside, and so is the Vision Quest VR arcade.

Some years there are more than 100 events on the property: charity drives, school programs, seasonal displays.