What happened to the big department stores at Central Mall in Port Arthur, TX after Sears and Stage closed?

Central Mall opened in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1982 with five department stores set around one indoor walkway.

A hurricane reached them first. Rita tore the roof off Dillard's and wrecked the Hobby Lobby that had taken over The White House space. Dillard's was rebuilt.

Hobby Lobby never reopened, and by 2011 its back entrance opened onto a large, empty stretch of the building. Sears went on a list of 80 stores the chain shut across the country, and its Port Arthur doors closed in 2019.

The Bealls store had turned into a Stage, and that chain went bankrupt. By 2024 three of the mall's five original department-store spaces held no department store at all.

What happens to them goes back to 2013, when the landlord turned Luby's, a Gap, and the shops beside them into a single store.

Five department stores on Highway 365

Warmack Company planned its Port Arthur mall around department stores, five of them, and kept the whole building on one floor.

Central Mall opened in 1982 at 3100 Highway 365 in Port Arthur, Texas, as an enclosed regional mall with JCPenney, Dillard's, Sears, Bealls, and The White House, a regional department-store name, set around a single indoor concourse.

Work on the building had been underway by 1980, on a site in the shopping area of Port Arthur, Groves, and Nederland, close to the US 69/96/287 corridor. Beaumont had beaten Port Arthur to this kind of mall by nine years.

Parkdale Mall opened there in October 1973, already a large regional center with JCPenney, Joske's, and Montgomery Ward.

When Central Mall arrived, Port Arthur shoppers had a closer enclosed mall of their own, with five department stores under one roof.

A cinema, then Target, with Walmart nearby

A movie theater was the mall's first big addition. Dickinson Theatres opened a 10-screen cinema there on April 14, 2000, with 1,400 seats in about 33,000 square feet.

That same year, Gap, Gap Kids, Foot Locker, and American Eagle Outfitters were among the chains opening or expanding in the Port Arthur market. The roads around the mall were filling up at the same time.

Walmart was next, opening a 205,000-square-foot Supercenter in mid-2001 on the southwest side of the US 69-Highway 365 junction.

Strip centers, restaurants, hotels, and freestanding chain stores later went up around Central Mall on every side, with Lowe's, Academy, Best Buy, and Ross among them.

In 2004 Target was added to the mall itself, a discount department store attached to a building where JCPenney, Dillard's, Sears, and Bealls were all trading.

By the end of that year, the stretch of Highway 365 around the mall had become a single shopping district, an enclosed mall surrounded by big boxes, with Target belonging to both.

Dillard's loses its roof and Hobby Lobby closes

Hurricane Rita came ashore on September 24, 2005, in the same year the mall underwent a full renovation. The storm tore the roof off Dillard's and damaged roofs across the rest of the building.

At the end where The White House had opened, Hobby Lobby had since taken over the department-store space, and the hurricane left that store damaged beyond repair. Dillard's stayed shut for more than a year.

By the summer of 2006, the Port Arthur store was one of four Dillard's locations that Katrina and Rita had kept closed, and the rebuilt store reopened in October 2006. Hobby Lobby never came back.

By 2011, the rear of the mall still held a large empty Hobby Lobby space, and the store's name stuck to it for years afterward.

TJ Maxx moves into combined shop space

Around the same period, the mall's smaller storefronts were changing hands. Old Navy closed in 2004, and Gap closed in January 2005.

Steve & Barry's moved into the old Old Navy space in 2005 and was running a closing sale by September 2008, which left that stretch of the concourse waiting for a tenant again. The landlord was joining small spaces into larger ones.

TJ Maxx, announced in 2012, took the old Luby's, the former Gap, and the shops beside them, and opened in May 2013 as a single store of 24,500 square feet.

The section where Old Navy and Steve & Barry's had been went to Shoe Dept. Encore, which opened there that year. Bed Bath & Beyond had done the same thing on a larger scale after the storm, taking a big section of the mall around the turn of 2007.

Sears closes after a foreclosure

By 2018 the mall was a place to ask for disaster help. The State of Texas and FEMA ran a Hurricane Harvey recovery center in a mall suite, open on weekdays, and at the end of May the Beaumont center was merged into it, so the Port Arthur center served Jefferson County and the areas around it.

The mall had money trouble of its own by then. Gregory Greenfield & Associates held it together with two sister malls, in Texarkana, Texas, and Lawton, Oklahoma, and one $119.5 million loan covered all three.

The loan had already been stretched past its June 2014 due date when it went to a special servicer that October. By January 2018, about $111.6 million remained on the delinquent loan, and it was already in foreclosure.

With fewer spaces occupied and less money coming in, the borrower could not cover the balance at its June maturity. Kohan Retail Investment Group bought Central Mall later in 2018.

In late December 2018, Sears put its Port Arthur store on a list of 80 closings nationwide. The store shut in March 2019, and about 100,000 square feet of one of the mall's original department stores went empty.

Stage and Bed Bath & Beyond close

The Bealls store had become a Stage, and in 2020 Stage Stores went bankrupt, with its Central Mall lease part of the case. By 2024 the store beside Target was gone. Bed Bath & Beyond was on the closing list the chain announced in September 2022.

The two remaining department stores, Target, TJ Maxx, the cinema, and a run of smaller national and local shops kept trading through those closings.

In 2020 B&B Theatres, which had taken over the cinema's operator in 2014, planned a $1 million remodel that swapped the old rocking seats for recliners. The empty spaces were the big ones. The owner had a bill of its own to settle.

In March 2023, Kohan's mall company was more than $355,000 behind on its 2022 property taxes, before penalties and interest. It paid in late April, and the account was current by June.

By 2024, three of the five department-store spaces the mall opened with had no department store in them: the Sears store, the Bealls space that Stage had held, and the end where The White House and then Hobby Lobby had been.

Crunch Fitness fills the old Stage store

In January 2024, 4th Dimension Properties bought Central Mall from Kohan. The new owner went looking for tenants while planning work on the parking lot, the outdoor lights, and part of the roof.

A large one went into the empty Stage space next to Target. Crunch Fitness was announced there in September 2024, and the franchisee put roughly $6 million into turning the old department store into a gym.

It opened on March 18, 2025, in about 45,000 square feet, with several workout zones and studios, open around the clock. The Bealls and Stage space had been empty, and it reopened as a gym.

Trampolines, Five Below, and plans for Sears

4th Dimension held the mall for about 18 months. In July 2025, it sold Central Mall to a development group and a business partner, who kept the repair work going and went on leasing space.

Altitude Trampoline Park, planned in January 2026 as a $1 million conversion, opened that year in about 45,000 square feet of former department-store space. Cici's Pizza took over the old Jason's Deli, a restaurant space of about 4,000 square feet.

Five Below opened a store of nearly 10,000 square feet in August 2026, the chain's second in the area after the one at Parkdale Mall in Beaumont, and more than 60 people had turned out for its hiring event in July.

The Sears store is still empty. The owners named Dunham's Sports in September 2026 as the tenant for about 100,000 square feet of it.

Later that month, the City Council approved a grant of up to $1.3 million through the Port Arthur Economic Development Corporation, money meant for the grounds rather than the building: replacing worn asphalt, fixing and restriping the parking lot, putting up new signs by the road, preparing pad sites, adding electric-vehicle chargers, and installing LED light poles.

That covers the parking lot and the lighting 4th Dimension had put on its list in 2024. In early October, the council approved a second economic-development agreement with the mall.

For the people who shop there, Central Mall is open and partly refilled. More than 40 businesses trade inside, Dillard's, JCPenney, Target, and TJ Maxx among them, and B&B Theatres runs the 10-screen cinema.

Of the five department-store spaces the mall opened with, JCPenney and Dillard's fill two, a gym fills a third, and the Sears space waits for Dunham's.

The last of the five is the space Hurricane Rita left beyond repair in September 2005, when Hobby Lobby had it. That end of the mall never went back to department-store use. It is a trampoline park for families now.