Mall of the Mainland stands on the Emmett F. Lowry Expressway in Texas City, Texas, and it hasn't worked as a shopping mall since 2014. It opened on March 20, 1991 with Dillard's, Sears, and JCPenney as its three full-line department-store anchors.
Foley's joined in 1994. The shops between the big stores stayed thin: a 1996 SEC filing put occupancy at 56.2%, and it was still only 65% in 2002 while the department stores carried the place.
Then they went, one at a time. Hurricane Ike closed Dillard's in 2008 and the store never reopened. The enclosed corridors were shut at the end of January 2014.
All four department-store buildings are still standing and all four have occupants. None of them sells clothes. The property goes by Mainland City Centre now, and city and owner material still identifies it as the former Mall of the Mainland.
Mall of the Mainland opened with 31 stores
Mall of the Mainland opened on March 20, 1991 with 31 stores. Empty and unfinished spaces were still visible inside.
Plans had allowed for five department-store anchors, a cinema, and about 110 shops and food-court stalls.
The department stores were the part that worked.
Dillard's, Sears, and JCPenney all opened with the mall, and two of them got there by leaving somewhere else.
Sears moved over from Galvez Mall in Galveston.
JCPenney left downtown after about 60 years in Texas City, where its first location had been on Sixth Street.
Foley's committed to the mall in October 1993. Its roughly 150,000-square-foot store opened a year later, on October 26, 1994.
That gave the mall four full-line department stores around a corridor that was still thinly leased.
By June 1996 the center measured 779,000 square feet and was 56.2 percent leased.
Two anchors leave, three years apart
Baybrook Mall sat about 10 miles north and did better business.
In May 2002, Mall of the Mainland was 65 percent occupied while Baybrook was at 96 percent. Three years later Baybrook took more than customers.
JCPenney announced in August 2005 that it would close in Texas City and open a new store at Baybrook instead, and that fall it was gone.
The 83,000-square-foot building it left behind stayed empty until 2019.
Hurricane Ike came through in September 2008 and damaged the mall. The enclosed part reopened later that month.
Dillard's didn't. The chain closed its 145,000-square-foot store because of the storm damage and never came back.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency then repaired part of that damage and used the former Dillard's for recovery work for about two years.
It was the first time one of the mall's department-store shells was given a job that had nothing to do with retail.
By the end of 2008, two of the four boxes were out of retail for good.
Macy's closes, then the mall does
Foley's became Macy's in 2006, and on January 4, 2012, Macy's announced that the Texas City store would close.
The clearance sale started four days later and ran into March. The store had 68 employees.
That left Sears as the only full-line department store still trading in a mall that had once had four.
Five days after the announcement, an EF0 tornado touched down in the parking lot just before one in the afternoon and cut a path a little over half a mile long.
The Movies 12 roof caved in, the adjacent arcade area was damaged, skylights broke, and water got into the building.
The mall was evacuated and stayed shut while the structure was checked.
After it reopened, drying equipment remained in the corridors, and the damaged former Tilt arcade had been sealed behind a wall.
By January 7, 2013, management had sealed the half of the mall beyond the food court toward Dillard's.
The decorative neon was dark by early that year, and the center-court fountain followed just before Christmas.
Elsewhere, unused storefronts still carried painted businesses: a dive shop, a surf shop, a fishing-charter office, and a camera store.
The remaining common areas closed at the end of January 2014, almost 23 years after opening.
Coastline said the move would reduce its holding costs while it negotiated with an investor.
Sears, Palais Royal, Cinemark, and, briefly, Affordable Furniture remained accessible from the parking lot and stayed open.
A gym in Macy's, a church in Dillard's
The Macy's building had always been owned separately from the mall, which is why a developer was able to buy it in 2014, a year before he bought the enclosed mall itself.
World Gym opened inside it on January 24, 2015, taking about 45,000 square feet of a 150,000-square-foot department store.
The buildout kept the structure and worked around it.
The Macy's escalator remained in place, and the conversion added second-floor windows for natural light. The gym also had a 60-yard indoor track.
Palais Royal moved out of the mall and into another part of the same building, alongside salons and offices.
In March 2015 the developer and an out-of-state partner closed on the enclosed mall itself, roughly 451,000 square feet.
That summer the former Dillard's went to First Baptist Church of Texas City, which had sold its Ninth Avenue campus to the school district.
The congregation still uses the 150,000-square-foot store.
616 storage units inside JCPenney
The JCPenney box took the longest to find an occupant, and the occupant it nearly got was a college.
In 2015, College of the Mainland trustees voted to buy the empty 83,000-square-foot store. The college never moved in.
Three years later the plan for the building was storage.
Texas City commissioners approved rezoning on June 6, 2018, allowing an indoor mini-warehouse and an extension of the shell out into the parking lot.
Right Move Storage took over management in March 2019 and held its grand opening on the 25th.
The 2018 plan called for about 76,000 square feet of storage.
By opening, the facility measured 63,675 square feet and held 616 climate-controlled units.
The building that had been dark the longest ended up with the quietest use on the property.
Mainland City Centre today
Sears outlasted the enclosed mall by more than five years.
The closure was announced in August 2019, the store shut that October, and the building went to the same developer in September 2020.
World Gym moved out of its 45,000 square feet in the old Macy's and into about 100,000 square feet of the old Sears in 2021, more than doubling in size.
That sales floor now holds an indoor basketball court, pickleball courts, an indoor track, and turf.
The complex at 10000 Emmett F. Lowry Expressway in Texas City, Texas, opened in 1991 as Mall of the Mainland and has gone by Mainland City Centre since 2020.
All four department-store shells are still standing and all four are in use, and none of them sells clothes.
Dillard's is a church, JCPenney is storage, and Sears is a gym.
The Foley's building that became Macy's has been divided among salons, offices, and College of the Mainland, which teaches cosmetology, culinary arts, and lifelong learning there.
Cinemark Movies 12 opened two days after the mall in 1991 and closed in December 2021.
It came back on May 28, 2024 as Premiere Lux Cine 12, with the same 12 screens.
LVL UP FUN took over former mall space in March 2025 with trampolines, axe throwing, go-karts, and laser tag.
Odyssey Academy has run a pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade campus in the complex since the fall of 2020, and its own address listing still gives the old mall name in parentheses after the new one.
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