When San Jacinto Mall opened in 1981, Baytown put new traffic signals at I-10 and Garth Road for the opening-day cars. The town's shopping, long centered on Texas Avenue, moved north to the interstate.
In 2001, three of the mall's big stores closed in a single year. The city drew a tax district around it to help redevelop it, and the new wings sketched for its empty ends never rose. In 2014 the city took it back out.
Any change to the building needed the department stores' consent, so the emptying mall stood, corridor after sealed corridor, until crews moved in again on June 28, 2019.
That summer the first phase was due in late 2020. The plan behind it called for 1.1 million square feet of retail and a large outdoor festival-and-concert space. The wait stretched into 2026.
The mall opens at I-10 and Garth Road
At 9:45 a.m. on Wednesday, March 4, 1981, the mayor of Baytown cut the ribbon in The Market, the central food and gathering section that the new center billed as a mall within a mall.
A symphonic band and a drum and fife corps played.
With that, San Jacinto Mall opened as an enclosed regional mall on about 110 acres at the southwest corner of Interstate 10 and Garth Road in Baytown, Texas, laid out for 175 stores.
Four wings reached out from JCPenney and The Market toward the big stores at their ends.
Foley's, Sears, Montgomery Ward, and Wilson's were the headline names, while Bealls, The Fair, and Palais Royal took the smaller anchor spaces.
Foley's had been set to open its two-level store the previous September, ahead of everything else.
One department-store pad, on the northwest side, had no store at all.
Ownership was split from the start.
One owner held the shared mall building, while the department stores held their own buildings or the ground beneath them.
Agreements that Foley's, Sears, and JCPenney signed in those first years gave each of them a say over any change to the common mall.
Shopping in Baytown had long clustered on Texas Avenue, close to the old core.
For opening day the city put in and adjusted traffic signals where the frontage road met Garth, and once the mall was trading, commercial construction on Garth Road sped up as the town's big-store shopping moved north to the interstate.
Mervyn's arrives in the northwest wing
Mervyn's opened on March 1, 1985, on the mall's northwest side with about 145 employees.
Wilson's became Service Merchandise later that year, leaving both stores in a wing where neither name had appeared on opening day.
By that April, 84 percent of the mall's space was leased.
In 1987 the mall's advertising named nine major stores, Mervyn's and Service Merchandise among them, and more than 170 specialty shops.
The courts held community events as well: a gospel band at Butterfly Court and a singles group meeting in The Market beside the waterfall and its elevator.
By 1989 JCPenney ran a free club for shoppers 55 and older, with 15 percent off on the first Tuesday of each month.
By March 1994 the roster had started to slip.
The ads listed seven major stores instead of nine, with Marshalls in The Fair's old place next to Sears in the northeast wing, and the specialty count had dropped to more than 140 shops and services.
Montgomery Ward and Service Merchandise close in 2001
A new owner group bought the mall from the insurer Aetna in 1998 and set out to refit it.
The group installed a new heating and air-conditioning system, and the old cinemas, open since the early 1980s, shut in 1999 and 2000 as a replacement was readied.
Premiere Cinema 11, an 11-screen theater with stadium seating, opened near the food court on July 6, 2001.
The office wing of roughly 100,000 square feet discussed alongside it never became part of the mall.
Three stores closed that same year.
Montgomery Ward went when its chain liquidated, Service Merchandise closed during its bankruptcy reorganization, and Bealls left as well.
Ward and Bealls had shared the southeast wing, and Service Merchandise had held the northwest end beside Mervyn's.
None of the three spaces got a department store of comparable size.
Occupancy stood at 75 percent.
In August 2001, after the owner put forward a redevelopment proposal, the Baytown City Council created a tax increment reinvestment zone of about 350 acres that took in the mall and the land around it, with early spending planned for streets, drainage, utilities, and redevelopment support near the property.
The empty wings are sealed off
Mervyn's closed its Baytown store in early 2006, when the chain pulled out of the Houston market, and the northwest wing was left with no big store at all.
That September, Foley's took the Macy's name.
NewQuest Properties drew up a redevelopment plan for the mall's two dead ends: the Ward and Bealls side and the Mervyn's and Service Merchandise side would come down, with lifestyle-center buildings planned for the cleared ground.
Redevelopment signs went up, and the new wings were never built.
Triyar, the company running the owners' real-estate holdings, put the mall up for sale in November 2006, and it did not sell.
In April 2007, only about 60 of the mall's planned 175 stores were still trading.
Its five big stores were Sears, JCPenney, Macy's, Marshalls, and Palais Royal.
Most of the life left inside had gathered around The Market, with the cinema, food court, Casa Ole, and two arcades below the upper-floor carousel and children's play area.
The outer wings had gone quiet.
Hurricane Ike damaged the building in September 2008, and the damage was left unrepaired.
By 2011, only a small piece of the old Montgomery Ward corridor remained open to shoppers.
Hallmark had moved to the Macy's side, leaving Walgreens and the former Bealls entrance behind the closed-off stretch.
In December 2014, Baytown took the mall out of the 2001 tax district because its property values had fallen.
Fidelis buys the mall but not its anchors
A partnership led by Fidelis Realty Partners bought the mall from Triyar in July 2015 and announced it would replace the enclosed building with an open-air center.
The purchase covered the common mall alone.
Sears, Macy's, and JCPenney controlled their own parcels, and under the early-1980s agreements each still had a say over any change.
Baytown backed the project with an incentive agreement that year, valued at about $26 million by 2017.
The redevelopment was drawn around Macy's and Sears, while JCPenney was slated for a replacement store elsewhere on the site.
The old anchor agreements made demolition dependent on deals with all three.
Starting in 2016, Fidelis also began buying the separately owned parcels, the old Mervyn's, Service Merchandise, and Marshalls spaces among them.
The old Montgomery Ward section was down by 2018, the year Sears closed.
Crews moved in on June 28, 2019, taking down the former Sears end and the enclosed corridors beside it in a first phase of over 500,000 square feet.
A smaller middle section stayed open.
The plan by then had grown to 1.1 million square feet of shops and a concert lawn roughly as big as two football fields, with Macy's and JCPenney retained, and the first new stores were projected to open in 2020.
The last department stores close
Journeys and Bath & Body Works were among the 14 stores left in the enclosed section by late 2019.
The tenants still inside had been given notice that the mall interior was nearing its shutdown.
January 5, 2020, was the last day the public could walk its corridors.
JCPenney and Macy's kept trading on their own, and the 2020 opening for the new center never came.
JCPenney went through bankruptcy in 2020 and later left Baytown.
Macy's announced in January 2022 that its store would shut, and its clearance sale ran until the end of February.
By April 2022, after buying the last parcels it needed, Fidelis controlled all of the roughly 105 acres, with no old store agreements left to clear.
That August the city council replaced the 2015 deal with one built on sales-tax rebates from the businesses the project would actually bring, and Baytown got $3.25 million back under the old agreement.
Demolition equipment returned in late August.
By the end of 2022, the last of the mall's buildings were gone.
San Jacinto Marketplace opens one store at a time
With the whole site under one owner, Fidelis rewrote the master plan without the old department-store pattern.
Construction started with a ceremony in October 2024, and the city later rezoned about 104 acres of the site as a planned development.
San Jacinto Marketplace is an open-air center laid out in streets and blocks: large single-store buildings, smaller ones shared by several tenants, restaurants, and surface parking.
Lone Star Avenue crosses the site from east to west, linking San Jacinto Boulevard with Garth Road.
Apartments, a hotel, and offices are planned for later phases.
Ross is open, after a grand opening on October 9.
Burlington has set its opening for October 30, and Barnes & Noble has scheduled a store with a cafe for January 2027.
Sam's Club, HomeGoods, Havertys, Dick's Sporting Goods, Men's Wearhouse, and EoS Fitness are among the announced tenants still under construction, and restaurants such as Texas Roadhouse and Pluckers are on the way.
For now most of the first phase is a building site, with site work scheduled to run into January 2027.
The 2019 plan had promised 1.1 million square feet and a concert lawn.
The first phase going up now is about half a million square feet, with Ross open in it.
The new center keeps the San Jacinto name, and nothing of the mall it replaced still stands.
Independent Publisher Notice
BestAttractions is an independent editorial publisher. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any location, business, property owner, manager, government agency, or organization described in this article. Comments posted on this page are not forwarded to, reviewed by, or acted upon by any entity mentioned in the article. For official inquiries, complaints, applications, bookings, or other requests, please contact the relevant entity directly through its official website or other verified channels.