Standing on South 31st Street in Temple, Texas, is Temple Mall, a single-level enclosed mall built around a set of interior corridors. It opened in 1976 and is still enclosed.
The mall became Colonial Mall-Temple in 2000, named by the owner that bought it that July. That owner filled it, and by 2005 the mall was 91 percent occupied, with big new stores opening around it.
In 2025 a buyer drew up a $50 million plan to take out the mall's corridors and turn its stores outward. The buyer walked away by May 2026, so the mall stayed with its current owner.
In August 2026 the corridors were still there. The city had closed most of the mall on June 22, and the small shops along the corridors remained shut, with no public date for reopening them.
Sears leaves downtown for Temple Mall
In the mid-1970s Sears left its store in downtown Temple and later opened one at Temple Mall on South 31st Street, near Loop 363.
The move was part of a shift that moved Temple's shopping out of downtown and onto South 31st Street.
Dillard's opened at the mall in 1976, and the building they shared was one enclosed level, laid out around its department stores and a set of interior corridors.
A movie theater was planned for the mall from its first year.
Texas Cinema Corporation set Christmas Eve 1976 as the opening date for Cinema Six, planned with 1,800 seats across six rooms: three of 350 and three of 250.
The smaller stores came in over the next two years.
Radio Shack was trading there by 1977, and Royal Optical had a shop at the mall entrance to Wilson's, which kept hours of 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., Monday through Saturday.
By 1989 the mall had a double carousel.
Colonial Mall-Temple fills up
Stein Mart opened at the mall in October 2000, three months after Colonial Properties bought the mall for about $25.5 million.
Colonial renamed it Colonial Mall-Temple and went after tenants, and Casa Ole, Foot Locker, Sunglass Hut, and Electronic Boutique came in with Stein Mart.
The anchors by then were Dillard's, JCPenney, and Foley's, which had taken over the old Sears store by 1995.
Colonial was trying to lift occupancy past about 80 percent while new stores went up around the mall.
A Walmart Supercenter and Sam's Club opened in Temple in 2000.
H-E-B opened on South 31st Street itself in June 2001, and Temple Towne Center, a shopping center almost half the mall's size, was under construction.
The mall filled up anyway. It was 91 percent occupied by April 2005, when Colonial sold it for $33.5 million, about $8 million more than it had paid.
A six-story IMAX above the roofline
Premiere Cinemas opened a new 12-screen theater at the mall around Thanksgiving 2002 and later expanded it to 16 screens.
The mall's finances went the other way.
Its $32.8 million loan was in trouble by September 2008, and in September 2011 the lender took over the property.
The cinema kept growing under the lender.
In July 2014, an IMAX auditorium opened in a new structure about 97 by 75 feet and six stories tall, rising above the mall's roofline.
The finished theater had 15 screens. Two of the old auditoriums had been demolished for the IMAX.
The IMAX held about 350 leather recliners, the size of each of the three biggest rooms planned for Cinema Six in 1976.
The theater opened the IMAX with a free showing of Space Station 3D on July 23, and Hollywood films started the next day.
In May 2016, the lender closed out the mall's loan and took a loss just under $30 million on it.
Dillard's moves across the mall
Macy's began its final clearance sale at the mall on May 15, 2017.
Its store was in the box Sears had opened in 1976, which became Foley's by 1995 and Macy's in 2006, and by that fall it carried a fourth name.
Dillard's left its original store, crossed the mall, and opened in the old Macy's box, growing from about 91,000 square feet to about 109,000.
That left the first Dillard's empty after 41 years.
The 7 Seas Aquarium project was announced in 2019, and by February 2020 it had moved into about 40 percent of the old Dillard's box.
By then 13 tanks had arrived, and the opening date had slipped from January to February.
The aquarium never opened.
In May 2020, after the COVID-19 disruption and changes to its business plan, the mall and the aquarium operator ended the deal.
The old Dillard's was split between Planet Fitness and Mega Furniture, and neither one depended on the corridor the way a department store had.
JCPenney's replacement has no mall door
JCPenney sat on a corridor near the cinema. In late 2020, the company put the Temple store on its closing list, and by 2021 the store was gone.
In October 2021, Kohan Retail Investment Group took ownership of the mall.
The cinema went next. Premiere Cinemas closed after Christmas 2022, about 20 years after it opened, and the theater and its IMAX hall sat empty.
The biggest piece of the JCPenney store went to Floor & Decor, which leased 63,000 square feet in January 2023.
By 2025 the store had no customer entrance into the mall at all, and shoppers came in from outside.
The corridor that had led to JCPenney now ended without a store.
A tornado, then Temple Mall gets a red tag
On May 22, 2024, a tornado damaged Temple Mall's roof and skylights. The storm damage overlapped with a separate set of problems.
In August a city inspection found a deteriorated fire-suppression system, fire alarms that didn't work, and exterior doors that were permanently locked.
A second inspection found none of it fixed and added plumbing and electrical concerns, and on September 27 the city closed the mall.
Dillard's and Xtreme Jump stayed open, because each was separately operated and could maintain a temporary fire watch.
The businesses along the corridors lost their workplaces, and the city and the Chamber of Commerce opened a resource center for them at 201 Santa Fe Way.
Repairs to the fire-suppression and alarm systems got the mall cleared to reopen on October 5, with other violations still unresolved.
More than 20 businesses were operating or getting ready to reopen, Claire's and Rainbow among them.
In 2012 the mall had listed more than 60 specialty shops and restaurants.
The corridor shuts, Dillard's stays open
RockStep Capital spent 2025 studying a purchase of the mall. Its plan called for roughly $50 million of work over about three years.
The interior corridors would have come out, the surviving stores would have faced outward, and the empty anchor boxes would have taken entertainment and recreation.
By May 2026, RockStep had stopped pursuing the deal.
So the mall stayed with its Kohan-linked owner, and on May 22, the Fire Marshal gave the owner 30 days to fix the building.
The list included an inoperable fire pump, sprinklers and alarm panels that were impaired or not working, problems with the exits, and electrical hazards.
The 30 days ran out, and at 7 p.m. on June 22 the city closed the rest of the mall.
The order didn't apply to Dillard's, which has its own fire-rated separation and its own alarm and suppression systems.
It keeps regular hours, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. on Sunday.
Xtreme Jump built a fire separation of its own and repaired its alarm, and the city let it reopen on July 31.
Temple Mall is a single-level enclosed mall at 3111 South 31st Street, at the corner of Loop 363 in Temple, Texas.
It opened in 1976 and was renamed Colonial Mall-Temple in 2000.
Its interior is closed by city order, and no reopening date, buyer, or new plan has been made public.
The old cinema's 58,000 square feet are for lease.
The small businesses that came back in 2024 are shut out of the building again.
Under My Skin is one of them, its store closed while the fire-safety and electrical repairs are made.
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