Charlottesville Fashion Square, a grand debut
On paper, Charlottesville Fashion Square was a simple idea: give a college town and nearby counties the one thing they did not have, an indoor mall.
In the late 1970s, this plan came down from New York with Leonard L. Farber, a developer already known for building shopping centers in Florida and other places.
His company, one of the first in the new business of building malls, chose a spot along U.S. Route 29, about a mile north of Charlottesville and a short drive from the University of Virginia, Monticello, and the Blue Ridge.
Construction started in early 1979, and by February 1980, the pitch was set.
Four main stores, Miller & Rhoads, JCPenney, Sears, and Leggett, would be joined by more than seventy-five smaller shops, with over forty of them new to the area.
On March 5, 1980, about four thousand people came to see what was happening. The mall opened before everything was finished, with only two main stores ready, Leggett opening later that month, and JCPenney a year later.
Still, for Central Virginia's eight-county area, this was the first indoor mall, so even if it was not perfect, it was already the main attraction.
Dreams under glass in Charlottesville's first indoor mall
In its first ten years, Charlottesville Fashion Square worked the way malls were expected to in America.
It gave people something to do on weekends and holidays, attracted students from UVA and families from nearby rural areas, and served as both a comfortable indoor walkway and a place to dream about buying nice things.
Sears sold appliances and tires, Leggett provided clothes for weddings and job interviews, and Miller & Rhoads brought a touch of Richmond department store style to Albemarle County.
But under the skylights, the mall was more than just a shopping place.
Teenagers learned the twists and turns of the main walkway, hanging out in groups as they went from the food court to the record store to small shops that needed lots of people passing by to stay open.
In its early years, the mall also had a special look: umbrella designs were everywhere in decorations and signs until they became part of what made it unique.
In a place full of shopping centers and big stores, Charlottesville finally had what other places had: an indoor, air-conditioned sign that the area had caught up to by the late 1970s.
Miller & Rhoads falls, Stone & Thomas arrives
The first real sign that things were changing came on January 7, 1990, when Miller & Rhoads closed its Fashion Square store.
The products were sent to other stores that had just become part of the May Department Stores group, and about a hundred local jobs disappeared when the store closed.
An empty anchor store can hurt a mall, so the owners acted fast to stop that from happening.
They filled the empty space and also did a bigger renovation in 1990, bringing in newer stores like Gap Kids, Victoria's Secret, and Express, and making the hallways look more modern.
Stone & Thomas, a department store chain from West Virginia, moved into the old Miller & Rhoads space, bringing its own local reputation.
The 60,000-square-foot store opened on November 2, 1990, right across from Leggett, and as a direct competitor.
For a short time, the mall had the kind of competition between big stores that mall planners hope for, but store owners worry about.
The competition did not last. In July 1998, Stone & Thomas was bought by Elder-Beerman, and the Charlottesville Fashion Square store was then taken over by Belk, the company that owned Leggett.
This led to a strange situation: two different Belk stores facing each other across the mall.
Simon, an $8.5 million makeover, and Tom Clancy's controversial mall attack
The owners of the property changed almost as often as the big store signs on the building.
In 1997, CFS Associates Limited was replaced by Shopping Center Associates, and later that year, the property changed hands again in a $1.2 billion takeover that put Simon Property Group in charge.
Simon, already one of the biggest mall owners in the country, added Charlottesville Fashion Square to its list of malls, where this Virginia mall was just another entry rather than something special.
Still, money was put into the mall.
From 1999 to 2002, an $8.5 million renovation added new lights to the hallways, better seating, more modern decorations, and quietly got rid of the umbrella designs that had been part of the original look.
Charlottesville Fashion Square now looked less unique and more like other suburban malls, which was the goal.
In 2003, though, it became special again when Tom Clancy picked it as the setting for a made-up terrorist attack in his book "The Teeth of the Tiger." He called the mall medium-sized and said it served wealthier shoppers, just off Route 29.
The people who ran the mall were not happy to see their property used as a target, even in fiction, and there was a small local uproar about it.
Sears closes, debt sours, and anchors disappear
Business changes kept happening out of sight. In 2014, Simon separated many of its shopping centers into a new company called Washington Prime Group, and Charlottesville Fashion Square became part of it.
On paper, it was still the area's only indoor mall. In reality, big national stores were moving away from what Fashion Square stood for.
The turning point came in December 2018, when Sears added its main store here to a nationwide list of eighty closures.
By March 2019, the Sears space was empty, and the mall had lost another key store from its opening day.
The money situation holding the property together started to show big problems.
By November 2019, experts were warning that its $45 million loan was in trouble. By February 2020, Fashion Square was close to failing on its loan.
Washington Prime lowered the property's status from a middle-level asset to something less important, and the mall showed that change: more empty stores, more short-term renters, and more empty space between the few busy spots that were left.
Then on August 20, 2020, JCPenney said its Charlottesville Fashion Square store would close that November.
With Sears already gone and Penney leaving soon, only the two Belk stores were left as the main big stores, and the mall's future as a regular shopping center was basically over.
Auctions, new owners, and a bet on Home Depot
The financial problems kept getting worse for the company. Washington Prime Group, which owned about $4 billion worth of property and owed about $3.5 billion, missed a $23 million payment on its bonds in February 2021.
On June 13 that year, the company filed for bankruptcy, saying the COVID-19 pandemic was a main reason. Charlottesville Fashion Square was just one property affected by this process, but it would not stay the same.
In July 2021, the mall was sold at a public auction in Albemarle County to help pay off its debt.
A local lender, using the name Charlottesville JP 2014-C21, bought the mall for $20.2 million after the bids did not reach the minimum amount the bondholders wanted.
Even before that, in September 2020, a company connected to a developer called Fashion Square Assets LLC had bought the old JCPenney building for $4.5 million.
Belk owned its own building. The idea of Charlottesville Fashion Square as one single property had broken up into separate pieces.
A new main attraction came in September 2022, when Home Depot bought a big part of the property, including the old Sears building.
The deal included a partnership with the local government: Albemarle County agreed to give up to $750,000 in special tax funding over ten years, in a project quietly called "Project Julius," in return for investment, new jobs, cleaning up the old auto center, and working together on future road changes.
Buses rerouted as Rio29 reshapes Fashion Square's future
By late 2024, the change from mall to something new was no longer just an idea.
On August 22, county leaders shared details about working with Home Depot, offering tax breaks if certain goals were met, like getting permission to open by December 24, 2025, and finding a new use for the old Red Lobster building.
On September 24, demolition crews were tearing down the old Sears building to make space for the new store.
County planners folded all of this into their Rio29 Small Area Plan, which imagines the whole corridor as something denser and more walkable than a dying mall.
Meanwhile, the last efforts to keep regular stores open inside the mall did not last long.
A Belk Outlet opened on September 20, 2024, in the old Belk Men's and Home building. It was the nineteenth store like it, selling discounted shoes, clothes, and home goods.
On December 16, Belk said the outlet would close in January 2025 to make space for a future Hobby Lobby. The main Belk store stayed open because Belk owned its building.
People running stores inside the mall found out they did not have much time left. In mid-December 2024, business owners got letters saying their leases would end on January 31, 2025.
A local TV report on January 24 showed how people felt: confused, frustrated, and like the big decisions were being made somewhere else.
When the deadline came, leases for the rest of the stores, from Spencer's Gifts to small restaurants and jewelry shops, were ended.
The inside of Charlottesville Fashion Square had been open since March 5, 1980. On January 31, 2025, that 45-year run was over.
Transit officials did what organizations do when a place closes: they changed the bus schedules.
In early February, Charlottesville Area Transit said that buses would stop going to the Fashion Square stop on February 28, 2025, which would change several routes.
They said the reason was the mall's closing. The message was clear. If the buses did not go there anymore, it was not really a mall anymore.
Rio Road dreams and the afterlife of a dead mall
By the time Home Depot finally opened on August 28, 2025, with booths, free gifts, and the usual excitement, Charlottesville Fashion Square was more of a memory than a real place.
The new store, covering 108,283 square feet, meant about $26 million in private spending, promised between $400,000 and $500,000 in yearly local sales tax, and created about 160 jobs.
It also tried to make up for the pollution left by the old Sears auto center.
Around it, the rest of the property was quietly changing.
A large first-floor area of about 64,000 square feet was being offered not as stores but as space for things like research, making products, and offices, with loading docks and doors you can drive through.
The Rio/29 Small Area Plan, adopted in 2018, pictured the whole area as a place with different types of buildings, public spaces, and a busier city feel.
The property's value had dropped from about $70 million in 2014 to under $20 million before Home Depot came in; the plan hopes that new uses will bring the value back up.
By late 2025, the inside of the mall is closed, buses have stopped coming to its doors, and only Belk and Home Depot are still open on a property that once offered endless air-conditioned options.
The story of Charlottesville Fashion Square is now mostly a memory, found in stories about first jobs and prom dresses, in a Tom Clancy novel, and in a long article in the local newspaper about forty-five years of shopping in America.
The future, as you might expect, will not look like a mall at all.
