Peninsula Town Center is the largest retail site in Hampton, Virginia, with 75 acres of streets, shops, offices, and apartments between Interstate 64 and West Mercury Boulevard.
The site opened in 1973 as Coliseum Mall, with one roof over the whole thing. It traded that way for three decades.
Most of its stores closed in January 2007. Most of what was left of the million-square-foot mall came down after that.
You park free and walk outdoors between the buildings now. Two outdoor gathering spaces, Town Square and Marys Park, are open. Several storefronts on the interior streets are empty, and what goes into them hasn't been settled.
Coliseum Mall opens between two highways
Hampton announced the mall in 1970, and by that July the proposal had settled on a building fully enclosed and completely climate-controlled.
Coliseum Mall opened October 31, 1973 with about 50 stores and three department stores: E. J. Korvette, Rices-Nachmans, and J.C. Penney.
It was the largest shopping center on the Virginia Peninsula that day. General Cinema opened one screen on December 21 and a second on Christmas.
The site sits east of Interstate 64 and north of West Mercury Boulevard, and it is now Peninsula Town Center, an open-air center of shops, offices, apartments, and parks in Hampton, Virginia.
In 1973 it was one enclosed building, with cars pouring in from the interchange and the boulevard.
A 1976 addition brought in Smith & Welton and Thalhimers and stretched the enclosure past its original three anchors.
The traffic came with it. Congestion complaints and lawsuits followed.
A food court in, the cinema out
By 1989 the mall held more than 125 specialty stores, against the 50 that opened it.
A renovation was due to finish that fall. It added a food court, skylights, a new fountain, and an information booth.
The two-screen Coliseum Mall Cinema closed on March 26, 1989. No relocation was scheduled for it.
The tenant list was civic as much as retail.
The Virginia Peninsula Chamber of Commerce and the United Service Organizations both kept a presence inside the building, alongside Children's Palace, The Swiss Colony, Blue Hawaii Restaurant, and Piccadilly Cafeteria.
A video arcade, fast food, a cafeteria, and sit-down dining were all under the same roof.
The anchors that year were J.C. Penney, Thalhimers, Hess's, and Montgomery Ward, and two years earlier Patrick Henry Mall had opened in Newport News with a newer building and newer stores.
The remodel that retailers rejected
The first concept for the site was a renovation.
Retailer response ended that version, and Mall Properties Inc. and Steiner + Associates moved instead to demolishing most of a building of roughly 1 million square feet and running streets across it.
Demolition started before the closing did.
One wing had been coming down since early September 2006, and about a quarter of the mall was gone by that November.
The stores still open kept trading through it.
LensCrafters stayed in business with its exterior entrance inside a construction zone, which meant the mall interior had to stay walkable until the store could move to temporary quarters at Mercury Plaza.
For a week and a half, crews replaced water, power, and HVAC connections overnight so businesses could open again the next morning.
About 33 of roughly 100 store spaces were open in the final week. Most of them closed on January 14, 2007.
Peninsula Town Center opens on streets
What went in where the concourse had been was a street grid, with sidewalks, three public parks, and shops on the ground floor under offices or apartments.
The approach changed too. The large Mercury Boulevard flyover ramp came out.
Crews removed medians, added turn lanes, and built a new four-way signalized intersection at a new entrance.
Coliseum Drive got wider sidewalks, paver crosswalks, landscaping, pedestrian-scale lighting, public art, and better bus stops.
About 32,000 tons of concrete from the old mall were crushed on site and used as aggregate under the new parking lots and building slabs.
The mall is under the parking.
The new streets also limited what could be built between them.
The theater building was designed for large tilt-up concrete panels, and the cranes needed to set them would have put streets, landscaping, hardscape, and buildings already finished around it at risk.
Hoar Construction switched the building to a steel frame with light-gauge stud exterior framing and still delivered it on schedule.
J.C. Penney had opened its new store back in August 2007.
The grand opening came March 11, 2010, on a site with about 4,400 parking spaces and a free garage off Cunningham Drive and Hartford Road.
Seven entrances with nothing to see
Five years in, Hampton looked at the result.
The 2015 update to the Coliseum Central Master Plan split the site in two: the perimeter was working and the interior wasn't.
Residential and office space, the theater, the perimeter restaurants, and the anchors were all performing.
Internal stores, especially at the west end, had more trouble, and many visitors from outside were unfamiliar with the Merchant Lane and McMenamin Street core.
The layout was named as part of that. All seven entrances ended in terminated views, with nothing to look toward from the edge.
No street ran completely through the site.
Gateway and directional signs were inconspicuous, and the buildings held a very uniform two to three stories.
The plan asked for stronger entrances, clearer wayfinding, and a tower or other vertical marker.
It also asked for outparcel development along Coliseum Drive, more housing, and a hotel.
The street pattern had replaced the enclosed mall, and the city now had interior storefronts that were hard to see from the roads bringing people in.
Which storefronts stay storefronts
Housing kept moving into the retail. In 2017, unfinished upper floors of the entertainment building became 23 apartments.
In 2022, 73,000 square feet of first-floor retail on the north side of Merchant Lane became 52 apartments.
Then the city drew a line.
On October 11, 2023, council approved 21 townhouse-style rental units on infill land at Cunningham Drive and Hartford Road, 10 in one building and 11 in the other.
No storefront came out for them.
The second request was for storefronts.
The owner asked to turn 9,600 square feet of single-story retail at 1631 through 1675 Merchant Lane into nine apartments, each entered from the street.
Planning staff counted the 2022 conversion as a 42 percent loss of the retail space they considered commercially usable, and this one would have taken it to about 48 percent.
The applicant offered frosted doors, screening at the lower windows, residential light fixtures, and a trellis, so the frontage would read as housing.
Council denied the permit on January 10, 2024.
Empty suites on Merchant Lane
The block council protected still has empty frontage.
Three ground-floor suites at 1620 Merchant Lane are still listed for lease, 6,300 square feet between them.
Hampton became a tenant in the same core.
The city leased 10,000 square feet for a retail incubator, planned by December 2025 across three suites, to move home-based businesses into physical storefronts with affordable space and technical help.
Hampton City Schools and the convention and visitors bureau came in as partners.
More than 70 stores and restaurants operate across the center, among them Target, J.C. Penney, Barnes & Noble, H&M, PetSmart, and Floor & Decor.
The theater at 4401 West Claiborne Square reopened November 25, 2025 as VIP Entertainment. More than 400 apartments sit on the site now.
The center runs its own rules on those streets.
Anyone under 18 has to stay with a parent or guardian at all times, and management can restrict groups of four or more young people without an adult.
Skating, skateboards, and hoverboards are out.
Parking is still free. The Pop Fountains are closed until further notice.
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