Southpark Mall is open, but it is also in foreclosure at the same time. This situation usually happens before a building is sold, emptied, or redeveloped. But it does not always.
The mall opened in Colonial Heights, Virginia, in 1989 with four department stores anchoring a single-story building near Interstate 95. It served the Tri-Cities area of Petersburg, Hopewell, and Colonial Heights, and grew a commercial district around it that still functions today.
Three of those original department stores are gone. A congregation now holds services inside the mall's Regal Theatre. Dick's Sporting Goods operates in another building that was once Dillard's.
The former Sears at the edge of the property closed in 2018, later received a temporary warehouse use, and is still waiting.
Southpark Mall is listed as an operating regional shopping center. But what Southpark actually is now takes some time to explain.
How One Mall Took Petersburg's Retail Gravity and Kept It
Developer Faison chose land near Temple Avenue and I-95 in Colonial Heights: close enough to Petersburg, Hopewell, Prince George County, and Chesterfield County that no single municipality had to carry the mall.
All of them would feed it.
The building Faison opened had 800,000 square feet and 88 stores and services. Four department stores anchored the corners: Sears, JCPenney, Leggett, and Thalhimers.
Sears arrived in spring 1989. Thalhimers came later that year, opening its doors on August 17, 1989.
That building had two floors, which made it unusual for a mall that was otherwise laid out flat and wide on a single level, surrounded by a vast field of surface parking.
Walnut Mall had opened in Petersburg in 1966. For roughly twenty years, it had been the enclosed mall for the region, the place with the department stores and the national chains.
Southpark arrived larger, newer, and with JCPenney already relocated inside its walls.
When Walnut Mall closed in spring 1991, the commercial center of gravity for the Tri-Cities had moved permanently north into Colonial Heights.
It has not moved back.
Thalhimers, Sears, and the Years When All Four Anchors Were Open
Thalhimers was a Richmond-based department store chain with deep roots in the region. Its Southpark Mall store was one of the major southern Richmond-Petersburg locations.
That name lasted three years. In May 1992, Thalhimers was folded into the Hecht's chain, and the store became Hecht's.
The sign changed. The two floors stayed.
Leggett, the fourth anchor, followed the same slow absorption into larger chains. It became Belk, then Dillard's.
Sears sold tools, appliances, tires, and clothing on the building's one level. JCPenney anchored its corner.
Through the 1990s, all four boxes were open. Between them: national chains, local service stores, a food area, and a cinema.
By 1994, Sam's Club had opened on the mall's southeast outlot, and big-box stores and restaurants had spread along the surrounding commercial corridors.
CBL & Associates, an enclosed-mall operator out of Chattanooga, bought Southpark in December 2003 as part of a deal covering several properties.
The mall's anchor structure was intact.
Dillard's Closes, and the Playbook for What Comes Next
In June 2012, Dillard's said its Southpark Mall store was underperforming and would close. About 50 people worked there. September 2012 was the last month. The building did not sit vacant long.
Dick's Sporting Goods took the former Dillard's space, and the redevelopment split it into a 56,000-square-foot Dick's store plus a strip of smaller retail space carved from the remainder.
The Leggett corner, which had been a department store since the mall opened, was now a sporting-goods store with a row of shops alongside it.
Sears closed in January 2018. The announcement had come on November 2, 2017, part of a national Sears closure wave. The building, 113,500 square feet on a separate 8.5-acre parcel, went dark.
Its parcel was recorded separately from the mall's main property, which meant the city could address it without redesigning the rest of the mall around it.
Three Halloweens and a Planning Vote That Went Nowhere
The building at 114 Southpark Circle had one tenant between 2018 and 2020: Spirit Halloween, which turned up each fall and vanished after the holiday. Three years in a row.
The first serious redevelopment proposal arrived in January 2022, when the Colonial Heights Planning Commission took up a plan to tear down the former Sears building entirely and replace it with 280 market-rate apartments.
Two four-story buildings, described in the application as wrapped around an interior courtyard, would hold 69 one-bedroom units, 168 two-bedroom units, and 43 three-bedroom units, with interior shared amenities including a coffee bar, bookable conference rooms, and shared office space.
The project needed zoning relief.
Multifamily housing in a General Business zone required special approval, and the plan did not meet the city's rule that at least half of the gross floor area in such developments serve commercial or civic uses.
The applicant's argument on traffic was simple: the roads around Southpark Mall were built for a fully operating 800,000-square-foot mall at peak retail load, and 280 apartments would produce far less traffic than that.
The Planning Commission voted unanimously in favor. The building was still standing in 2024.
Hecht's to Macy's, and Macy's to Destination Church Plans
Hecht's became Macy's in September 2006, when the national consolidation following the Federated/May Department Stores merger rolled through the region and replaced Hecht's nameplates in Virginia with Macy's.
The two-story building was now one of the Richmond-area Macy's locations, occupying about 100,000 square feet. For nearly two decades, it held that position.
On January 9, 2025, Macy's included the Southpark store in a list of 66 non-go-forward locations scheduled to close. The store ran closing sales and shut on March 23, 2025.
That left JCPenney as the only department store still open at Southpark.
The building Thalhimers had opened in August 1989, the store whose sign had changed twice and whose two floors had been a fixture of the southern end of the mall for 35 years, was no longer Macy's.
Plans for the next use were already forming, with Destination Church tied to the former Macy's building in city records and later described as buying it.
The Financial Reckoning
CBL had entered Chapter 11 restructuring in November 2020, aiming to cut roughly $1.5 billion in company-wide debt and preferred obligations while keeping its malls open and operating.
Southpark Mall stayed open throughout. But the loan backed by the mall was under pressure that bankruptcy reorganization alone could not fix.
By 2021, the collateral value behind the Southpark loan had fallen from $103 million at the time of securitization to $40 million.
The mall was still running at 79 percent occupancy, still covering its debt service.
In October 2022, CBL extended the loan. A $54.4 million modification pushed the maturity date to June 2026. That was not a solution. It was a postponement.
In May 2025, the loan moved to special servicing. It had been there before, during the pandemic. This time it did not come back.
In July 2025, the loan went into default, and Southpark Mall was placed into receivership. CBL lost accounting control of the property and deconsolidated it.
The outstanding balance was about $48.3 million. CBL reported a $33.9 million gain on deconsolidation and anticipated returning the property to the lender.
Three Bets on the Sears Box: Apartments, a Warehouse, Then Kroger
The 2022 apartment proposal had not produced demolition. By 2024, the Sears building was still standing.
That fall, Dick's Sporting Goods received approval to use it as a temporary fixtures hub, storing and shipping store-fixture inventory rather than retail products.
The permit ran through December 31, 2025. Daily vehicle trips were capped. Trailer activity was restricted to a midday window.
Then came Kroger. On March 11, 2025, the Colonial Heights City Council voted 7-0 to approve a $2.1 million incentive grant tied to Kroger's proposed construction of a Kroger Marketplace at 114 Southpark Circle.
Grocery, pharmacy, general merchandise, fuel center. The grant was structured as seven payments of $300,000 each, the first one due only after a full calendar year of operations.
The Economic Development Authority followed with a 6-0 approval on March 20.
The Planning Commission approved Kroger's preliminary development plan on May 6, a 7-0 vote, covering a 109,700-square-foot grocery building, a 200-square-foot gasoline station, and 466 parking spaces across 9.8 acres.
Demolition of the Sears building was a condition.
As of February 2026, Kroger had not filed updated preliminary plans or a final site plan. The traffic study had been reviewed by city engineers, who had no comments. The Sears building was still there.
What Southpark Mall Is Now, and the Two Realities Running Side by Side
The mall at 230 Southpark Circle is open. More than 70 stores remain open, with JCPenney, Dick's Sporting Goods, and a 16-screen Regal Theatre as the principal anchors.
H&M, Five Below, Planet Fitness, Destination Church, American Eagle, Bath & Body Works, and JD Sports are among the active tenants.
Spinoso Real Estate Group, which took over public-facing management and leasing in August 2025, markets the property as an 800,000-square-foot regional shopping and entertainment center for the Tri-Cities and the broader Richmond-Petersburg area.
Two of the four original anchor buildings are vacant. The Sears box stopped being Sears in January 2018, later took seasonal and temporary uses, and no longer serves as an anchor.
The Macy's building closed in March 2025. The mall is operating on a footprint that was designed for a different set of tenants, and the financial structure behind it collapsed in 2025.
What holds the place together now is not department stores.
It is a 16-screen Regal Theatre, a Planet Fitness, a church holding services inside that theater, and Dick's Sporting Goods in a building that used to be Dillard's.
JCPenney is still in its original corner, the same store that left Walnut Mall in 1989 and started all of this.
Walnut Mall, which Southpark Mall replaced, has been gone for more than thirty years. Southpark outlasted it by a generation, and it is still outlasting the version of itself that opened on March 1, 1989.
