Stony Point Fashion Park sits off Chippenham Parkway on Richmond's Southside, in Richmond, Virginia. The streets between its storefronts have no roof over them. Three anchor stores opened the mall in 2003, and one of them is still trading.
That one is Dillard's. Saks Fifth Avenue took the smallest of the three boxes and was the first Saks in the Richmond area. The sporting-goods anchor opened as Galyan's and had a Dick's sign on it two years later.
Dick's left in 2018 for a new store across town, so its box has spent the years since without a full-time tenant. Saks closed in spring 2026. Tiffany closed that June.
Richmond businesses took the smaller storefronts, and a chorus, a records shop, and a tea room now rent space built for luxury chains. The city wants housing on the parking lots.
Richmond paid for three anchors by name
Richmond's final deal with Taubman was built around three signatures.
In October 2001, City Council approved a Stony Point agreement that promised the site and $13.5 million if Saks Fifth Avenue, Dillard's, and Galyan's committed to the mall.
Taubman would put about $100 million into the project, build the parking lot, and sell that lot back to the city for nearly $1 million.
The public package came to about $15 million, and the ordinance called for a top-tier retail center south of Chippenham Parkway at Stony Point Parkway.
That was less than Richmond had once been willing to spend.
Taubman had announced the Southside mall in 1995 with roughly $33 million in city support behind it, but the first version never got built.
Taubman bought Regency Square in Henrico County in 1997 and cut back its Stony Point plans.
Henrico rejected its request for redevelopment help at Regency, and by 1998 Taubman had largely backed away from Richmond's original deal.
It later returned to the city and accepted the smaller package.
Whether Richmond paid at all now depended on which stores signed.
Taubman sued Henrico and opened second
Henrico County was helping build Taubman's competition, and Taubman went to court to stop it.
By 2000 the county had created a community development authority for Short Pump Town Center and approved up to $22 million in bonds for parking, roads, and other infrastructure.
Taubman filed its own challenge and joined three Henrico taxpayers in fighting the financing.
The court battle held the project up for about a year before Short Pump moved ahead.
Forest City Enterprises and local developer Tommy Pruitt's group had first approached Henrico in 1997, when Short Pump was already booming.
Their mall finally opened on September 4, 2003: two levels, about 1.1 million square feet, and roughly 140 stores.
Taubman's Stony Point opened 14 days later, one story and open to the weather. After trying to stop Henrico's mall, Taubman still opened second.
Stony Point opened into a hurricane
Stony Point Fashion Park opened on Thursday, September 18, 2003, at 9200 Stony Point Parkway in Richmond, Virginia, a one-story open-air shopping center that still trades there today.
Hurricane Isabel was closing in on the state.
Rain and wind hit the opening, the formal celebration was pushed back a week, and when it finally ran it handed gift certificates to visitors named Isabel and gave out T-shirts about the storm.
All three stores Richmond had named were open.
Dillard's took about 204,000 square feet, Galyan's about 84,000, and Saks about 80,000 in the chain's first Richmond-area store.
Around them ran two pedestrian streets, The Promenade and The Park, with fountains and planted seating, bocce courts outside Brio Tuscan Grille, and dogs allowed through the common areas from the first day.
Getting those streets flat took more than 1 million cubic yards of earth.
The ground fell away sharply, so the work needed retaining walls, 12 buildings, and more than two miles of new road across roughly 90 acres before a storefront could stand on any of it.
The Galyan's name lasted about 15 months. Dick's Sporting Goods bought the Galyan's chain in 2004 and put its own name on the building.
The city rewrote the plan for a theater
Copeland's Cheesecake Bistro closed beside Dillard's around 2008 and left about 30,000 square feet that nobody could turn into a cinema.
The mall sits inside the Stony Point Community Unit Plan, a 1975 planning document covering about 527 acres, and the permitted uses in the mall's section didn't include a specialized movie theater.
Richmond amended the plan in February 2010.
CineBistro opened that October with six screens and a 21-and-over policy.
Servers worked the auditoriums while patrons ate from wood tables beside their reclining seats.
A restaurant space that had sat empty for two years became the biggest draw at the mall that wasn't a department store.
It's still running in 2026 as CMX CineBistro.
282 apartments north of Dillard's
The land north of Dillard's was supposed to hold offices and shops.
A 2001 agreement said so, and in 2013 Richmond approved 282 apartments on about 27 acres of it instead: four buildings of three or four stories, plus smaller carriage units, a project valued at about $40 million at approval.
The neighbors went to court.
The Huguenot Farms Area Association, representing about 250 residents, won an injunction in 2014 that blocked the sale of the tract, and it asked for a permanent one on the grounds that the 2001 restriction still held.
Five months later a circuit judge let the Taubman affiliate sell, finding that the sale itself broke nothing.
Construction was underway by January 2017, about two years behind, and the apartments opened as James River at Stony Point.
The retail buildings stayed exactly as they were. Beside them, the city had let housing onto ground that had been reserved against it.
Starwood rebuilt the courtyards, then defaulted
Taubman sold Stony Point in October 2014, and Starwood Capital Group paid about $72 million for the Richmond property inside a seven-mall deal.
Less than two years after the sale, crews were remaking the east side.
A children's play area and a dog park went in around Triangle Park, with a lawn, a stage, heated benches, and fountains.
The ice rink opened there in November 2016 on real ice, cooled by a 200-ton refrigeration unit.
It was the first phase of a $50 million program Starwood had announced the previous November, and the center stayed open through the whole build.
Richmond's Planning Commission approved a second phase in 2017.
H&M opened 20,000 square feet in Triangle Park that December, which would have brought the mall to 53 tenants.
Then the tenants left.
Dick's closed in September 2018, two months after opening a purpose-built store at Willow Lawn, and its 84,000-square-foot box sat empty apart from seasonal occupants.
H&M closed in 2020. So did Sur La Table and Brio, the restaurant with the bocce courts outside it.
In 2019 Starwood had moved to buy roughly three acres of parking land from Richmond's Economic Development Authority, a right that traced back to the original city deal.
By 2020 it had fallen behind on the loan and lost the property to a receiver, who sold the mall in April 2022 for $14.6 million, roughly a fifth of what Starwood had paid eight years before.
Stony Point is down to one anchor
Saks held on longer than its second floor.
The store closed that floor to shoppers in June 2022 and traded on one level until spring 2026, after its parent entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy and the Richmond store was one of eight Saks Fifth Avenue closures.
Tiffany & Co., at the mall since 2011, closed on June 30, 2026.
Of the three stores Richmond bought with land and $13.5 million, Dillard's is the one still open.
The storefronts filled with Richmond instead.
Zero Empty Spaces took the old Build-A-Bear in 2023 and cut it into studios of 96 to 144 square feet, advertised at $2.50 a square foot including utilities, month to month, inside a center built for Louis Vuitton.
The Greater Richmond Chorus and the Urban Line Dance Museum are tenants.
Southern Kitchen moved from Jackson Ward into the former Brio space in 2024, and the Salvation Army ran its Christmas distribution out of the empty Dick's box in December 2023.
Since October 2023, a state license has let participating restaurants sell drinks to carry out into the common areas.
Richmond 300 named this site a priority growth node in 2020 and asked for a denser mix on land now under low-rise retail and surface parking.
Four years after Second Horizon bought the mall, that private planning is still at an early stage.
The center is the open-air mall that opened in 2003, the dog park runs from dawn to dusk, and the studios in the old Build-A-Bear rent by the month.
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