Potomac Mills, in the heart of the vast Washington DC suburbia that is Northern Virginia, continues to show remarkable resiliency amidst the widespread decline of many—perhaps even most—conventional enclosed shopping malls. Dead and dying malls are, obviously, a familiar subject on this blog; even from the earliest days in the late 2000s, I explored Lafayette Square and Washington Square malls in my hometown of Indianapolis. At that time, they flanked downtown Indy on the near-west and far-east sides (respectively) and showed all the empirical evidence of struggling retail: low foot traffic, high vacancies, the departure of nationally known name brands resulting in a proliferation of mom-and-pops. Fast-forward to 2026 and Washington Square is, against all odds, still chugging along though at an even reduced capacity from 2009: the only remaining anchor tenant (Target) has eliminated all access to the mall’s mostly-vacant interior, bereft of national brands. Even Burlington couldn’t survive! But that’s better shape than Lafayette Square, which closed in 2022 while awaiting a dubious redevelopment proposal that has yet to materialize. (Meanwhile, in those ensuing seventeen years, a third mall, downtown’s Circle Centre, was doing respectable business when I began blogging; as of the first of 2026, it has shuttered completely for a less patchy redevelopment proposal.) The main reason, however, that I reference Indianapolis malls while keeping Potomac Mills in focus is an article from many moons ago, when I visited Castleton Square Mall on Indy’s north side, which was mostly successful except for a dying wing—the hallway leading to Sears. In 2026, Sears is all but gone from the earth, but the apparent dying wing phenomenon remains, if Potomac Mills is any evidence.
Hundreds of miles away from Indy, in Woodbridge, Virginia, Potomac Mills continues to bring in considerable foot traffic, bucking the trends for half the nation’s malls.
It’s no great surprise that it is outshining many other malls in the national capital’s metropolitan area: Potomac Mills is enormous. It offers over 225 inline retailers, space for eleven major anchors, and several minor anchors, all spread across more than 1.5 million square feet. It also sits in the middle of a network of smaller shopping centers (mostly conventional strip malls) within a two mile radius. An IKEA (formerly attached to the mall) flanks the east side, and a Walmart Supercenter stands just a few hundred feet north. Potomac Mills is a super-regional shopping hub, attracting people from a good part of the state, as well as neighboring Maryland, for the concentration of tenants under one roof. Lastly, it is primarily an outlet mall, indicating that it offers largely discount variants on its signature brands, which distinguishes it from most other enclosed malls in the region.
Most remarkable of all, in my opinion, is that all operates on one floor.
Yes, the country has a few dozen malls bigger than Potomac Mills. But how many of them sit on such a large footprint? This mall opened in multiple phases (starting in 1985), which isn’t unusual in itself, but rarely does each one represent a medium sized mall, while the available land allowed the two subsequent phases (1986 and 1993) to just graft on to the original. The mall is so big that, viewing the map above, it would take an average person between fifteen and twenty minutes to walk from one end to the other. I suspect many people engage in the positively American past-time of driving to portion of the mall they want to visit first, then return to their car and drive to another wing.
But walkability isn’t the real consideration. Fundamentally, Potomac Mills is walkable, but it is unusually long to be so lacking in intersecting hallways; the primary one, as the floor plan above shows, is right in the middle, where the most prominent entrance yields to the main corridor, with the food court (colored in green) on the opposite side.
It abides by the “dumbbell” scheme of much smaller malls, where anchor tenants (department stores) flank a central corridor, forming the loose shape of a dumbbell: narrow in the middle; bulky on either end. But this mall, owned and managed by Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group since 2007, effectively shrouds that simple configuration with all the other stuff appended to that corridor.
Potomac Mills is a dumbbell gone baroque, with angles and kinks and vertices and little offshoots or alcoves, but fundamentally it is two wings: one that skews southwestward to terminate at Nordstrom Rack, and another that lurches northeastward to terminate at the not-yet-open Slick City Action Park, a business that appears to be an inhabitable variant on the classic board game Chutes and Ladders—a waterless indoor water park.
The Thriving Half of Potomac Mills
And there’s the clincher: it has a thriving wing and a dying wing. The floor plan color-codes the map into different “neighborhoods”, which, for the most part, I interpret as a means of making the vast corridor more digestible by breaking it into smaller segments. Only “Neighborhood 1”—colored in pink—has a distinct identity.
This part of the wing is the “Fashion District”, characterized by outlets to two upscale department stores—Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s—while the adjacent in-line tenants include factory outlet variants of traditionally higher-end brands: Kate Spade, Coach, Brooks Brothers, Michael Kors, Boss, Ann Taylor, and so forth.
Not too many signature luxury brands—Salvatore Ferragano, Hermés, Gucci, Tory Burch, Balenciaga—those are more attuned to the high-powered Fairfax County suburbs, where the famed Tysons Corner malls form the epicenter for DC luxury retail. But the Fashion District is the fanciest part of Potomac Mills, and the foot traffic reaffirms it—which in turn spills over to Neighborhood 2 and 3.
I’ll concede that these photos don’t exactly suggest heavy foot traffic or a regional hub. To be fair, I snapped them after 5pm on a beautiful Sunday in mid-September; the mall was getting ready to close. But the conditions at Potomac Mills reflect overall reduced standards for malls in the 2020s: the foot traffic is good enough by today’s standards. Good enough, at the very least, that this wing—Neighborhoods 1, 2, and 3—have maintained near 100% occupancy.
The Half with the Dying Wing
Continuing eastward past the food court, Neighborhood 4 (colored gray on the floor plan) doesn’t look bad either. Similar levels of foot traffic and tenant occupancy characterize the region, though it does seem to feature a few brands that are definitely not of national repute.
The almost seamless transition to Neighborhood 5 (colored yellow) suggests that the major and minor anchors around here still offer plenty of appeal. Costco continues to be huge, but one must remember that it is a membership-only operation, and thus does not encourage the same free flow of traffic as a conventional department store or even a Target. But adjacent to the Costco is the hip emergent Irish fast fashion brand Primark (filling vacancies from the rapid demise of Forever 21 last year), and stalwart Polo Ralph Lauren, which would not likely choose to locate in a wing of a mall if it felt it received sub-optimal foot traffic.
Conditions don’t begin to deteriorate visibly until one turns the corner at the Costco, heading northward into the other half of Neighborhood 5: the dying wing.
Even this portion—north of Costco but south of JCPenney Outlet and Marshalls/HomeGoods—is generally managing adequately in terms of foot traffic. But the inline tenants have shifted sharply to budget-oriented consumers: Fashion Time, Rainbow, Lids for Less, and a number of locally owned enterprises. And a few creeping vacancies.
But it is the final portion of Neighborhood 5 that reveals itself as a dying wing: at the point where the corridor offers a rare intersection—with stub hallways leading to JCPenney and Marshalls/HomeGoods—it feels like far more than just a fifteen-minute walk from The Fashion District. It’s like an entirely different mall.
Yes, this dying wing has a few well-known brands: the ubiquitous and resilient Zales Jewelers and Books-A-Million (BAM!) in the distance. But these two chains have a reputation for lingering in sub-optimal mall conditions; they’re not choosy like Coach or Kate Spade or North Face, or even like middle-of-the-road retailers like American Eagle, Hot Topic, and FYE (For Your Entertainment). And interspersed with sundry low-end brands are quite a few vacancies.
The large vacancy in the space to the right will eventually become Slick City Action Park These photographs date from September 2025, when Slick City was newly announced as a “Coming Soon” tenant. Based on my current research, the business has morphed since last September from “Coming Soon” to “Any Day Now”. The previous tenant at this medium-sized anchor space was Christmas Tree Shops andThat, which operated successfully from at least 2015 until the eve of the chain’s bankruptcy in 2023. The next year, BuyBuy Baby closed its location here, along with all others, concurrent with the demise of parent company Bed Bath and Beyond.
All in all, this area has probably languished as the dying wing at Potomac Mills for several years. The anchor tenants on this side lack the wattage of high-end discounters like Bloomingdale’s or Nordstrom Outlets, and TJMaxx continues to enjoy a higher profile than a competitor like Marshall’s. The most damning aspect of the dying wing, however, is the comparative impotence of JCPenney Outlet, which remains a middlebrow staple to most functional malls, but with a significantly diminished footprint compared to the era before internet shopping: it has shuttered half of its stores since the early 2010s, culminating in the filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a few months into COVID-19, simultaneous with one of the largest waves of closures. Later that same year (2020 of course), Simon Property Group partnered with another real estate giant, Brookfield Property Partners, to purchase JCPenney. The act helped stave off a complete liquidation, but what is the condition of this once-mighty department store five years later? From what I can tell, it has largely become the next Sears. When I blogged in 2009, I noticed that, even in mostly successful malls, Sears seemed to preside over the dying wing. The oldest and most historically stable tenant among them—it has occupied space at the mall since the 1993 completion of the third phase—JCPenney has no capacity to draw visitors like it once did. The result is higher vacancies, fewer national brands, and greater dependence on retail innovations like the one in the photo below:
This strange tenant, The Square, occupies a medium-sized inline space in the dying wing, the sort of storefront that might at one time have been The Gap or Wet Seal. Instead, as of 2025, it consists of a tenant that opens up various portions of the floor space to approximately a dozen much, much smaller tenants—basically microretail. Each tenant needs more space than a mall corridor kiosk, but a single inline space is too big. These are grassroots mom-and-pops, striving to capitalize on the foot traffic in a major mall, which Potomac Mills certainly is, but the only portion that can justify this sort of novel approach is the dying wing, where I guarantee the leasing rates are lower. The very existence of The Square reflects the paucity of suitable tenants in 2026 to fit into a mall of this size, as well as Simon Property Group’s desperation to fill the space, including lowering both the standards for creditworthiness among tenants, and their ability to remain in business through the duration of a lease. Granted, the business that organized The Square has to bear the brunt of this responsibility, but this structure seems vaguely reminiscent of the food hall concept, where a larger entity leases space to incubate very small restaurant concepts. The major difference here is that the businesses are durable goods, but the concept is no less risky than that of the faltering food hall—and Woodbridge already had a buzzy food hall initiative called Epiq, which opened and folded in less than three years.
I wish The Square and its sublease tenants the best, but they sit squarely in the middle of the dying wing at Potomac Mills, right between JCPenney and the opening-someday Slick City Action Park. And even the very presence of Slick City at Potomac Mills is dubious, with no offense to the business enterprise itself. It may prove a roaring success that helps lower vacancy rate in this dying wing; it is a growing business that just broke 100 locations. But will it encourage interplay with the rest of this dying wing of the mall? Not likely. It’s a destination in itself, not a place for passive visits or browsing. Much like Costco, customers have to pay to partake in what Slick City offers.
And it’s not the only example of its kind at Potomac Mills. As the original floor plan photo indicates, the mall features Off Limits Trampoline Park in Neighborhood 2 (space previously occupied by Sears Outlet), Round 1 Bowling and Arcade in Neighborhood 1, as well as an 18-Screen AMC Movie Theater. All fine and good—movie theaters have cultivated a symbiotic relationship with malls for years—but does a single facility need that many climate-controlled entertainment hubs? Malls have proven resilient through various weather conditions; people historically enjoyed escaping to their air conditioned comfort on hot summer days, just as they proved a reprieve from cold winter days. But do people go to trampoline parks or bowling arcades at 3pm on a beautiful Saturday? And how much will they diffuse their own client base, competing with one another? It is highly unlikely that a person will visit Potomac Mills to bounce around at Off Limits for a few hours, then careen down some slides at Slick City, concluding the day with movie or a round of bowling. I suspect the management team at Simon Property Group would have greatly preferred to replace the vacant clothiers of yesteryear with new clothiers—but the quotient of Primarks and H&Ms is not enough to offset the precipitous decline of The Gap, Aeropostale, Abercrombie and Fitch, or The Limited, let alone the complete demise of Forever 21, Charming Charlie, Dressbarn, BuyBuy Baby, Wet Seal, and now Eddie Bauer.
Long-Term Prospects at Potomac Mills
Alas, the dying wing at Potomac Mills might be more of a portent than an outlier. The mall is still more successful than probably 90% out there, but this is more of a testament to Simon Property Group’s deftness and aggressive efforts to attract new tenants at those malls in its portfolio it really cares about. The real estate giant rescued JCPenney from its demise, just as it did for Aeropostale in 2016. But I feel that Penney’s is the biggest instigator of the dying wing at Potomac Mills, and if it eventually retreats like Sears did, that will leave not one but two massive voids across a majority of American malls.
The dying wing at Potomac Mills is not (yet) dire enough to drag the rest of the mall down, and it has a better property manager/advocate than most of its peers. It’s still performing better than most malls, but this is a locational comparison, not a chronological one. How well does it compare to those other fading malls using metrics from 1989 or even 2009. How effectively does Potomac Mills compare with itself during those years? The mall as a typology isn’t what it used to be, because shopping isn’t the recreational past time that it once was. Maybe the great mall management companies of the present era are awaiting that day when a wave of nostalgia captures the American public. Gen Xers hearken back to their teenage years; Millennials to their childhoods. Whether DC, or Indianapolis, or anywhere in between, they begin to hairspray their bangs, tight-roll their jeans, then head out with their friends Jennifer and Karen, or Kaitlyn and Hannah, and shop till they drop on a Friday night. It sounds illogical or even silly. But, as recently as 2021, so did a revival of the audio cassette.
72 thoughts on “Dying wing in a healthy mall: the Sears phenom all over again?”
If you’re thinking of the wing furthest away from the movie theater that is perpendicular to the heart of the mall and ends near Costco, that end has always struggled with keeping anchor spots going back to the 1990s. It was an early expansion to the mall in the early 1990s, and given its struggles, the mall probably would have been better had the expansion not been built.
Y’all I remember that place when it was brand new in the mid 1980’s
Me too. Didn’t it start out as an outlet mall?
I think so, but I was 6 at the time.
I live near this mall. It was insanely busy back in the day
My grandparents lived about a mile away from this mall, so I visited quite often. I remember that the interior remained very early ’90s-style well into the mid-2000s–blue tile floors, neon lights in the fountains, and those giant neighborhood signs in wacky fonts. Sad to see it’s since been given the generic Simon treatment.
I agree Simon’s treatment of interiors is very safe, corporate, middlebrow, and bland. And the neon stuff definitely seems retro cool. But we have to admit that Simon is very good at keeping its signature malls at high occupancy levels, and if a mall didn’t renovate it interiors in the early 90s, that’s usually a signal to the customer base at the mall is failing. So it’s kind of a mixed blessing!
Potomac Mills Mall turned 40 last year as it opened in 1985 as is one of the first Mills Corporation malls in the USA. It is owned by the Simon Group. The place where And That! was has been vacant since it closed in 2024. The mall has been good at filing vacanies and has added some entertainment options such as an indoor park. As you can see, it still has a JCPenney. The mall has a Costco which does not have a mall entrance.
30 years ago during the Blizzard of 1996, a section of the roof collapse due to the heavy snow
I remember when IKEA and Sanrio was located there. I would drive up from Richmond to buy items from Sanrio on clearance and resell on eBay and I would hit Ikea and get their cinnamon buns. My car would smell delicious driving home.
The mall is still very busy. That wing has always struggled. Idk why, must be the configuration of the mall design. I was hoping Simon would land Eataly for that end but they chose Tysons. Hoping Netflix House will go there. The right anchor can help to fill it. The other option would be to tear down the mall right after Marshall’s and JC Penney and build a plaza in its place.
If it’s the section I’m thinking, that same wing was dying when I was last at that mall 20 years ago!
Wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t have a long history of visiting this mall, but the condition of having one wing with high vacancies and mostly low-end stores didn’t happen overnight.
Great article. Twenty five years ago, I lived close to the mall, so used to go once in a while. Really interesting to see where it’s at now.
Oxmoor Center in Louisville is what I would consider a “successful” mall, yet they had a dying wing for several years in the Sears wing of the mall. Once Sears left, they tore down the entire wing where Sears was and put Topgolf and a few other things in there that seem to be more “thriving” (even though I hear Topgolf as a company isn’t doing so well at the moment).
Sounds almost identical to the Sears wing at Castleton in Indianapolis. Still mostly successful but that wing has been crud even before Sears closed 99% of its locations.
I live 10 minutes away, and from all the traffic we encounter it is far from dead, always packed every time I go.
I lived in Gaithersburg, MD growing up and back in the 90s it was a real treat when my dad decided to take the family down to Potomac Mills mall for the day! Like a 1 hr and 20 minute drive to get there. We got our exercise in for sure and we loved going to the 50s style McDonald’s outside of the mall. The moon man on the Piano was a centerpiece there! My mom would spend hundreds of dollars in that mall, Dad loved Nordstrom Rack store there, and we walkes wveey neighborhood! We would not get back home until after 9 pm. As a kid we also went to a huge electronics store called Incredible Universe in 1995/1996 anybody remember that gigantic store? I loved playing with the stereo equipment and CB radios in that store! We went to Potomac Mills at least a 10-11 times!
Was just there in that part of the mall the other day. 🙂
Yep, it’s a ghost town!
It reminds me of another Simon mall in Greenwood, Ind., as far as its aesthetic is concerned.
Yeah, Simon has a few safe and very pleasant design templates that it uses for pretty much everything. They’re never bad-looking malls, but you certainly aren’t going to get anything wacky like Fairlane Town Center in Dearborn, Michigan (owned by former competitor Taubman, now owned by Simon), Marley Station Mall outside Baltimore, or the defunct Forest Fair Mall outside of Cincinnati.
Not really dying, small business took up the retail space of the mall franchises that went bankrupt, the mall is healthier now then before 20200
Agreed. Not really dying. But having small businesses take up lots of space in a generally upper-middle income mall, which mostly caters to national chains, is not a good sign. Apparently this wing has always been lagging, so maybe the conditions aren’t getting worse. But are they getting better?
That wing has ALWAYS been quiet compared to the rest of the mall.
Been years since I have been there, back when we were making regular trips down that way to visit my in-laws. Now, we have Arundel Mills.
It’s the best part of the mall if you’re into geek/nerdy stuff tho
books a million is always why I head over there haha
I love that section- I hit Cinnamon- Marshall’s/ Home Goods then Books A Million and my
Son on the spectrum loves that quieter section benches. Love Woodbridge and that part of the mall.
I worked at the smaller Books-A-Million down where the old Ikea used to be. Maybe ‘94-‘96.
As a native, we call that the quiet side of the mall. Where you can casually stroll and shop in peace. Maybe even grab Auntie Anne’s and sit on a bench to eat. The music is soft, like malls in the 80s and 90s during Cmas. I definitely wouldn’t categorize it as a sad side. 🥰
Indeed…maybe not sad. But “quiet” usually means low foot traffic, which almost definitely translates to lower leasing rates. Which is probably why big names like Ann Taylor and Swarovski aren’t on this side of the mall, but the lesser known mom-and-pops are.
they are building a giant indoor slide park at the end. It will “perk” back up then.
The mall is not great. It’s depressing and either a ghost town or sardine packed which is only on Black Friday. It does not feel safe at all inside or out.
Two box stores (All That, Buy Buy Baby) closed at the same time because their parent company went belly up. As far as I know, something is already moving into one of the spots.
Clearly written by someone that doesn’t know much about Potomac Mills. It is broken into different Neighborhoods all named after the type of stores you would find there, there’s entrances everywhere throughout the mall so you’re likely to always find at least one spot that’s emptier than the rest especially during the work week as the area is known for government workers, military personnel, and education professionals. This is the area where it is has been quiet for years even when there was a business in the very back. Not because people don’t go there and it’s “dead” but people actually respect the quiet environment down that way since it is a bookstore and a card shop where they do frequent game events. You have specifically selected the one spot of the mall where all the “nerds” are able to have a calm quiet environment for social gathering and twisted the story to fit your narrative for interactions.
I’m very aware and clearly indicate that it is broken into different neighborhoods in the text of my article itself. It is not desirable for a mall to have a quiet section because that translates to low foot traffic, which means lower leasing rates for the tenants, and lower revenue overall. I full acknowledge that the rest of the mall is healthy and include photos of it. My photos come from a Sunday afternoon in the late summer. Did you read the article?
The hell are you talking about? That mall is always full of people.
I wouldnt say dying, just not the attraction it used to be. My family would go up there at least once a month and that slowed over time to just not going unless we have to.
I suspect that Penney’s is not long for the world, and as such, any Penney’s wing in a mall will be dying. However, I think Penney’s had been following the Kohl’s model and moving out of malls and into outlots and powercenters, since Kohl’s is probably their nearest competitor.
As I re-read this piece to comment, I struggled to think the last time I (1) set foot in, or (2) bought anything from Penney’s. I think anywhere from 30-45 years since I bought anything there, and I probably walked through a now-closed Penney’s at a mall to get somewhere else at least once in the last 15-25 years. And with department stores more broadly, I’ve definitely shopped Macy’s more recently than Penney’s, and Von Maur more recently than that, but even then it’s probably been a good 4-5 years since buying anything in a traditional department store. (Compared with at least 8-10 trips to Target per year, but in all fairness, Target is the closest major retail to home…less than 2 miles.)
The only saving grace to Penney’s that I can see is that a SPG-led real estate consortium purchased the brand after its latest Chapter 11 filing, and that a similar consortium purchased Aeropostale about a decade ago. And Aeropostale is still clearly around, even if living on a prayer. Ultimately these mall managers determined that, even if the individual stores operate at a loss, the act of retaining them as a viable tenant is better for the mall’s image and overall performance. At the very least, that’s my assumption.
Having done a fair amount of mall research these last few days, I’ve stumbled across two malls that are completely vacant and mothballed EXCEPT for the JCPenney: Marley Station outside Baltimore and Lakeside outside Detroit. I’m sure there are many more. At this point in time, mall management seems to fall almost exclusively into two camps: the high-powered corporations that continue to believe in the mall as a concept and invest heavily in their surviving portfolio (Simon, Macerich), and then the
“vampire squid” asset managers (Namdar, Kohan). Of course, declining malls may shift ownership from the latter to the former; throughout the 2010s Simon allowed foreclosure on its low-performing assets.
Penney’s may own the structures where it is the “last man standing”, and it may be riding the wave in the hopes of a lucrative redevelopment proposal for the rest of the defunct mall property. All fine and good, but if the redevelopment involves a successful retail reinvention, why would Penney’s aging model be able to latch on? Kohls has always been a bit more independent; even when malls were mostly doing well (90s and early 2000s) Kohl’s only operated as a conventional department store about half the time. It has a more proven track record operating independently than Macy’s or Penney’s, whose go-it-alone branches are very uncommon.
Simon also spun off a bunch of class B and C malls and strip centers into “Washington Prime Group”. In 2014, WPG had 98 properties; in 2015 it merged with Glimcher, another mall owner. The combined company went into bankruptcy in 2021 and has been selling off assets since. They’re down to 15 non-prime properties.
So Simon certainly timed its spinoff properly.
Thanks for the capsule summary of Washington Prime. I knew it handled SPG’s lesser elements in its portfolio but had forgotten about the Glimcher merger. Skimming at some of the properties in Glimcher’s old portfolio, they seem to be mostly successful Class A or B-Plus malls (with the exception of a few near Glimcher’s HQ city of Columbus like Eastland).
I remember being a bit confused how, in the early 2010s, SPG deliberately allowed banks to foreclose on many of its properties (probably a lot under Washington Prime), but I’m sure it helped them report lower assessed values for the purposes of reducing their tax burden, among other things.
In further news, I just learned yesterday that Penney’s announced a new closure: at Springfield Town Center, about 15 miles up the road from Potomac Mills (north along I-95). This is NOT a mall with a dying wing; it actually appears to be thriving all the way through.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PzSJPCz6Os
And, incidentally, in the years since the Google Street View shown in this video, this mall has reduced the footprint of its surface parking lots by constructing a large (7-8 story) apartment structure, which, as of my last visit, were nearing completion and almost ready to move in. This mall also has two big parking decks, both near the JCPenney, one of which is about 70% leased as storage for fleet vehicles from an unrelated company.
I remember when the property was Banks Used Auto Parts before the Mall was built, and the only other place was the Sunoco gas station on the corner.
Potomac mills is NOT SAFE there is so much gang presence and violence could break out any moment, Hood Mall, in Hoodbridge.
no there is a lot of wannabe gangsters here and there. I lived in NE DC Trinidad. So I know hood. What you will find here and there is wannabe lil thunder cats who live in IKEA furnished houses in the suburbs who want to act street.
My sis lives in Manassas, VA and goes fairly often. I visited once when I visited her a few years ago. It seemed to be doing well then. I’m glad it apparently seems to be doing pretty well now, too. I’ve been to a lot of the “Mills” malls across the country, and I will say the saddest, deadest one I’ve ever been to is Arizona Mills in Tempe, AZ. Dark, dead a lot of the time throughout much of the mall, and frankly depressing. Conversely, my favorite was Sawgrass Mills in Sunrise, FL. Lively, a lot of good stores, relatively crowded, and fun. I enjoyed that one a lot. I’m definitely a mall rat. Whenever I go somewhere, I’ve gotta check out the malls.
I will say I lived in Scottsdale for awhile and frequented Arizona Mills, and I had the same experience most of the time. Unfortunately, I wasn’t just there on an off day. It was pretty sad. I enjoyed some of the stores and kiosks, and I liked walking around sometimes, but it gave me the vibes of a dying mall.
Interesting that Arizona Mills would be so lifeless. As malls go, it’s a baby (built in 1997) and it’s in such a fast-growing region. I’ve never been to it, but it seems to operate on a concept similar to Potomac Mills: an outlet shopping focus and lots of smaller anchor tenants, rather just a few of the big ones (Macy’s, Nordstrom, Dillard’s). Potomac and Arizona Mills also now both have the same owner: Simon Property Group. But, not surprisingly, the Mills Corporation originally built both of them, and SPG bought them out.
Well, the parking lot shootings and gang violence don’t exactly help.
Growing up that part of the mall was always the quieter side of it.
See how the anime tgs place has people
That end of the mall has been dead for years. The rest of the mall is vibrant
Grew up going there. As others have said that section of the mall has always been “quiet”. Even when Vans was there before Costco. I used to love going to Waccamaw. Toy stores and music shops were on the other side of the mall though.
Definitely you are Not resident from woodbridge
Wow I’ve never seen so much controversy on a post about a mall…
People’s childhood memories are wrapped up in these places. Emotions are strong.
By most metrics, Potomac Mills is bucking the trend. But one mall I covered multiple times, Cortana in Baton Rouge, started by having a “quiet section” in the mid 2000s. By 2019, it was closed completely.
I think in Potomac mills I never got past ikea
hat’s the place to be. It’s the first thing most people think of when it comes to Potomac Mills—more than the mall.
IKEA is more prominent from the highway. The original roadside sign for Potomac Mills has some personality but was seriously faded. Simon blandified it with their logo a few years ago.
Does it still have the indoor skatepark?… my friends mom used to drive us up from richmond and drop us off. We would spend all day there. Im so glad I got to experience the last of the mall era. Im sure the 70s and 80s was super fun too but 90s mall era was 🔥…
No indoor skatepark that I can see. But still lots of entertainment oriented businesses: a trampoline park, a bowling alley/arcade, and soon-to-be waterless slide park.
Yeah, the mall is healthier, but it’s gonna be a fading dinosaur soon. I had the opportunity to visit that mall was nice mall, but businesses are gonna suffer under this corrupt government administration…
At over 30 minutes from DC, I would not call it a DC suburb
You had to work pretty hard to get those shots!
Not really. This end of the mall (north of JCPenney) is at least 25% vacant. And the active tenants are mostly local brands, with the exception of Zales and Books-a-Million.
That end has always been like that, I’ve been around the area since 1987.
I used to live near it, but only went a few times.
And plenty of empty store fronts…. I remember when the Mall was horse trails.
Worked there when it first opened at Bud’s Deep Discount under Peoples Drug stores. It was more of an outlet mall and not like the pictures I am seeing. The JCPenney was an outlet and labeled as such. Loved the Sears outlet back in the day also. The Waccamaw Pottery was another positive. Looks like it is a Costco now.
JCPenney is the only mainline department store in Potomac Mills that ISN’T an outlet. The others are either discounters (Marshall’s, TJ Maxx, Burlington) or luxury outlets (Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom). It has probably been since the early 2000s since either Waccamaw or Sears had a location there.
Good to know. Yeah, moved out of that area in the early 90’s to Shenandoah County to be able to afford a house. The 75 mile commute each way to Fairfax for work was brutal, but necessary.
Per Wikipedia, “Waccamaw stores were renamed “Waccamaw’s HomePlace”, and were planning to phase out the Waccamaw name altogether when the company filed for bankruptcy. The company ceased operations in June 2001.” I thought it was later than that, but there you go.
I thought it was later than that too. I remember them, for sure, when they were housewares–not the pottery era. Apparently they emerged in the same era as their surviving competitor, At Home (formerly Garden Ridge), which from what I can tell has employed a growth strategy of moving into former Kmarts–so pretty low-end real estate. And that hasn’t been enough to stave off a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in 2025. Home goods stores apparently go through spikes in demand, followed by deep troughs. The early days of COVID were ostensibly great for the home remodeling industry, but that stalled by 2023. I say “ostensibly” because one of the most famous home goods stores, Pier One Imports, went out of business at the start of COVID. Then again, Pier Ones were much, much more prevalent at their peak than these competitors. HomeGoods are fairly prevalent these days too, but sometimes partner with other retailers, as is the case with Marshall’s at Potomac Mills; they share the same parent company (along with TJ Maxx).