Hudson Belk, The Streets at Southpoint, Durham, North Carolina (webshots.com)
Hudson Belk, The Streets at Southpoint, Durham, North Carolina. Lower level entrance. (ctcharlotte.com)
Hudson Belk, The Streets at Southpoint, Durham, North Carolina. Escalator well. (ctcharlotte.com)
Hudson Belk, The Streets at Southpoint, Durham, North Carolina. Lower level mall entrance. Photographed by camera phone 12/9/06
Hudson Belk, The Streets at Southpoint, Durham, North Carolina. Upper level mall entrance. Photographed by camera phone 12/9/06
Hudson Belk, The Streets at Southpoint, Durham, North Carolina. Mall entrance. Photographed by camera phone 12/9/06
The new millennium, stagnant sales, and a revamped corporate structure were Charlotte, North Carolina-based Belk, Inc.’s incentives to evolve its store prototypes. From 2001 on, Belk stores tended to get smaller than before, and were located in more strip malls and lifestyle centers than regional malls, reversing a three decade trend of large stores in regional malls.The company did not completely abandon malls, especially in its core markets in the Carolinas, as is seen in this Hudson Belk store in The Streets at Southpoint mall in Durham, North Carolina. Opened in 2002, it presents a contemporary face on Belk’s mall offering. The 180,000 square foot, two-level store reflects Belk’s ‘Millennium’ design, with a more open interior, large glass-covered entries, a clerestory skylight topping a oval escalator well, and a Carmen!Carmen! Aveda Prestige day spa; one of only a handful in the Belk chain.
Belk closed three Hudson Belk stores in the Raleigh-Durham area to open the Southpoint store. The former South Square Mall store (opened in 1975), seven miles west, closed in January 2002 and was demolished when the mall was torn down. A Sam’s Club opened on its site in 2004. The former Northgate Mall store (opened in 1995), located across town, closes in February 2004, with plans for it to be replaced with a multi-screen movie theater and several smaller shops. The University Mall store (opened in 1973), located ten miles to the west in Chapel Hill, also closed in January 2002 and was replaced by A Southern Season gourmet grocery store.
What's become of Northgate, anyway? Stopped by there once on my way to Charlotte, and it seemed to be caught in mall purgatory. It was obvious from some of the stores there that it was or had been a fairly upscale mall, and it seemed to be doing okay, but the redevelopment plans that were on all the directory signs had "dying mall" written all over them. As close as the mall is to 85, it still didn't seem to be in a growth area, and the neighborhood behind the mall was scary-looking even by my lax West Baltimore standards. Anyway, any backstory about this mall would be great.
ReplyDeleteNorthgate has evolved over the years from pioneering strip mall to early enclosed mall to slightly dowdy small mall to stylish upscale mall back to dowdy small mall with a new lifestyle component. The best history of the place is on Wikipedia but I will say that it’s one of the more interesting mall form a historical standpoint that you’ll find.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northgate_Mall_(Durham)