former Montgomery Ward, Carolina Circle Mall, Greensboro, North Carolina, showing the upper level entrances facing US 29.
former Montgomery Ward, Carolina Circle Mall, Greensboro, North Carolina, showing the upper level side entrances.
former Montgomery Ward, Carolina Circle Mall, Greensboro, North Carolina, showing the lower level loading docks and garden center.
former Montgomery Ward, Carolina Circle Mall, Greensboro, North Carolina, showing the freestanding auto center across the street from the mall.
Montgomery Ward at Carolina Circle Mall in Greensboro, North Carolina opened in 1976 and was unequaled in its architectural outlandishness.
The new suburban store, relocated from a more sedate downtown location, featured angled concrete berms originally covered in brightly colored ceramic tile on the exterior of its upper level. Its multiple entrances angled skyward with soaring transoms over the doors with round keyholes cut into concrete fascias on three of the entries.
Not content to play it subtle inside, Montgomery Ward's Greensboro store single-handedly wins the award for worst interior design. Wards tried every bad ‘70s decorating fad they could from avocado and gold shag carpeting to a ‘conversation pit’ style stereo department. As the mall around it began to fail, almost nothing was updated at Wards, leaving the store oversized and trapped in a serious time warp.
By the early 1990s, the store began to downsize its selling space and reconfigure its departments, resulting in a low-cost remodel that never truly erased its former '70s self. By 1997, citing security and climate control concerns, Montgomery Ward closed off most of its exterior entrances and eventually its mall entrance, which led to the mall owners closing off the interior of the mall, which by then only contained a handful of stores.
Still, even as the mall it was attached to faded into obscurity, only the 2001 closing of the entire Montgomery Ward chain could kill this store, wich maintained decent sales and a loyal customer base until the end.
Oh man, the articecture on that place is awesome!
ReplyDeleteAnd the Montgomery Ward logo back in the day was cool, too. I have a pic of a Wards with the old logo that I got off of deadmalls.com (shh!) on my desktop right now.
Best Carolina Circle store ever! It had a little of everything. Of course, being a geek, I enjoyed the electronics department. The boom box I currently use is from wards. But they're website is still around. http://www.wards.com
ReplyDeleteRoadgeek
That was the best store at CCM. No wonder it was the last store there to close. I still have a heavy load of merchandise I bought at Wards that still work perfectly. Except for that stereo that has a broken display light.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. I just drove past the site today and it made me very sad that the store was no longer there.
ReplyDeleteI don't have as much stuff from Wards as you do, but I have a flood of memories.
I wish you were old enough to see it it in its '70s style glory. You thought it was funky in the '90s? The '90s had nothing on the early '80s! I just wish I had photographed the place back then...