Hickory Hollow Mall: Rise and Fall of a Tennessee Institution
Tennessee
When Hickory Hollow Mall opened in Antioch on August eleventh, nineteen seventy-eight, it was the largest retail space in the state of Tennessee. Two hundred forty-nine stores spread across three wings arranged in a T-shaped layout with a soaring two-story atrium at the center. There was an arcade, a movie theater, anchor department stores at every end, and the particular social energy that American shopping malls generated in their heyday. On weekends, families drove from across Middle Tennessee to walk its corridors.
For twenty-five years it thrived. But the forces that were hollowing out American retail were operating even at the peak, and they accelerated through the early two thousands. JCPenney closed its Hickory Hollow location in two thousand six after more than twenty years as an anchor tenant. Other anchors followed. New competition opened nearby. The demographics of Antioch shifted, and the mall found itself serving a changing neighborhood while its ownership struggled to adapt.
By two thousand twelve, only twelve retailers remained in a building designed for nearly two hundred fifty. Nashville Mayor Karl Dean announced a plan that year to transform the dead mall into a mixed-use facility anchored by a satellite campus of Nashville State Community College. The mall was rebranded as Global Mall at the Crossings and marketed as Tennessee's first international mall, designed to serve the immigrant communities that had moved into the surrounding area in large numbers. The grand reopening in twenty thirteen drew attention, but the fundamentals remained difficult. The site closed entirely in twenty nineteen.
Metro Nashville purchased the property in twenty twenty-two for forty-six million dollars with plans to redevelop it into something the neighborhood actually needed. What exactly that something will be is still being worked out. The building that was once the largest mall in Tennessee is waiting again, the way these places do, for someone to figure out what comes next.
