Say goodbye: Cary Towne Center mall is finally coming down after more than a year
After more than a year withering in development limbo, Cary Towne Center is finally coming down.
Demolition of the 40-year-old complex began this past week, about 13 months after most mall retailers shut their doors.
The shopping center’s impending absence leaves some area residents ambivalent.
“Clearly, the mall was no longer thriving,” Maryrose Melito Kemp, a Cary resident of more than 20 years, previously told the News & Observer. But, she said, “I’m so sad to see it go.”
Leveling the 87-acre property will make way for Cary’s Epic Games to build a new headquarters. The video game titan behind Fortnite and Rocket League bought the mall and its surrounding land for $95 million in January 2021.
Epic’s current office space off Crossroads Boulevard can no longer contain the company’s expanding workforce. The company, valued at nearly $30 billion, is avidly recruiting hundreds of new Triangle employees. It hopes to build up to 2.7 million square feet of office space on the Cary Towne Center property, plus 75,000 square feet of retail and up to 200 hotel rooms.
Are malls becoming obsolete?
Cary Towne Center — which hosted Macy’s, JCPenney, Sears and Dillard department stores in its heyday — joins hundreds of bygone shopping centers that shuttered amid the 21st century “retail apocalypse.”
The advent of e-commerce walloped in-person retailers, and a global pandemic accelerated their demise.
Fewer than 1,200 enclosed malls still operate in the U.S. Of 1,000 tracked by Green Street, a real estate analytics firm, about 750 have vacant “anchor boxes” where retail giants like Sears, Nordstrom and Macy’s once thrived.
A 2020 study by Coresight Research estimated 25% of America’s malls would close in the next three to five years. Like many experts, Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, expects that trend to persist as internet shopping undercuts traditional retail operations.
“The whole business model of a mall,” he told USA Today, “which is about pulling in as many people as you can and getting them to stay for as long as you can, has just unraveled.”
This story was originally published March 12, 2022 at 4:26 PM.
