The Glory Days, Ghost Town Years, and Slow Demolition of McFarland Mall

There was a time when suburban America believed the absolute pinnacle of human civilization was a climate-controlled concrete cavern smelling exclusively of cinnamon pretzels, chemically pumped department-store perfume, and youth anxiety. If you grew up anywhere near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that cathedral had a name: McFarland Mall.

Today, if you drive past the intersection of McFarland Boulevard and Skyland, you’ll find mostly open sky, crushed limestone, red dirt, and memories. But for decades, it was the social, sensory, and retail nucleus of West Alabama—a place that rose with great fanfare, fought off a shinier rival for way longer than it had any right to, and then suffered a decade-long death so agonizingly slow it felt like watching paint peel in reverse.

Grab a stale Orange Julius. Here is the eulogy McFarland Mall earned.

The Birth of a Subterranean Kingdom (1969)

McFarland Mall opened its doors at 9:30 AM on Wednesday, February 19, 1969.

Back then, enclosing an entire shopping district under one roof with central air conditioning was basically viewed as dark sorcery. Developed by Ward Wharton McFarland and James Hinton, it was only the sixth fully enclosed shopping mall ever built in the state of Alabama. In a climate where summer humidity feels like breathing hot clam chowder, entering a terrazzo-tiled, 72-degree wonderland was nothing short of a religious awakening.

The original anchor lineup set the tone:

• Woolco: The sprawling discount department store chain created by F.W. Woolworth Company. Woolco opened just slightly ahead of the rest of the mall in late 1967 and served as the working-class backbone of the north end.
• Gayfers: The Southern belle anchor at the opposite end. Gayfers was where your mama and grandmothers went for Sunday dresses, perfume counters, crystal vases, and fine china on layaway. It proved so wildly successful that by 1975, Gayfers added an entire second floor, reigning as the only two-story tenant the mall ever saw.
• Winn-Dixie: Operating as an immediate out-parcel grocery anchor to round out the convenience trifecta.

Alongside regional junior anchor Pizitz and roughly three dozen inline specialty shops, McFarland Mall was the place to see and be seen throughout the 1970s. You could buy records, pick up an airbrushed vanity plate, eat lunch, and buy a riding lawnmower, all without feeling a single drop of rain.

Echoing Halls, Skylights, and Mall Zoology

If you were a kid walking through those enormous, echoing halls back in the day, the sheer scale of the place took your breath away. You’d look up at those giant skylights letting in shafts of pure Alabama sunshine, watching the dust motes drift down onto the planters and benches below. It didn’t feel like a store; it felt like an entire indoor city.

And like any good city, it had its local legends and sensory landmarks.

Take, for instance, the legendary Spiller Pet Center. Long before giant big-box pet depots existed, Spiller was practically an all-day excursion. If you had fifty cents or five dollars burning a hole in your pocket, you bypassed the clothes racks and went straight to the animals.

The moment you crossed the threshold, you were hit with that unmistakable, damp-warm pet shop perfume: cedar shavings, dry puppy kibble, warm aquarium water, and fish food flakes. To the left and right were glowing walls of glass aquariums humming with aerators, lit with electric blues and neon greens. For a kid, standing there watching schools of angelfish, neon tetras, and velvet swordtails was better than a Saturday morning cartoon. It was your own personal trip to the zoo.

Then, of course, came the main event: the mynah bird. Every kid in Tuscaloosa County took a turn leaning in close to that cage, whispering, whistling, and trying their dead-level best to coax that bird into saying something—anything—polite. Half the time, the bird would just cock its head, stare you down with a beady black eye like you were the biggest fool in the state, and suddenly belt out an ear-splitting whistle that bounced off the glass storefronts and echoed halfway to Woolco.

Then there was the culinary mystery across the concourse. Right across from the theater sat a restaurant shrouded in perpetual, impenetrable twilight. Stepping out of the blazing, sun-drenched corridor into that place was like wandering straight into a cave. The lights were hung so impossibly low that the entire dining room lived in silhouette. It sparked a running debate that lasted for years: was it supposed to be fancy, romantic mood lighting? Or were they keeping the bulbs at four watts just to hide the bad food and make sure nobody noticed the bugs crawling along the baseboards? To this day, nobody is entirely sure, but you practically needed a miner’s headlamp just to verify your hamburger didn’t have legs.

The Theater: From Twin Screens to Fox 12 Oblivion

Right across from that mystery cavern was the place where generations of Tuscaloosa teenagers spent their weekends paying five bucks to sit in sticky darkness.

The cinema’s evolution mirrored the modern moviegoing arms race:

1. Fox Twin Theatres: It started in the early 1970s as a quaint two-screen house operated by Mann Theatres (and later Southeastern). Two screens, heavy velvet curtains, and one central popcorn machine.
2. The Multiplex Sprawl: As Hollywood transitioned into the summer blockbuster era, two screens were laughably inadequate. The theater carved up its space into four screens, added two more, and kept expanding.
3. Fox 12: By the late 1990s, the complex took over adjacent retail space to balloon into a 12-screen megaplex under Regal. The interior entrance featured a neon-lit, carousel-style box office sitting smack in the middle of the concourse.

The Downfall of Fox 12

The theater’s demise came swift and merciless in 2004. That year, developer Stan Pate opened Hollywood 16 over on Towncenter Boulevard.

Fox 12 was a child of the 1980s and 90s: low ceilings, cramped rows, gentle sloped floors, and worn fabric seats. Hollywood 16 arrived with stadium seating, cup holders designed to hold a bucket of sweet tea, chest-rattling digital surround sound, and a sprawling video arcade. Fox 12 went instantly obsolete and went dark permanently in 2004. Its shuttered, dust-covered marquee hung frozen in time over the empty mall hallway for over a decade—an eerie, neon-less tombstone to suburban movie nights.

Surviving the Flashier Younger Sibling

Long before the cinema went under, the mall had already survived its first existential crisis. In 1980, University Mall opened just up the highway.

University Mall was bigger, shinier, had fountains that looked like modern art, and came out swinging with JCPenney, Sears, and Parisian. Across the country, older malls folded like cheap lawn chairs whenever a newer, flashier mall showed up three miles down the road. McFarland Mall, however, refused to roll over and die.

Its secret weapon? Gayfers.

University Mall failed to lure Gayfers away, meaning Tuscaloosa shoppers still had to patronize both properties. When Woolco finally threw in the towel in 1983, discount chain Zayre stepped into the breach. When Zayre collapsed in 1989, mall management smartly partitioned the massive space, bringing in T.J. Maxx, Drug Mart (which became Shoe Station), and Heilig-Meyers Furniture.

In 1993, McFarland Mall doubled down with a major renovation: cutting open the ceiling for an expanded sunlit atrium, adding a 320-seat food court, and welcoming apparel anchor Goody’s Family Clothing. For a solid stretch in the 1990s, the mall boasted four anchor spaces, nearly 60 inline stores, and a steady stream of weekend foot traffic.

The Spiral of Death (2000–2016)

Once a mall starts bleeding its anchor stores, you can’t slap a Band-Aid on the wound. The 2000s turned into an excruciating, decade-long downhill slide:

• 1998: Gayfers was absorbed by Dillard’s.
• 2001: Heilig-Meyers folded.
• 2008: Dillard’s threw in the towel and shut its doors for good. Losing that primary department store anchor was the fatal strike. By 2010, the entire east corridor leading to Dillard’s was sealed off with raw drywall.
• 2009: Goody’s went through bankruptcy and vanished.
• 2009: Local real estate developer Stan Pate purchased the property from the McFarland family, officially closing out the founders’ era.

What followed was the classic, eerie “Dead Mall” twilight zone. The concourse became a cavernous bowling alley of empty storefronts and echoing tile. Bright daylight still poured through the skylights, illuminating dusty ficus trees and empty wooden benches where nobody sat. The only reason anyone visited was for the exterior-facing survivors: T.J. Maxx, Shoe Station, Dollar Tree, and the annual Spirit Halloween that drifted into the corpse every October like a vulture picking at old bones.

When T.J. Maxx and Shoe Station packed up and moved across the road to McFarland Plaza in early 2016, the mall was running on fumes. On September 1, 2016, the main interior doors were locked forever.

Demolition by Installments

Most malls go out in a blaze of dramatic glory—a televised Sunday morning implosion, a cheering crowd, and a neat cloud of concrete dust cleared out by Monday afternoon. McFarland Mall, however, was demolished the way a distracted dad takes down Christmas lights: one reluctant, haphazard piece at a time over the course of more than a decade.

The dismantling began in earnest on March 19, 2014, when crews tore into the hollowed-out carcass of the old Dillard’s anchor. That gave the property a bizarre, half-amputated appearance, as its eastern wing was turned to rubble while the interior concourse was technically still wheezing along. After the doors finally shuttered for good in 2016, the surviving bulk of the structure sat frozen in limbo while redevelopment ideas floated around the rumor mill.

The heavy iron returned on December 15, 2020, kicking off the endgame by leveling the long-abandoned Chili’s near the road. Once the dust settled there, excavators swung over to the western edge on February 23, 2021, reducing the historic Woolco-turned-T.J. Maxx wing to piles of crushed rebar and pulverized cinderblocks. A little over a year later, on April 20, 2022, crews pulverized the Goody’s wing, wiping out the last recognizable remnants of the primary mall structure.

Even then, McFarland Mall refused to vanish cleanly. A solitary perimeter Dollar Tree outpost held the line on the fringe of the property like a post-apocalyptic holdout until August 2025, when the final walls were finally knocked flat. Between revolving redevelopment visions—from Stan Pate’s multi-use “Encore Tuscaloosa” to grand proposals for a regional sportsplex—the cleared dirt spent years looking less like prime real estate and more like an open-air archaeological dig.

McFarland Mall was never as fancy as modern outdoor lifestyle centers, and it didn’t stay shiny forever. But for anyone who ever walked those bright, skylit halls, split fries in the food court, squirmed through a thriller at Fox 12, or spent thirty minutes whistling back at that sassy mynah bird in Spiller’s, it was an unforgettable piece of home.

Rest in peace, McFarland Mall. May your neon hum and your pet shop aquariums bubble forever in retail heaven.