Billed as the first air-conditioned mall west of the Mississippi, Chris-Town Mall opened with huge fanfare in 1961.  Originally, the mall opened with four anchors: JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, local Phoenix department store Korrick’s, and UA Theatres.  Bullocks, a department store chain from Los Angeles, was added soon after the mall opened.  In the late 1960s, the entire Korrick’s chain became The Broadway, another chain from Los Angeles.  The mall chugged along into the early 1970s as a regional destination.  People from all over the entire southwest came to the mall to shop in the cool climes and some even thought the mall reminded them of New York.  JPB Publishing has created an excellent website dedicated to the early days of Chris-Town Mall.  Check out the different courts, especially the court of birds in cages which hung down into the mall.  Truly amazing. 

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, traffic declined markedly at the mall.  Other, newer, brighter centers with more impressive features opened in the Phoenix area and the mall’s trade area made it just another mall.  A dated mall, at that.  Rather than keeping up with renovations, citing lower traffic, stores began to leave in droves.  In 1985, the Bullock’s at this mall was sold to Dillard’s.  In 1995, The Broadway was purchased by Federated Stores.  Rather than converting the location to a Macy’s, Federated chose to close the store.  In 2000, the Montgomery Ward location closed when the chain went bust. 

Losing a mall’s anchors is usually a death sentence, forcing rapid redevelopment or worse yet, abandonment and blight.  Not so in the case of Chris-Town Mall.  After The Broadway closed its store and Federated chose not to replace it with their Macy’s brand, the mall’s management quickly enticed Wal-Mart to build on that site.  In 2002, the former Montgomery Ward space was divided into PetsMart and a Ross clothing store.  Also in 2002, longtime anchor JCPenney closed and was quickly replaced by a Costco warehouse store.  The UA Theatre closed, but also quickly reopened as the Phoenix Spectrum Cinemas.  Wal-Mart expanded its store into a supercenter, and the mall was also renamed Phoenix Spectrum Mall.  Dillard’s also closed in 2004. 

The mall seems to have died, but quickly reinvented itself as an alternative, ancillary mall.  It no longer has the top-tier of anchors or in-line stores, but it does okay mostly as a neighborhood and discount center.  In 2006, plans were announced to replace the empty Dillard’s and JCPenney announced it would be returning to Spectrum Mall.  How often does an anchor leave and want to come back?  The mall’s occupancy currently stands at about 88 percent. 

We stopped at the mall during some free time we had in Phoenix during a cross-country road trip in July 2004 and took the pictures below.  We were amazed at the decor of the mall, and how the mall had placed “alternative” anchors such as Costco and Wal Mart, and how successful it seemed to work.  We also particularly enjoyed the antics of one of the mall’s maintenance workers, a lively middle-aged woman who wore a bee hive bufant hairstyle with a white stripe in the middle (like a skunk).  Watching her bark into her walkie-talkie became one of the running jokes of that trip, and we won’t soon forget her.