The centerpiece was a full-scale Santa sleigh with lifesize, animated reindeer. It was surrounded by faux snow with animated elfs decorating Christmas trees and robotic mice that would pop out large boxes. This display was located in the center of the mall, near the Santa meet-n-greet area.

In one of the wings, there was a cottage set up with animated elves inside building toys. You’d peer into the windows to see the automated figures. Other cottages were set up elsewhere in the mall. One of them featured a kitchen interior with animated figures of women baking. Yet another cottage had a living room scene with animated kids sleeping in their beds and two animated parents decorating a tree.

As I mentioned, the scenes were highly detailed. My memories link them to the 80’s, but they struck me as seeming older than that at the time. I’ve scoured Google for images, but haven’t had any luck. If my memory serves me correctly, the displays started to disappear in the late 80’s or early 90’s.

The original mall was Sears and the wing immediately adjacent to it including Budget Drug. There was no west exit from the mall and no way to get to K Mart on the inside. For years, there was just a bare wall at the west end with a sign announcing a future expansion. Meanwhile, the K Mart end of the mall was given to mixed use. Del’s Cafe was in the same spot as in these photos, but there was also a hallway going west from Del’s containing non-retail uses like an insurance agency, portrait studio, and doctor’s office. Above this wing was a record store, Mr. Music Man, reached by a spiral staircase. (No lie!)

The main expansion of the mall opened in November 1973. That is when they rolled out the logo seen on the sign in the photo above. At this point, the Sears wing and the K Mart wing were connected, and the interior of the mall was developed. If you drew a line north from the entrance to Del’s, everything east of it was ready at that time. The Plaza Twin theaters also opened at this time.

There was a fire in one of the stores in the mall about 1976, and stores that had roll-down grill type doors instead of glass suffered a lot of smoke damage.

The wing extending further west opened in 1977. Obviously this was the peak of the mall as Columbia opened the next year.

By 1989, South Forks Plaza was mostly marginal businesses and a lot of the chains had left.

Interestingly, to compete with the opening of the expanded South Forks Plaza in 1973, a block of downtown businesses built the North 3rd Walk-Through. They built doorways between each of their stores to make it a mall of sorts. It was possible to walk from Griffiths to the Ryan Hotel.

The “pavillion” was indeed converted into a church. The Sears space is occupied by a ballet studio, a caterer, Aaron’s (a discount furniture store), and Zimmermann’s Furniture; there was a Big Lots, but that has closed. Also in the mall: KMart, several collectors/junk stores, Stonegate Pets (I think this is original to the mall, but it has changed locaions), Merle Norman Cosmetics, a sub shop, a slightly worse for wear climbing wall, Del’s Restaurant (original to the mall), Jack’s Shoes (a popular local store with two locations), an alterations shop/Tupperware store (really), a shoe repair center, a watch repair center, a wine shop, Ben Franklin Crafts, Ace Hardware, a Christian bookstore, a bar and liquor store, an art and coffee shop, Cost Cutters (where I used to get bad perms as a teenager), and most surprising of all: an African/Chinese/Moroccan/West Indian grocery store. There were maybe 10 vacant storefronts–this is by no means a complete list.

The mall is, of course, ugly as sin…a hodepodge of architectural errors…and completely fascinating. The parking lot was half full at 10:30 on a Monday morning, and there were a variety of people actually shopping inside. …Dare I suggest this is a dead mall success story?