Suburban Department Store, Early Mall

Cobb Center Mall is pictured above in an advertisement from the grand opening in 1963, and below in late October 2009. The mall opened in 1963. It was the second mall built in Georgia, and according to deadmalls.com it was the first mall to open north of Atlanta. Today, it isn't exactly completely dead (you can see in the photos below the original Rich's that anchored the mall has been repurposed as a school), but it is no longer a mall.

Originally, the mall was an open-air mall with Rich's (an Atlanta department store) serving as an anchor and 50 other stores surrounding it. This was the fourth store Rich's opened in their suburban expansion in the 1960s and 1970s.

Ten years after its opening, the mall was enclosed. It continued to decline in the 1970s because it offered little in comparison to newer malls in the area (e.g. Cumberland Mall opened in 1973). The mall was renovated for its 25th Anniversary in the 80s, but only saw modest success. My mother often took us to shop at Rich's here in the early to mid 1990s even though we lived much closer to Cumberland Mall because it was never busy and was easier to get in and out of.

The mall was closed in the mid 1990s, and redeveloped into a strip mall. Rich's, however, stayed until 2004. In August 2009, what was the original Rich's two story portion of the mall opened as Image International Academy. The rest of the remaining mall space is empty.