Village Center Mall
- Jan 23
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 18
Village Center Mall located in Harlan, Kentucky, is one of my favorite malls of all time. My story with this mall goes back to December 2022. I was on another offroading and camping trip with my university club and it just so happen that the town we were traveling to was Harlan. We arrived in Harlan, and while everyone was grabbing food after our roughly 6 hour drive, I went to go check out the Village Center Mall for a few minutes. I would later return on the way back home to document the place fully for the first time. Even now as I have been to hundreds of malls, Village Center Mall still strikes me as such a special place that I love visiting as often as possible. At the bottom of this post I will have my YouTube video where I show off its gorgeous architectural features and tell its story in video form.
Harlan is a town like many in Appalachia that was dominated by the coal and energy industry, which has since seen a massive decline. Something I found interesting is that the coal industry had started to flounder during the early 1980's at the same time that the Bennett Family would construct the mall complex. Harlan is a pretty large town for Appalachian standards, with a population that peaked at roughly 5,000 in the 1940's and has continuously declined ever since. Harlan county however, had a population of 40,000 in 1980, so the county was decently sized with plenty of population base for retail. The Bennett's owned a lot of the mines that would dominate the region, and they would construct the mall roughly two miles from downtown Harlan.
The mall complex consisted of two parts: an enclosed mall, and a strip mall located adjacent to it. Kroger opened first on November 10, 1981, with SupeRX drugstore opening not long after in the adjacent strip mall portion. Kmart would join in the adjacent strip mall on June 3, 1982, making that section fully tenanted. The interior mall got its first anchor with Belk Simpson on July 28, 1982, which moved from downtown Harlan. Belk Simpson had been in downtown Harlan since 1954 after their acquisition of Burr's Department Store, and the downtown location closed on July 24, 1982. The last anchor to join the mall after it opened was Magic Mart, which opened on October 3, 1984.
Village Center would operate without an open interior mall until May of 1984 when the mall officially opened. Opening day tenants were Swensen's Ice Cream, RadioShack/Audio World, and The Boardroom restaurant. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I have a feeling that this mall took a while to get going because the coal industry was already struggling when they started construction, and it would only get worse as time went on.
History for this mall is quiet throughout the 1980's and 1990's. One thing it is notable for is hosting the 'Festival of The Mountain Masters,' a trade show featuring local artisans offering art, food, and other crafts to attendants of the event. The first show happened in 1984 when the mall opened and has been held there ever since.
Village Center Mall was a mall that I broke my earlier rule of not looking too much at a mall before visiting. I had been staring at that former Belk Simpson on street view for months prior to my first visit, and watching other mall documenter's videos dreaming of when I could visit for the first time. That first visit was a wonderful experience, and I have returned many times to Harlan to visit their gorgeous mall. I love the way that it sits mostly unaltered with its brown tile floor and brick planters. Its possible that the center planter used to be a fountain, that some storefronts have changed, and that there may have been planters by the former Magic Mart, but otherwise this mall is basically as it sat in the 1980's.
Village Center would end up losing its Kmart on February 12, 1994. The store was number #9610, and the likely reason for the closure was Walmart, which opened behind the mall on December 31, 1991. Other than that, history around the mall was quiet, with a small format Sears Hometown store opening in the back middle of the mall sometime in the 1990s.
Going into the 2000's, the mall would undergo some changes. Kentucky based clothing retailer Dawahares would swallow what used to be inline mall space that housed The Boardroom restaurant among other stores in 2001. The store operated until 2006 when Dawahares as a company went bankrupt and closed every store. The Dawahares spot was shortly after replaced by Peebles, which was owned by Stage Stores.
Magic Mart closed in 2003, and was replaced by a Goody's Family Clothing in 2004. Due to the Goody's Family Clothing bankruptcy and closures in 2008, Stage Stores bought the rights to the Goody's name and decided to rebrand their Peebles store as a Goody's. This store would last until 2020 when Stage decided to rebrand all of their stores into Gordman's, and this store would get signage indicating as such. However, it would close after a couple of months of operation as a Gordman's.
During the 2010's the mall would keep slowly emptying out. In my research, I discovered that before the town had their mall, they had Woodlawn Plaza, which was a strip mall about a mile up the road towards downtown. The retail that exists in Harlan today mostly has collected itself around that strip mall, which is almost ironic since Village Center Mall likely took away its thunder all of those years ago. At some point in the past, the Kmart was subdivided to house a Big Lots and Dollar General, but the Big Lots closed with the bankruptcy of the company in 2024 and did not reopen afterwards. Likewise, the Kroger when it closed in the early 2000's got turned into a health facility.
Belk Simpson, by then just Belk, closed at the Village Center Mall in 2007, leaving behind its beautiful copper storefront that still adorns the mall today. Something that is rather recent with the mall property is that a recreation facility has signed a lease with the mall to build out a facility in what used to be the Belk. Work has already well begun as I write this blog in 2026, and it will give the mall property a much needed tenant.
I love coming to this mall for its mostly unchanged 1980's aesthetics, and the fact that its in such a charming and lovely town that has gorgeous scenery and a neat history. I hope the Village Center Mall can remain open into the foreseeable future as a local mall where the residents of Harlan and beyond can come together.
Here is a link to my YouTube video on the mall, recorded in February 2024.
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