Plaza Mayor at the Crossroads to close
The Hispanic-themed retail mall that moved into the massive former Crossroads Mall in south Oklahoma City is closing, the building’s owners said Friday.
The mall will shut down on Halloween, said Raptor Properties, which owns the property. The company said it will seek to market the site for other nonretail uses.
The building includes Santa Fe South Charter School, which began holding classes this year in the former home of a Montgomery Ward store. The closure won’t affect the school, officials said.
The 63-acre site at the intersection of Interstate 35 and Interstate 240 opened 43 years ago as Crossroads Mall, one of the nation’s largest shopping malls.
After the current owners acquired Crossroads Mall in 2011, they sought to serve the burgeoning Hispanic population in south Oklahoma City with stores, events and a business incubator at Plaza Mayor at the Crossroads.
The owners of Plaza Mayor at the Crossroads (formerly Crossroads Mall) said Friday the property will close on Oct. 31.
The closure will affect about four dozen retailers that operate businesses inside the building.
The owners, CRM Properties Group, a division of Raptor Properties, said the closure won’t impact Santa Fe South Schools, which began holding classes this fall in a renovated anchor space that formerly was the home of a Montgomery Ward at the mall.
Raptor Properties said Friday it is shifting its efforts from bringing new retail into the building into marketing the site for other uses.
“We are still excited about its future,” Roddy Bates, a principal with Raptor Properties said on Friday. “It’s just not going to be retail anymore.”
“It is 63 acres sitting on the intersection of Interstates 240 and 35. It has tremendous opportunity to be repurposed for something else, and we are working with the city and state officials on that.”
The mall opened 43 years ago as one of the nation’s 10 largest. By 2006, the mall had a mix of local-regional stores and national retailers, but its managers regularly were battling store vacancies.
The financial crisis and the Great Recession were no help.
Ultimately, the mall landed in local hands after it was sold by the Federal Reserve, which was looking to offload risky properties it had acquired during its efforts to bail out troubled financial firms.
Raptor Properties’ deal to buy the mall in 2011 included the main mall building, at 383,784 square feet; the former J.C. Penney store, at 198,358 square feet; the former Steve & Barry’s, at 157,000 square feet; and the former Ward’s Automotive, at 23,390 square feet.
It wasn’t clear Friday how much space will be marketed for a different purpose. But the decision to close the mall by Raptor Properties is the latest step in a series of actions it has taken over the years to keep the property viable.
Changing focus
When Raptor Properties acquired the mall in 2011, a statement from its owners said they hoped to bring “some TLC” to the mall.
“The property has been in receivership for over 3.5 years. The mall is in great shape, but Raptor looks to make some improvements on appearance, open up the leasing gates and attract previous tenants back as well as new retailers,” the statement read.
In 2013, Raptor announced it had a plan to make the mall into a thriving retail and social hub for the Oklahoma City area’s Hispanic community, renaming the development Plaza Mayor at the Crossroads.
Its goal was to turn Crossroads into something much like La Gran Plaza in Fort Worth, Texas, a then-thriving shopping center that had been nearly vacant just nine years earlier.
Raptor hoped it could carry out a similar project for Crossroads in about five years, adding regular live music performances and American Idol-style singing competitions as weekend events in its main mall.
Also in 2013, the Salvation Army moved into space at the mall to both use as a warehouse for donated items that came to the area after deadly May tornadoes and to use as a distribution center for some of its other programs.
In September 2014, Raptor took another major anchor space at the mall that once was the home for Dillards and dedicated it for the El Parian, an open marketplace expected to feature as many as 300 booths for small retailers.
Space on the ground floor was set aside as a business incubator, with hopes to convert the wing’s second and third floors to office space.
By the summer of 2015, El Parian was about 26 percent leased, and Plaza Mayor still was holding live music events and festivals on weekends to try to lure more shoppers.
Early last year, Raptor said its occupancy rate stood about 50 percent. By then, it had broadened its business recruiting efforts to bring in businesses or uses that seek patrons from across the Oklahoma City area.
It also sold the mall’s anchor space on its east end, which previously was a Montgomery Ward, to Charter Schools Development Corp. and Santa Fe South for $1.8 million.
Charter Schools Development, which provides capital financing for charter schools in low-income communities, worked with the school to renovate the 157,000-square-foot building for $10 million.
The school opened for the 2017 school year, and Bates said Friday the school isn’t going anywhere.
“We’re working with them closely to try to make this a smooth transition for them. They’re staying,” he said.
Another major deal for the mall that year was to sign Buchanan’s OKC Public Market into a lease for the mall’s former J.C. Penney space at its west end.
Buchanan’s, a promoter for antique and collectible shows, routinely had been holding its events at State Fair Park’s Modern Living Building for the past 35 years, but it opted to move to Plaza Mayor in October because it provided it more space to hold a wider variety of shows, more often.
“The main goal was to make sure it stayed a mall, and we have accomplished that,” Kristi Cole, the mall’s manager, said earlier this year.
Mall no longer feasible
On Friday, Bates said it no longer was possible to continue forward with the property operating as a mall.
“We didn’t want to do this. We held on longer than we should have. It just became unfeasible to keep the doors open,” he said, adding Raptor is working with mall tenants to help them find other retail spaces in Hispanic shopping corridors where they can relocate.
Tammy Fate, the manager of retail development for the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber, said Friday her organization is working with Raptor now to pull together information that can be used to market the property for other purposes.
“That is kind of the plan, to see who might be interested in taking the space and what options are available.”