MacArthur Center mall will close June 27. Business owners say they got the news the same day as the general public.
“We knew that there was going to be a date when we would have to move out, but we didn't expect it to be this soon,” said Beth Dryer, executive director of the 757 Creative Reuse Center, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable arts and crafts.
The city of Norfolk has talked about redeveloping MacArthur Center for years. The mall was a centerpiece of downtown when it was built in 1999. But its once bustling walkways emptied out over the years as mall traffic declined and stores closed.
The city bought the mall in 2023. At the time, officials said the city would redevelop the three-story structure but didn’t have a concrete plan or timeline. Ideas came and went — such as tearing it down to create an open plaza, moving city offices into the Nordstrom site and building a military-themed hotel.
The city announced Feb. 6 it plans to close the mall this summer and start demolition later this year. The redeveloped site will include “new market-rate residential units, additional hotel rooms, street-level retail and a network of neighborhood streets connected by open spaces,” according to a press release.
“The redevelopment of MacArthur Center represents a significant milestone in advancing a downtown that reflects Norfolk’s continued momentum,” Mayor Kenneth Cooper Alexander said in a press release.
Dryer said the announcement was a surprise. And the short notice — roughly four months — was even more surprising.
“It is the tightest of the tightest timeline,” she said. “We would really need to identify something by the end of this month that we absolutely wanted to move forward with, then assume that it's going to take one to two months for the landlord to make that space ready for us.”
If everything aligned, they’d be able to move into a new space in May or June to be up and running by July, she said. But it’s more likely to take several months to relocate and open.
The Creative Reuse Center moved to MacArthur in 2023 after outgrowing its first space on Granby Street. In MacArthur Mall, the center has a retail side and a workshop side for classes.
Dryer said they’ll likely have to downsize.
“There's absolutely no way we'd be able to have a comparable space,” she said. “The rent here is well below what the market rate is in the outside world. We really are hoping to have at least half as much space as we have here.”
Larry Estes, owner of the store Cool and Eclectic, said he’s barely had time to process the news, let alone find a new place. He said he remembers MacArthur Mall when it was just a “sand heap,” before construction was complete.
He said he always dreamed of opening his business there and finally did in 2022.
“I’m still trying to accept this demise of something so beautiful,” Estes said, adding that the city’s decision to close and demolish the mall is “antithetical to the city's pro-business stance.”
He said his ultimate goal is to buy a storefront, so his business is no longer at the mercy of others’ decisions.
Norfolk City Council voted Feb. 10 to buy out clothing retailer H&M’s lease for $1.5 million. But Dryer said that’s the only example of financial assistance from the city she’s heard of. So far, she said the city’s relocation assistance has consisted of help navigating the commercial leasing process.
Where the city hasn’t helped, Dryer hopes the community will step in.
“We're hoping to raise $20,000 to help us with our move,” she said. “We do have a very generous anonymous donor who has offered to match up to $20,000, so whatever we raise during this fundraiser is going to be matched.”
Dryer says the Creative Reuse Center will stay in Norfolk. It’s just a matter of where – and when.
