Quintard Mall

The Quintard Mall is a regional shopping center located at the intersection of Quintard Ave. (AL 21/ US 431) and Hamaric Dr. (US 78/ 431) in Oxford, Alabama. It is the largest shopping mall in the Anniston/Oxford metro area as well as Northeast Alabama.

The 720,000 square feet mall, has risen from 37th place to 14th in Alabama in size after a major facelift double the size in 2000. It has three anchors â€" J.C. Penney, Sears and Dillard's â€" and 65 other retailers, plus an AmStar 12 Cinemas with stadium seating theater and a food court area.

Notable Stores

•The Gap

•Foot Locker

•Spencer's

•Goody's

•Amstar 12 Cinemas

History

Opened in August 1970, Quintard Mall had 32 tenants occupying 291,550 square feet of GLA, it was the first enclosed mall in the area, with J.C. Penney and Britt's department store its original anchors. In 1983, Grimmer Realty formed Quintard Mall Ltd. to purchase the mall. A series of facelifts and expansions have added on to the mall in recent years.

•Prior to the purchase, Sears left its space in downtown neighboring Anniston and moved into the former Britt building at the north end of the mall.

•A modernization completed in October 1985 improved the landscaping and added an irrigation system. Inside, the original concrete floors were replaced with terrazzo flooring, and the owners added skylights, a dropped ceiling to make the mall seem more intimate, service courts and new mall entrances.

•Sears expanded and modernized its store between November 1996 and June 1997, adding a second level and boosting the store size from 82,000 to 122,000 square feet; this brought Quintard's GLA from 291,550 to 337,550 square feet.

•Expansion plans that had been talked about since the '80 started to become more realistic after the mall's new renovations had attracted more shoppers, putting Quintard in second place in the state for sales per square foot, right behind Riverchase Galleria in Birmingham. Major hurdles, such as the environmental issues raised by their plan to channel and bridge Snow Creek, which ran alongside the mall to the rear, keeped this a slow process. Grimmer describes Snow Creek as a long drainage ditch approximately 104 feet wide and 1,700 feet long. The goal was to cover Snow Creek with concrete sides, bottom and top so that the mall could be expanded over the creek in the middle rear of the mall and additional parking could be added. By the time the work was completed, the creek was covered from its northern property line at Snow Street to its southern border at U.S. Highway 78. Because 60% of Snow Creek is storm water from neighboring Anniston, Quintard Mall also had to build a retention pond for creek overflow. It took from 1987 to 1994 to obtain all necessary environmental permits to build this.

•Four agencies had to be satisfied before environmental permits were granted for the Snow Creek work: The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Engineers hired by Quintard Mall first worked with FEMA on the permit application; after more than a year of effort, FEMA handed the project over to the Corps of Engineers, and environmental permit work was started all over again.

•Another challenge came on the anchor front. Mercantile Stores had agreed in the early 1990s to locate a Gayfer's Department Store at Quintard, but before the expansion could begin, Dillard's bought Gayfer's. This delayed the expansion another year while a lease was negotiated with Dillard's to anchor the expansion, joining the existing anchors of J.C. Penney and Sears. Dillard's opened on Oct. 25, 2000, a week prior to the grand reopening.