The Woodlands Mall
The Woodlands Mall is a colossal shopping mall featuring more than 160 shops, play areas for kids, and many other amenities. Why You Should Go: One of the top things to do in The Woodlands with kids is taking them on a fantastic shopping spree at this brilliant mall. Some of its facilities include play areas to keep your children well-entertained, a bustling food court, an indoor carousel, and endless more. Have a wonderful time with your youngsters as you spend the day together at The Woodlands Mall. Go shopping as you buy things for them like books, clothes, toys, shoes, electronics, games, and the like. Other activities you can enjoy here are going on carousel rides, watching over your little ones as they have a blast at a play area, and participating in outdoor, family-friendly movie nights. The Woodlands Mall is a sprawling shopping center situated near the Woodlands Waterway. You can take the trolley over to the mall, then browse their more than 150 stores. There are quite a few kid-friendly spaces to keep your kids entertained during the shopping experience, as well as a food court with plenty of options for the whole family.
The Woodlands Mall is a two-story, enclosed shopping mall located at the intersection of Interstate 45 and Lake Woodlands Drive in the community of The Woodlands in unincorporated Montgomery County, Texas, United States, north of Houston. The Woodlands Mall features six anchor stores: Dick’s Sporting Goods, Dillard’s, Forever 21, JCPenney, Macy’s, and Nordstrom. With a gross leasable area of 1,350,000 square feet (125,000 m2), The Woodlands Mall is considered a super-regional mall by industry definitions. The Woodlands Mall is managed by Brookfield Properties Retail Group. Having grown from its initial roots as a resort-oriented master-planned community first begun in 1974, developer George P. Mitchell’s The Woodlands began to rapidly grow with an influx of new families from Houston and other areas, and had also gained national prominence from the community being both host to the Shell Houston Open and home to the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, which opened in 1990. By the 1990s, the community (and Montgomery County) had grown enough to the point where a new super-regional mall became a key priority of the community’s developer, The Woodlands Corporation, who sought to develop the mall as part of its Town Center development.
The Woodlands Mall opened on October 5, 1994 with over 120 stores, including anchor tenants Dillard’s, Foley’s, Mervyn’s and Sears, whose Homart Development Company jointly built the mall with The Woodlands Corporation.[3][4] This was the final development by Homart, which was acquired by General Growth Properties the following year. In addition, the mall also contained a carousel and adjacent food court on its upper level, and several restaurants and smaller retailers on the periphery. Before The Woodlands Mall opened, many residents of The Woodlands and Montgomery County (as well as the nearby community of Huntsville further north) traveled to another mall known as The Wharf currently located in Grogan’s Mill for retail services. Greenspoint was the mall most directly impacted by The Woodlands Mall’s opening, as Greenspoint consequently lost virtually all of its most critical (and most upscale) customer base, though Greenspoint already had been in decline due to competition from the more upscale Willowbrook and Deerbrook malls (which sustained themselves due to sizable suburban populations in their respective trade areas), as well as increased criminal activity within the Greenspoint area that further contributed to Greenspoint Mall’s decline.
In 1998, JCPenney opened in an empty anchor space situated between Sears and Dillard’s in the mall’s northeast corner. In 2004, a 150,000-square-foot (14,000 m2) outdoor section was added featuring a Barnes & Noble bookstore, several upscale shops, and Class A office space, as well as a 1.4-mile (2.3 km) waterway, which features a water taxi. In April 2007, the mall partnered with NearbyNow, a digital applications company based in California, to offer shoppers a service that allows them to search for items at the mall through their cell phones or home computers.