Decline of a Raleigh mall: What went wrong with Triangle Town Center?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Triangle Town Center opened in 2002 as a major regional mall but didn’t flourish.
- Anchor stores faded while surrounding big-box traffic keep the site commercially viable.
- Analysts predict redevelopment into hybrid open-air retail or mixed-use.
When it opened in 2002, Triangle Town Center drew 1,500 shoppers before sunrise, all of them eager to browse the new Hecht’s, gawk at the mall’s 18-foot indoor waterfall and stroll down the artificial river that burbled alongside Ted’s Montana Grill.
Raleigh’s boosters spared no exaggeration when they declared their new retail hub would form a “second downtown” along the Outer Loop, pulling in customers clear to Rocky Mount to the east and Virginia to the north.
Never happened.
Two decades later, the North Raleigh mall has decayed enough to attract “urban explorers” — amateur filmmakers who post YouTube videos while wandering through abandoned eyesores.
They walk through the ghost town of the outdoor commons, where the only sign of humans is the bedding from a homeless camp, and they point out the plentiful signs of collapse: locked doors and lights out at Orvis, a fire marshal’s notice tacked to the door at Twisted Fork restaurant, and rotting wood at Ted’s.
Inside the mall, Macy’s plans to shut its doors as did Sears. Saks Global filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, leaving Saks Fifth Avenue, one of the mall’s anchors, vulnerable. On Friday, March 6, the company announced it would close the Triangle Town Center location along with 11 others across the country, as part of a focus “to prioritize the best-performing and most desirable locations.”
Meanwhile, the mall’s waterfall is long gone, and a trickle of customers now pass by storefronts offering 70% discounts.
Most telling: The fake river now runs dry.
“That’s wild, dude,” a YouTuber named Driving Daily noted in his visit last year. “This was a popping area. I’m fascinated by the reality that things can go so fast, right? You got to keep that in mind, obviously be able to pivot in life.”
Malls are dying? Not like this
The mall’s failure to meet wild expectations and its steady demise remain a popular conversation in Raleigh, where analysts call it an “outlier.”
Mall traffic is declining nationwide thanks to online shopping, but neither Crabtree Valley in Raleigh nor Streets of Southpoint in Durham show anything like Triangle Town Center’s decay.
Summit Properties USA, the mall’s seventh owner, did not respond to questions.
But the truth can’t hide:
- Nearly 200 unsold Tesla Model Y electric cars sit parked in the lot along Capital Boulevard, part of a trend to store overstock in declining malls.
- The once-vaunted food court no longer features an outdoor splash pad for children, and a tarp covers one of the restaurant stalls.
- Few children play on the tunnels and slides of the indoor playground, once more crowded than a city park.
- Many of the stores stock specialty goods only: remote-control cars, anime, swords and armor for fantasy games.
“I’ve lived near this mall for the last 20 years,” wrote Daniel Corell in a one-star Google review about two months ago. “It has been slowly deteriorating in value over that time. The mall opens at 10 a.m., however most stores don’t open until 11 a.m. Most of the stores are off-brand names at extreme costs. Wife and I went this morning, and it was a ghost town giving us the feeling we were in a ‘closed’ store. Even the decorative water pond looks dilapidated.”
Is it safe?
In 2008, the members of two rival gangs clashed in the mall on a Saturday night, triggering a brawl among 15 to 20 teenagers that nearly sparked an all-out riot. Hundreds ran through Triangle Town Center while 40 Raleigh police swarmed in to break up the fight that left a 15-year-old stabbed.
“I can’t understand why someone would come out here to fight,” Rahmaad Midgett told The N&O at the time. “I just come to hang out and talk to girls.”
More recently, in 2022, a 21-year-old man died of gunshot wounds in the Triangle Town Center parking lot after his friend shot accidentally shot him inside a car.
Analysts point to these incidents as incentives to stay away.
“Unfortunately, negative news breeds negativity,” said Vijay Shah, vice president at Raleigh-based Trademark Properties. “Tenants have been apprehensive about going there.”
There’s good transportation infrastructure around it. Going forward, I don’t expect it to be a zombie mall. I’d expect it to either be more of a hybrid, open-air retail center or maybe transformed into mixed-use.
Jim Spaeth
UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School real estate professorThe mall’s reputation for violence seems unfair considering a shootout at Crabtree Valley Mall in 2024 left 20 cars riddled with bullets. Prosecutors described it as a gang fight.
And in Durham, a 2021 gunfight at Streets at Southpoint left three people injured, including a 10-year-old boy, on Black Friday.
But Triangle Town Center’s critics note that the mall responded to violence there by forbidding teens without parents, ordering unaccompanied young people to leave what might otherwise be their social habitat.
“Everyone knows how this happened,” wrote J.M. Cook, responding to an urban explorer post on Instagram. “The people who were actually looking to shop became afraid to go there.”
Location, location, location?
On the business side, Triangle Town Center started in a rough location — farther north than many people lived in the early- to mid-2000s and situated around the car lots and endless asphalt of Capital Boulevard.
Crabtree Valley, in contrast, sits alongside well-established, “Old Raleigh” neighborhoods reachable by a greenway and creek that, despite its tendency to flood, provides a pleasant atmosphere.
Triangle Town Center emerged just as North Hills began a massive expansion that continues today, much of it the same walkable restaurant-retail mix that Triangle Town Center used as a lure.
“The original demographics around the mall weren’t that great,” said Shah, reflecting on Triangle Town Center’s futility. “If you look at the five-mile radius, those in the skirts and close to North Hills will shop there.”
And while North Raleigh has added hundreds of high-rise apartments around the mall since its 2002 opening, they arrived as the anchors began to fade, never attracting the hoped-for crowds, Shah said.
But considering Triangle Town Center remains a mall surrounding by big box stores with no apparent dip in traffic — stores like DSW, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Nordstrom Rack — analysts see promise for development.
“Raleigh is a growing market,” said Jim Spaeth, real estate professor at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. “There’s good transportation infrastructure around it. Going forward, I don’t expect it to be a zombie mall. I’d expect it to either be more of a hybrid, open-air retail center or maybe transformed into mixed-use.”
Until then, its emptiness will fascinate a YouTube audience tuned into urban decline.
“This was just running water,” said “Driving Daily,” walking along the dry river. “I don’t think they ever had fish in it. When the river’s run dry, that’s it for society. Got to move somewhere else. That’s wild, dude.”
This story was originally published February 25, 2026 at 7:30 AM with the headline "Decline of a Raleigh mall: What went wrong with Triangle Town Center?."
