CUMBERLAND — Tucked into the heart of the Cobb Galleria complex is a time capsule of a bygone era.
Through glass skylights, sunlight streams down on a stand of trees set into the tiled floor. Storefronts sit silent on a Thursday afternoon, especially without a convention to drum up activity.
The heyday of the Galleria Specialty Shops, a mall sitting inside the overall footprint of the 320,000-square-foot Cobb Galleria convention center, is past — long past.
Bob Voyles, a real estate executive and board member for the Cobb-Marietta Coliseum and Exhibit Hall Authority (which owns and operates the complex), said it’s been a while since the mall was a going concern.
“Before I was on the board, which was 2004,” Voyles said of the last time the mall was economically viable. “The tenants we have in there, they’re great tenants. But it is not long-term sustainable.”
Indeed, going back to the start, the Galleria mall was never the hit its developers hoped it would be, said Tad Leithead, a former chairman of the Atlanta Regional Commission who worked on the project when it first started in the early 1980s.
“The idea was that there were four big anchors that were across the street at Cumberland Mall … and we would be a specialty boutique mall,” Leithead said. “People who were coming to the anchored mall across the street would also be customers for our shopping. And some of it worked.”
Yet while some of the restaurants, more popular shops, and an AMC movie theater did well, “the Galleria mall never really stepped up and survived on its own,” he said.
Marietta Mayor Steve Tumlin, who also serves on the Exhibit Hall Authority’s board, agreed.
“The kingpin was Cumberland Mall,” Tumlin recalled. “…It had the four big boys — Rich’s, Davison’s, Sears and JC Penney — and it was amazing to have those four big…
Read the full article here
