Florence Mall- (Florence, Kentucky)

     Florence Mall is a regional mall located in  Florence, Kentucky, a few miles south of Cincinnati, Ohio. This is the largest mall in Northern Kentucky with over 130 store and food court and four anchor stores, Sears, JCPenney and two Macy's department stores.

     Florence Mall was developed by Homart Development, a real estate subsidiary of Sears, Roebuck & Company. The malls opening in September 1976 consisted of around 90 stores, and anchor stores Sears, Roebuck & Co., and Pogue's. JCPenney and Shillito's opened in 1977 and 1978. Other than Sears and JCPenney, Pogue's and Shillito's would change names continuously through the malls history as a result of store merges and buy outs. The Shillito's changed merged with competing Rike's department store chain, creating Shillito-Rikes for several years before being merged into the Lazarus department store chain.

     Pogue's department store converted to L.S. Aryes in 1983 before being sold to Hess's in 1987. Hess's went out of business in 1993 and the anchor was filled with Lazarus Home Store a year later. A major renovation consisted of a newer style food court and an added 64 inline tenants. In 2003, Macy's purchased Lazarus, former Lazarus-Macy's from 2003-2005, before dropping the Lazarus name entirely. Currently the mall is doing very well with its business and a major retail hub of Northern Kentucky and I see many more years of success coming its way.

     A very interesting story with the water tower in the photo below. Before the mall even opened, the water tower was constructed and painted "Florence Mall". This form of commercial advertising was considered a violation to federal and state laws. The "M" in "Mall" was painted over and a "Y" was put in its place spelling "Y'all". This fixed the so called violation and was pragmatic to the dialect of the local culture.

These photos below are of the mall this August as a bonus visit to my trip to Cincinnati for the Forest Fair Village mall.

Strange there closed so early on a weekday.

Neat to see such a large Hallmark store still opened.

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