Who killed Greenspoint? A look at the Mall, and a discussion about the community

Welcome back to Houston Historic Retail, where Dead Malls are a bit of a specialty. Chances you learned about this blog through one of our mall-based posts about dead, dying, or otherwise. Houston’s dead mall problem has never been particularly bad. While we’ve had malls that have been problematic, we’ve usually been limited to one to two malls dying at a time, and in the 4th largest city in the United States, and that ain’t too bad. At the moment, the two malls on “high levels of alert” are Pasadena Town Square/Marcoplaza and West Oaks, with Greenspoint bringing up a close third. At this point, I wouldn’t say Greenspoint is really dead. It seems to be doing a bit better than it was ten years ago, even though its most recent “revival” mostly involved a migration of stores from Northwest Mall after they closed. Greenspoint Mall opened in 1976 as a centerpiece of the Friendswood Development Corp’s new project, the Greenspoint neighborhood. Unlike earlier projects undertaken by the company, which involved developing land they had purchased for mineral rights, Greensgate (as it was initially known) was new land purchased for the purpose of creating a new hub for Exxon (Humble Oil) owners of the Friendswood Development Company at the time. The idea would be somewhat influenced by the success of The Galleria in Houston, where a large mall and new office buildings helped spur a residential boom in the area. The Greenspoint plan would be much the same, with Exxon buying up 2000 acres for development around the mall and office spaces they were planning. The plans were ambitious, sometimes being termed Houston’s “second downtown” for the scale they wished to achieve. However, the biggest difference between the development of Greenspoint and the Galleria would be the timing. While the Galleria was started in the ’60s during the oil boom and mostly finished by 1980, work on Greenspoint would begin just as the oil economy began to wobble in a cycle of busts and booms. While Greenspoint was initially a very nice area with a mall that reflected it, by the time our local economy straightened out again in the 90s, the greater neighborhood had deteriorated, and few developers were willing to invest in Greenspoint. From here forward, you hear the familiar story of “Greenspoint was nice until…” and then you hear one of a few different starting points. “until the mid-80s oil bust when everyone moved out.” or “until the 90s when that cop was shot at the mall.” or “until the 2000s when those Katrina evacuees moved in.” The thing is, none of this really is true. The failings of Greenspoint started much earlier. When Friendswood was initially planning the development, it was the largest undertaking they had ever planned. As such, it did little to plan for city services outside of the basic MUD connections (Electric, Water, Sewer, and Gas). There was no planning for police stations, fire stations, etc… This was all expected to be provided by the City of Houston, which annexed the land just after the mall opened.

Unfortunately, though, this annexation would end up creating a “jurisdictional enclave” with the nearest HPD station over 10 miles away. While the developers had planned for the city to immediately build new services in the area, this wasn’t the case. It wouldn’t be until the 1990s, when the Mall actually donated a portion of its space to the city, that Greenspoint would finally get its own HPD substation. Before this, a few improvements were made to the area in the 70s. Such as developing a few residential neighborhoods and an elementary school. The neighborhoods would have slightly above-average homes on good-sized lots. However, by the late 70s, fewer homes were being built on increasingly smaller lots. By the 80s, Greenspoint would then see a large number of “high-end” apartments developed for the mainly oil and gas crowd who lived in the area, and with the 1985 oil crash, after a large number were laid off, Greenspoint found themselves with vacant apartments and nothing drawing anyone to them. The luxury style of most apartments demanded a high rate, and the location was rarely convenient to anyone who didn’t work in the area. This stop in residential development meant the city would leave the Greenspoint area to fend mostly for itself. Don’t worry; the City was kind enough to install a Fire Station by 2015! During the mid-80s, crime spiked throughout Houston, but jurisdictional enclaves like Greenspoint became notorious for them. Not because of the fact that it was a bad part of town but rather because it was a very nice part of town with no nearby enforcement. Greenspoint Mall was particularly a magnet for violent crimes due to its popularity and lack of security to compensate. Unfortunately, by the time the aforementioned Police Substation had been built in the mall, Greenspoint’s fate was all but sealed. By the 90s, many former luxury apartments had been converted into government-sponsored housing. This saw a rapid decline in the socioeconomic status of the area’s residents and a decrease in the amount of crime. In the late 90s and early 2000s the area experienced a small resurgence with the boom in O&G that occurred around this time, area apartments were refurbished, and somewhat re-occupied, only to fall vacant again. Lately, Greenspoint has seen an increase in commercial growth, but larger chains haven’t been operating in the area. Independents and local chains mostly find the Greenspoint Mall and surrounding shopping areas suitable. Even the office tenants are now smaller companies. Although some legacy O&G companies still have their Greenspoint digs, Exxon ditched theirs in 2015. Truly a lack of planning nearly killed Greenspoint from the start, it wasn’t the only area to have this occur. Alief went through a similar experience and still has yet to recover. It’s hard to say exactly what lies in the future for Greenspoint Mall, but downsizing is likely a good start. The mall is far too spread out, and if they were willing to demolish an empty wing or two and consolidate the remaining stores closer to the center, they would likely see good results. West Oaks tried this by demolishing the former Mervyn’s Wing for a new movie theater, and it helped to buy them a few years. The fact that Marcoplaza and West Oaks have already tried tenant consolidated on a larger scale and have had little success leads me to believe Greenspoint will be around for at least a bit longer.

10 comments

  1. this sad day i lived in the Greenspoint years ago at that time it was booming with customers stores and all however the economy has went through some hardships and allowed the heart of gp to go down witch now looks lifeless now i look at the place and the potential it still has

  2. By the 90s many of the former luxury apartments had been converted into government-sponsored housing. – That was the end…..

  3. I’ve noticed that when people remember this mall they often mention the Tilt arcade, which was large and worthy of a major market mall. They had a lot of large basketball and other prize games, a two-seater hydraulic motion theater ride, and a Sega Waverunner jetski simulator. From the photos it looks like the boxing place has taken over that space since then.

  4. It’s been a few years since I’ve been to Greenspoint Mall, I think my last visit was probably around 2016 or so, but I’ve been to the mall many times over the years including when the mall was still the place to be back before The Woodlands Mall more or less replaced this mall. As big and packed as this mall was back for the turn of the Millennium, it physically deteriorated quite quickly during the 2000s. Even by the late 2000s, the physical state of the mall was terrible and large parts of the mall were not even air conditioned and were quite musty smelling. This situation became even worse as time went on during the 2-3 visits I made to this place in the 2010s.

    The abandoned pizza place in the food court was, I believe, a Roman Delight Pizza. For many years, Brothers Pizza was one of the highlights at the food court, but they moved out at some point and were replaced with another pizza chain (I believe the aforementioned Roman Delight) back when the food court still did good business from Exxon employees.

    The Bag n Luggage is a knock-off of well-known Houston luggage store Bag n Baggage. That might have been a Bag n Baggage at one time, I don’t remember. The little corridor around the Bag n Luggage was the old Montgomery Ward mall entrance. I remember that part of the mall very well! Of course, Federated really didn’t want Montgomery Ward to be at this mall, but they were compelled to add them to prevent possible competition from a Deauville developed mall (with Simon’s help I believe) anchored by Wards. This led to a lawsuit by Deauville against Wards and Federated, but I’m sure preventing the competition was worth the headache for Federated and probably Wards as well.

    That’s a great find with those Auchan baskets! Instead of filling those baskets with french bread, I suppose one will have to settle for French Toast school uniforms!

  5. I’ve been able to grab the bus over here a few times during layovers for work. It’s definitely a sad place whose former glory peeks through.

    I have also visited the sister mall, West Oaks a couple times as well. Wanting to get to Pasadena Town Square but unfortunately the bus system doesn’t go over there. Good post!

    1. Indeed it is! I actually tried stopping in to take some photos but it’s offers from the Outlet problem of being consistently staffed.

  6. I like that classic Greenspoint logo marker. The wall of movie posters is a neat/sad snapshot of how quickly COVID shut down movie theaters, that is everything that was out when the theaters all shut down.

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