The Shoppes at Bel Air
shopping mall in Alabama, United States
The Shoppes at Bel Air is a super-regional shopping mall, located in Mobile, Alabama, United States. The mall has a gross leasable area of 1,345,000 sq ft (125,000 m2). It is the oldest continuously operating enclosed super-regional mall in Alabama and serves as one of the primary retail venues for the west Mobile shopping district located at the vicinity of Airport Boulevard (Mobile County Highway 56) and Interstate 65. Currently, Belk, Dillard's, Surge Entertainment Center by Drew Brees, and Target serve as the mall's anchor stores. The mall also features more than 130 stores and restaurants; it has a vacant anchor that was once JCPenney.
History
Planning, Construction, and Opening
More than ten years of research and planning took place before Bel Air Mall finally came to fruition in August 1967. Designed by the architecture firm of Herbert H. Johnson Associates of Washington, DC, the enclosed mall was developed by WKRG-TV founder Kenneth R. Giddens, William Lyon and Jay Altmayer as the centerpiece of an automobile-centric edge city known as Bel Air. In its original configuration, the mall consisted of a one-level 900-foot (270 m) long retail corridor of fifty in-line tenants anchored by Sears and local department store Hammel's. Over the years, the mall would be complemented by extensive commercial developments in the form of movie theaters, communal strip malls, office complexes and upscale apartment complexes in surrounding Bel Air development sites. It was originally decorated with nine Grecian statues that "originally stood at Versailles and were cast in the 1850s by order of Napoleon III." The mall took its name from its location at the intersection of Beltline Highway and Airport Boulevard.
“The Shoppes at Bel Air” enters the record as shopping mall in Alabama, United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Shoppes, shopping and mall can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4881719. Authority coordinates are 30.673, -88.124. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Shoppes at Bel Air” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.