Charles Towne Square opened in 1976 at 2401 Mall Drive in North Charleston, South Carolina, developed by Melvin Simon & Associates as the third enclosed shopping mall in the greater Charleston area, following Northwoods Mall and Ashley Plaza Mall, both of which had opened earlier in the 1970s. Original anchors were Montgomery Ward, JCPenney and Edward’s, a local department store later sold and renamed Big K-Edwards, alongside roughly 75 specialty stores and a General Cinemas multiplex.
The mall struggled through the 1990s as specialty tenants departed, and in 1997 the enclosed structure was demolished, with Montgomery Ward the only anchor initially left standing before it too filed bankruptcy and closed in 2001. Piccadilly Cafeterias, the sole tenant to survive the demolition by relocating into a new freestanding building on the site, continued operating until a sudden closure on July 22, 2012. An 18-screen Regal Cinemas multiplex opened on the site in 1999 but was itself demolished in January 2020 to make way for an apartment building.
The former Montgomery Ward building was converted into a Verizon Wireless call center, officially dedicated in February 2005, and a new North Charleston City Hall opened nearby in September 2009. Mall Drive, the road serving the original property, remains in use as the address for this office and municipal complex. The mall’s distinctive “town square” clock, a fixture of the original 1976 design, was donated to the City of North Charleston and later restored for display at a nearby Tanger Outlet Center food court.
That closure and full conversion to office and civic use inside a single decade of the mall’s 1997 demolition reflects how thoroughly this North Charleston property has left retail entirely, distinguishing it clearly from the similarly-named St. Charles Towne Center in Waldorf, Maryland, an active regional mall with which this property is frequently and incorrectly conflated due to the shared name.
