By Larry Felton Johnson
[This is an expansion and republication of an evergreen article we first published in July of 2017, when the Courier’s web traffic was about a tenth of our current readership.]
On Nov. 18, 1954, an article in the Atlanta Constitution opened with the following paragraph. “The Belmont Hills Shopping Center, planned as the largest center in the Southeast, will hold its grand opening on Thursday, with Georgia’s Miss Neva Jane Langley, Miss America of 1953, and Seventh Dist. Rep. Henderson Lanham leading ceremonies.”
The article described the grand pageantry planned for opening day.
Bill Ward, the project developer, would welcome a former Miss America, who would then visit each store in the center. The motorcade bringing her to Belmont Hills would begin in Atlanta, drive through Marietta to Acworth, and turn back to Marietta where she would be given a tour of the Lockheed plant.
Anita Ekberg, who was Miss Sweden and later became an actress, was also on hand for the event.
It was quite an opening for a shopping center that would be considered small by the standards of malls at their peak during the 1970s and 80s.
Belmont Hills was developed by Ward to capitalize on the rapid postwar growth in Smyrna.
Kennesaw State University historian Thomas Scott reported in his book Cobb County, Georgia and the Origins of the Suburban South: A Twentieth-Century History
During the rise of the suburban shopping mall in the 1950s and 1960s, Cobb County became home to Cobb Center on South Cobb Drive, Town and Country on Roswell Road, and, in 1973, Cumberland Mall. Cumberland, the first enclosed shopping mall in the county, was larger than the other three shopping centers combined, both in square footage and number of stores.
As late as the 1990s, new stores were still opening in Belmont Hills, although each closing brought tenants less desirable from a retailer’s point of view. Like most early shopping centers, Belmont Hills went into steep decline, first battered by competition from larger enclosed malls and, finally, by changes in the American public’s shopping habits.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which had provided fanfare for Belmont Hills’ 1954 opening, reported on July 30, 2009, “Belmont Hills Shopping Center in Smyrna is being unceremoniously demolished 55 years after it opened in a blaze of hype and excitement.”
The article also said, “Smyrna City Manager Wayne Wright said the city prefers empty land to what’s at Belmont Hills now. Besides attracting vagrants and rodents, the rundown buildings send a bad message about Smyrna.”
Jack Halpern, who had owned the center for 45 years, began planning to develop it as a mixed-use development. By August 2016, Halpern had developed the Village of Belmont, and the first businesses began to open.
Be the first to comment on "The Rise and Fall (and rise) of the Belmont Hills shopping center in Smyrna"