The Rise and Fall of America's Most Scandalous Mall Empire: Sharpstown Mall, Texas

On September 14, 1961, three days after a hurricane hit the Texas coast, about eight thousand people came to the southwest edge of Houston to watch a shopping mall open. The main speaker was Ted Kennedy, the President’s younger brother. The mall was Sharpstown Center, the first enclosed, air-conditioned mall in Houston. Ten years later, its name belonged to one of the biggest political scandals in Texas history. This video traces the full history of Sharpstown Mall, from developer Frank Sharp’s master-planned community of 1955 through the mall’s 1961 opening with Foley’s, Montgomery Ward, and Battelstein’s. It covers the 1971 Sharpstown stock-fraud scandal, which reached the governor and the speaker of the Texas House and collapsed the bank that was one of the mall’s original tenants. It follows the mall’s surprising growth afterward, including the second floor built over the heads of shoppers in 1980, and then its decline after the 1986 oil bust: a failed fifty-million-dollar renovation, foreclosure in 2001, the loss of every department store, and bankruptcy in 2008. It ends with the mall’s reinvention as PlazAmericas, and with the 2022 death of a deputy constable working security there.