What's Next For Birmingham's Century Plaza Property?

BIRMINGHAM, AL — Anyone who did any shopping in Birmingham in the 1970s and 80s likely visited Century Plaza mall on Crestwood Boulevard and Oporto-Madrid Boulevard. The mall was considered state-of-the-art when it was built in 1975 but the building has been empty since 2009, but action by the Birmingham City Council Tuesday took a step toward changing that.

The council voted unanimously Tuesday to rezone the property from CB-2 (Contingency General Business District) to Q-1 (Qualified Light Manufacturing District), paving the way for an Amazon logistics and distribution center, which the council said in a statement would provide more than 300 jobs for the area.

According to a statement from the council, the proposed facility is designed for Amazon package delivery service. Packages arriving at this facility are prepackaged in cardboard boxes and labeled for shipping within local neighborhoods and areas surrounding the facility. The packages are brought into the facility via semi trucks, using designated loading dock positions. The model limits the number of large trucks that would arrive at the facility in order to mitigate traffic concerns.

The new center could open by summer of 2021.

Pelham-based Lumpkin Development purchased the mall in January of 2018 and announced "big plans" for the property, but those plans did not materialize.

In its heyday, the mall included anchor stores such as Sears, Rich's, Loveman's and JC Penny, and later Pizitz, McRae's and Macy's. When it closed in March of 2009, fewer than 40 stores remained open.

Within a couple of years in the 2000s, Eastwood Mall and Century Plaza — both at one time busy retail centers within a block of one another — closed or changed functions.

Eastwood Mall, which was the first enclosed shopping mall in the south when it was built in 1960, was razed in 2007 and the property was used to build a Walmart and surrounding shopping center.