Sikes Senter Mall Is Finally Closing. Its Tenants Keep Choosing Downtown Instead.

On her last day at Sikes Senter Mall, Withershins Menagerie co-owner Amy Jones Walker watched regulars who'd walked the mall's halls for exercise come in one more time to say goodbye. The oddities shop, known for handmade gifts, crystals, and the kind of merchandise you don't find at a chain store, had lost its lease in December when the city declined to renew any agreements inside the mall it now owns. By early January, Withershins had a new address near the Wichita County Annex on Scott Avenue, making it the first business to leave Sikes Senter under city ownership and, without anyone quite planning it that way, the first to test whether downtown could absorb what the mall was shedding.

It's a useful test case, because the mall has been shedding tenants for years. What's different this time isn't that a store is leaving. It's where it's going.

The Old Pattern Was Two Directions, Not Three

Every anchor and national retailer that has left Sikes Senter in the last five years alone has followed one of two paths. National chains with enough leverage to negotiate new terms simply relocated to other Wichita Falls shopping centers: Old Navy, The Buckle, and American Eagle all made that move and kept operating in town. Anchors without a local alternative left the market entirely, and this is the more consequential list. Both Dillard's locations closed in 2022. JCPenney followed in 2024, then At Home a few months later, leaving the mall with no open anchor stores for the first time in its history.

Neither path led downtown. Through this whole stretch of anchor and chain departures, downtown Wichita Falls wasn't in the conversation when a mall tenant needed a new home. It didn't have the retail footprint to absorb them, and the mall's gravitational pull ran the other way, toward the shopping centers that could offer the same kind of parking and visibility Sikes Senter once did.

That's the backdrop that makes Withershins interesting. It didn't have a national chain's leverage to relocate laterally, and it didn't want to leave town. Downtown was the only real option, according to the coverage of the move, because retail space elsewhere in the city was already limited. So a business priced out of the mall by a public buyer ended up on Scott Avenue instead of another shopping center across town.

Why the City Bought a Dying Mall in the First Place

The city didn't buy Sikes Senter because it wanted to run a mall. It bought sixty acres it plans to demolish and rebuild. The Wichita Falls City Council, alongside the Economic Development Corporation and the 4B Sales Tax Corporation, voted unanimously on August 14, 2025, to authorize a purchase of up to $28 million. The sale closed on October 15, 2025, at a final price of $26 million, transferring the property from Summit Properties USA to the city.

Chamber of Commerce CEO Ron Kitchens framed the calculation bluntly at the council meeting: doing nothing meant a dead mall, and dead malls drag down everything around them. He's also been candid that this isn't a rescue of the mall's tenants. With no lease renewals on offer, city and chamber officials have described their present job less as running Sikes Senter and more as managing an orderly exit, relocating businesses out before demolition rather than trying to keep the mall alive as a going concern.

That distinction matters if you're trying to understand what happened to Withershins, and to the roughly 32 businesses and 170 employees who were still operating inside the mall as of November 2025. They weren't victims of a slow death by consumer indifference, the story that's explained every anchor closure since 2022. They were tenants of a building the city had already decided to tear down, working against a lease clock that wasn't going to reset.

Where the Displaced Keep Landing

Withershins isn't downtown's only new arrival this year, and the coincidence of timing is worth sitting with. In January, IWG, one of the largest shared workspace providers in the world, opened on the twelfth floor of the Big Blue building, a space developer Will Kelty had spent over a decade renovating after it sat vacant for years. In May, AB Foods & Catering held its grand opening at Element 120 on Gregory Street, bringing scratch-made soul food to a stretch of downtown that Forward Wichita Falls CEO Moriah Williams has said needs exactly this kind of foot traffic to support existing restaurants and coffee shops.

None of these openings are explicitly tied to the mall's closure. IWG's move was years in the making, and AB Foods relocated from Houston for reasons that had nothing to do with Sikes Senter's lease terms. But they're happening in the same six-month window as the mall's first wave of tenant displacement, and they're happening in the same three or four blocks. Downtown Wichita Falls is absorbing new business activity at the exact moment the mall is losing it, and for a business like Withershins with nowhere else obvious to go, that overlap isn't background noise. It's the reason the shop still exists in Wichita Falls at all.

Sixty Acres, No Finish Line Yet

What replaces the mall is still an open question, and residents who want a firm date are going to be disappointed for a while longer. The city brought in Cypress Equities to manage the property during the transition and sent out a request for proposals to developers interested in the site, branded by Forward Wichita Falls as The Corridor at University Town Center. In June, the organization released concept renderings showing green space, residential housing, retail development, and a new stadium for Midwestern State University spread across the sixty acres.

Mayor Tim Short described the developer search in March as deliberately broad, comparing it to fielding multiple offers on a house rather than settling for the first one that shows interest. As of the most recent public update, Forward Wichita Falls says it's still conducting interviews and evaluating proposals, with no completion date set and no guarantee yet about how closely the final design will match the June renderings. The organization has said it hopes to announce a selected developer within a few months, but that timeline has already slipped once since a spring target of choosing by the end of summer.

The uncertainty is real, and so is the years-long pattern of anchor departures that preceded it. What's changed is the direction some of the smaller businesses are moving when their leases run out. Withershins is the first Sikes Senter tenant on record to land downtown rather than at another shopping center or out of the market entirely, and the storefronts filling in around it suggest that choice is getting easier to make, not harder.

If you've shopped at Sikes Senter for years and you're wondering where your favorite mall vendor went, downtown is worth checking before you assume they left town for good.

Marc McCown and the team at McCown Real Estate keep an eye on shifts like this because they shape which parts of Wichita Falls feel like the center of things, block by block, year by year.