KANAWHA COUNTY, W. Va. (WCHS) — Call it a tale of different decades – maybe of a different era.

There’s the Charleston Town Center of 1983 when it opened – a $100 million showpiece, with a 3-story waterfall and more than 130 tenants at its peak. Leaders hailed it as the largest downtown-based shopping mall east of the Mississippi River.

“The Charleston Town Center is a monument to dreams and vision,” Mayor Mike Roark said at the mall’s ribbon cutting.

Fast forward to Town Center 2021 and three out of four anchor stores are gone. The mall at one point went into receivership and now is for sale.

Walking through the mall recently, Eyewitness News counted more than 40 empty storefronts. There are blocks of closures on the first and second floors. Others on their way out. There are also non-retail tenants occupying some stores, such as the Kanawha County Public Library and the WV Music Hall of Fame. It’s quite the contrast to that exciting start nearly four decades ago.

Michael Birurakis, owner of Mediterranean restaurant Best of Crete, was there opening day.

“It was great for us, because people didn’t know what our food was all about,” he said.

They were in the mall for nearly 30 years before moving to Charleston’s West Side in 2013.

“The mall is a great thing. A lot of traffic – back then, anyhow,” Birurakis said.

Today, not so much.

Birurakis says rent in the food court leading up to 2013 wasn’t cheap but it was affordable, given the business they generated. Over the years things changed, and they decided to relocate for multiple reasons.

“At first they wanted to raise the rent. We said, ‘No, you guys brought in several new restaurants. You’ve diced the pie too many ways. The sales aren’t there for that,’” Birurakis said.

The Town Center is not alone in its struggles. WVU Marketing Chair and Professor Michael Walsh believes 25% of the roughly 1200 malls in the country will not survive.

“It’s a really tough situation, because I think it’s going to be really hard to somehow change consumer preferences and consumer shopping behavior. The fact is, we like buying things online, and I can’t see that changing any time soon. I think that what I believe a lot of the shopping mall operators and owners are really struggling with is how to reimagine the shopping mall and the shopping mall experience,” Walsh said.

The first public sign of the Town Center’s distress came in 2001 when Montgomery Ward, one of the four anchor stores, closed, replaced six years later with Brick Street Insurance Company.

In 2017 the second anchor store, Sears, closed, and in 2019 Macy’s pulled out, leaving JC Penney as the lone anchor store today.

On a cold winter day in Jan. 2019, U.S. Bank National bought the mall at auction on the city’s courthouse steps for $35 million dollars - a third of its original value. The city’s mayor then formed a Mall Task Force to help with the transition of the struggling shopping complex.

Its first and only public meeting was held Feb. 4 of 2019. Two years later the mall was put on the market for sale.

“What we did over the last two years and especially the first year we were here was participate in the negotiation, the deliberation, of making sure that the mall got into a buyer’s hands,” Charleston Mayor Amy Goodwin said.

She says the city’s efforts to revitalize Slack Plaza and the Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center should attract a buyer.

“We did what we believe was necessary, which was to tie up all the loose ends that were left, to make sure that we could get that mall on the market,” Goodwin said.

The listing boasts location and amenities. It doesn’t, however, include the four anchor properties or the mall parking garages. That’s because JC Penny owns its property. Encova Insurance owns the former Montgomery Ward building. The former Sears property is owned by a hotel developer. And the former Macy’s building is now owned by CURA. CURA’S executive director says it is available to anyone interested in buying the mall.

There’s a lot riding on the mall’s future.

“It’s the anchor, if you will, for this portion of downtown Charleston,” Commercial Property Broker Howard Swint said.

He is concerned for the city’s future.

“All the hotels and parking garages and office buildings that are in adjacent blocks will have their values negatively impacted, should the Town Center go dark,” Swint said.

The impact however goes much farther. In 2020 the Town Center brought in a little more than a quarter million dollars in B&O taxes.

The mall also generates more than a million dollars a year in property taxes, funding among other things, schools.

In 2019, the mall generated $1.3 million in tax revenue. In 2020, amid the pandemic, that figure dropped by more than $300,000.

The tax revenue each year goes to four entities. Below is how much each received from property taxes generated in 2019.

• Kanawha County Commission -- $239,785.54

• Kanawha County BOE -- $325,303.46

• City of Charleston -- $183,276.64

• State of WV -- $4,192.05

The mall also pays $300,000 a year to the Charleston Urban Renewal Authority for use of the three parking garages.CURA owns the property under the garages.

The agency has not received a dime in the last three years since the mall has been in receivership. Those garages are operated by a third entity.

“Three structures that are nearing the end of their useful life. The operator is $12 million in debt. There’s $5 million in deferred maintenance,” Swint said.

Swint says that’s based on a report from four years ago. He believes the parking garage structures as well as the legal ownership structure could be an impediment to the legal sale of the town center.

While the future is uncertain, Tim Brady, president and CEO of the Charleston Convention and Visitors Bureau, which promotes the Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center, believes the area still has a lot to offer.

“That used to be the experience - You would come to Charleston, you would see, say, Disney on Ice at the coliseum. You would go to the mall and shop, and then go get dinner somewhere. The mall is a component of that Charleston experience, but I do want to emphasize that even without the mall, we’ve got a thriving dining and shopping scene here in Charleston that is just a couple of blocks away,” Brady said.

The reality, however, faced by many malls: adapt to survive.

“What you’ll see is shopping malls trying to cater toward experience type opportunities for consumers, as opposed to just the tradition retail ‘here’s a bunch of merchandise and we’re just trying to sell it to you.’ It’ll be more like experiences,” Walsh said.

We asked people on Facebook what they would like to see, and they gave a lot of ideas: An ice rink, Olympic size pool, an outdoor mall like Easton in Columbus, indoor amusement park and an aquatic center, just to name a few.

In the meantime, current mall tenants hold on.

“The ones that are inside the mall, I feel for them,” Birurakis said. “I really do.”

“I think that malls will survive,” Walsh said. “I don’t think it’s realistic to think they are going completely away.”

Eyewitness News reached out to Charleston Town Center management and the mall’s owner for this story, but did not hear back from either.

WATCH: Mayor Amy Goodwin's full interview with Eyewitness News reporter Anthony Conn .

WATCH: Dignitaries gather to celebrate the official opening of the Charleston Town Center on Nov. 7, 1983.

WATCH: Second day of grand opening creates long lines to get into the mall.

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WATCH: Shoppers flock to Sears and Montgomery Ward opening.

WATCH: Land was cleared to make way for construction of the Charleston Town Center Mall.