Hopkinsville’s oldest retail store, J.C. Penney, is slated to close permanently.
The company plans to shut down 154 of 850 stores nationwide as part of its debt restructuring plan after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on May 15. The Hopkinsville store is one of six in Kentucky that will close, according to a list published Thursday.
(Photo by Jennifer P. Brown)
As an anchor store, J.C. Penney was the last of the original tenants in Hopkinsville’s Bradford Square shopping center, which opened as Pennyrile Mall in the early 1970s. It occupied the largest space in the mall.
Christian County Historian William T. Turner said the company opened its first store in downtown Hopkinsville around 1931. The store moved in 1942 to the former J.H. Anderson building, at Eighth and Main streets, where it did business for roughly three decades before leaving downtown with other retailers that filled the new mall.
“It is sad to see it close,” Turner said.
J.C. Penney was incorporated by founder James Cash Penney in 1913. He got his start in retail as a partner in a Wyoming store called Golden Rule in 1898.
At its peak, in 1973, the company had 2,053 stores. During the late 1960s and early ‘70s, J.C. Penney stores across the country left old downtown retail centers and moved into suburban shopping malls.
In addition to clothing, jewelry and housewares, the Hopkinsville store had a hair salon.
The original mall building now has only two other retail stores still operating, Hibbett Sports and Gordman’s, a discount department store whose parent company also filed for Chapter 11 in mid-May. A sign on Gordman’s says the store will be closing, but on Friday an employee indicated it was unclear if the store would be shutting down.
Much of Bradford Square’s interior retail space is vacant, but a large portion of the building is now occupied by the TTEC call center. In January 2017, owner Rick Vaughn, of North Carolina-based Granite Development, told the Kentucky New Era he was starting a major overhaul of the property. A handful of remaining stores that had interior entrances moved out. Vaughn said he was shifting the design to a strip mall so that all of the stores would have exterior entrances. Dunham’s Sports was touted in a large sign as the next big tenant for the property, but that addition never materialized.
J.C. Penney cited the coronavirus pandemic as a major factor in its bankruptcy. The local store closed under a state order for non-essential businesses to suspend in-store transactions on March 23, but the store did not join other retailers in reopening under Kentucky’s Healthy-at-Work guidelines on May 20.
(Jennifer P. Brown is the editor and founder of Hoptown Chronicle. Reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org.)
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. She spent 30 years as a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition.
