Owner of Lexington’s Largest Mall Files for Bankruptcy

I'd imagine that most of you who have visited Lexington have paid a visit to Fayette Mall at least once.

With three anchor stores (well, two now) that have phenomenal big and tall clothing departments for men, you can count me among them. That third store, by the way, is JCPenney, which has closed.

I actually got lost in that mall a while back. It was in 2007, and my family and I decided to go on a little jaunt to Lexington to--are you ready for this?--be there the day Billy Gillispie was hired to be the new University of Kentucky head basketball coach.

It was an exciting time in Lexington. In the Fayette Mall, there was a UK store that was selling brand new Billy Gillispie t-shirts. My sister bought one.

As we all, know the Gillispie/Kentucky/Big Blue Nation relationship was always ever tepid, at best. Two years later, when he was fired, I told Sharon to hang on to that t-shirt, but she had already gotten rid of it.

That UK store, by the way, was hard to find because one of the mall's anchor stores, the now-defunct Sears, was right in the middle and you actually had to walk THROUGH it to get to the rest of the mall. Very confusing. I kept wondering where they were hiding all these stores I was SURE I'd seen on the directory.

Well, the mall has since been renovated and is much easier to navigate. But times have been tough in 2020--no surprise there--and a dearth of traffic has led to a bankruptcy filing for Fayette Mall's owner, CBL, according to a report from Kentucky.com.

The mall has not closed and will, in fact, remain open during the bankruptcy process, but malls were in shaky shape prior to the pandemic, to begin with. CBL, which owns more than 100 malls, has already seen a number of its malls' tenants shutter.

2021 can't get here quick enough.