AUSTIN, Texas — For over 40 years, Highland Mall, between Airport Boulevard and I-35, with its dozens of stores, was the premier shopping center for people in Austin.
From the time it opened in 1971 through the 1990s, it was one of the busiest indoor shopping malls in the city. For shoppers back then, Austin had entered the big leagues.
But about 30 years after the mall opened, it was in decline as so-called “big box stores” like JC Penney and Foleys moved out. On April 30, 2015, Highland Mall officially closed after 44 business years.
The mall had been built on the land that once belonged to St. John’s Orphanage and its surrounding grounds, a place where Black children were given a home and educated from 1906 to 1946. It was supported by several, local African American Baptist churches.
After the orphanage closed, the U.S. Navy expressed interest in converting the imposing three-story building into a military hospital, but the plans were later abandoned, and St. Johns sat empty until a fire destroyed it in 1956.
The land surrounding the orphanage was sold to developers who built houses for mostly white homebuyers on the near-northeast side of Austin. Eventually, some of that land was used to erect Highland Mall.
In recent years, the abandoned mall has been reborn as a fresh, new campus for Austin Community College, and as home to Austin’s PBS TV channel.
Such is the course of history: The very land where orphan children once played, and later where thousands did their holiday shopping, and where today, college students are preparing for their careers – it all happened on what was once the farmland and home for children who had no home.