Rehoboth Mall, Rehoboth Beach, DE

Rehoboth Mall, Rehoboth Beach, DE

  February 25, 2018    Robby S.

---

REHOBOTH MALL 
18908 REHOBOTH MALL BLVD
REHOBOTH BEACH, DE 

If you haven't already read about my experience exploring the Kmart in Rehoboth Beach, I highly suggest that you go do that now! It gives a bit of background to the competitive nature of the Rehoboth Beach Resort.

Now getting into the mall itself...

The Rehoboth Mall was one of the first malls to open in the Rehoboth area, and to this day remains the only indoor mall of the area. Quickly other development such as the Rehoboth Outlets (Now owned by Tanger Outlets and consists of three separate outlet centers along DE-1). In the early days of the mall, a Roses department store was the main anchor. Currently the nearest Roses store is 16 miles away in Millsboro, DE.



The mall is set up in quite an awkward way, and consists of three main parts:

1) There is an indoor section of the mall. When the mall first opened, it housed many notable retailers such as Hallmark and other national chains. Within the last decade, the space has mostly been used by local shops with the last two stores, RadioShack and Alterations by Soulja, leaving in 2017.

2) There are a series of larger stores on the outside of the mall. Presently, these consist of Walmart, Peebles, Any1Fitness, Tuesday Morning, Michaels, and Rite Aid.

3) Various small stores along the edge of the property. Presently, these include Taco Bell, Friendly's, Popeyes, Wendy's, Pizza Hut, and Capital One Bank.

From the outside, the mall looks like it's doing just fine. I know whenever I'm in Rehoboth Beach we frequently shop at the Walmart with occasional stops at Peebles and the various restaurants, but that's not what makes the Rehoboth Mall the subject of today's article.

Some of the restaurants that line DE-1

The outdoors Peebles store

Tuesday Morning (Formerly Roses), Michael's, and Rite Aid (Formerly Eckerd)

The Walmart of the Rehoboth Mall. Despite this Walmart having a pretty big Food Center, it technically isn't considered a Supercenter store.

What sparked my appeal to the Rehoboth Mall was the interior, which has been covered before by some channels on YouTube (Be sure to check them out, I highly recommend it).

Despite it being covered prior, I thought that I'd give my own two sense on the subject as the inside of the mall is like a blast from the past.

Approaching the mall entrance (which is between Peebles and Tuesday Morning) you are greeted by a sad sign listing all the stores in the mall. As of January 2018, the mall is completely vacant, but some businesses still remain on the sign outside.

A sign for RadioShack, Any1Fitness, Dear Nails & Hair, and Alterations by Soulja next to the entrance

Upon entering the mall, you are greeted with a very 80s-esque interior complete with wood paneling and white concrete

A view looking into the mall

Looking back outside of the mall

When I went to take these pictures (way back in April of 2017), all that remained was RadioShack and Alterations by Soulja, and as I mentioned earlier, all of whom have since left.

In the first picture, that tenant used to be a Buffet known as the Cheerful Crab. I have absolutely no idea when that closed.

After rounding the first corner, you are left at the end of a quite short hallway filled with vacant tenants (Besides RadioShack)

RadioShack was pretty happy about opening a Sprint store inside... It's too bad that there was already a Sprint store half a mile away.

Despite Tuesday Morning having a sign inside of the mall, you actually can't enter from inside.

There's nothing too much to say about these stores. They have all been closed for years, but you can still make out some of the labelscars (the little outline of the sign leftover from when the signage was removed) hinting at what was there before.

The Cheerful Crab Buffet

A view looking down the corridor

A maintenance hallway. The restrooms are also located back there

Peering inside one of the abandoned stores

One of the abandoned stores. The odd thing is that this is actually two are three stores morphed together to make one retail pad. I don't know what it used to be.

This quite clearly used to be a Hair Cuttery. They moved about a mile down the road next to Giant (Also called Stop & Shop in New England)

Hair Cuttery was weird as it had full glass windows and a door on the front of its store despite being inside. 

Another view of that maintenance hallway. At the top used to be a picture of two seagulls, which is the mall's icon. It appears as if this was meant to be a store of its own during the planning stages of the building and then turned into a small corridor later on, as seen by the patterns of wood paneling and the width between stores.

So, yeah. Getting that spooky vibe yet? The Rehoboth Mall is what urban explorers like to call 'dead malls'. All that means is that there are WAY more store closed than there are open. At the moment, there is a grand total of 0 stores still open inside the mall.

At the end of that corridor is what used to be a small food court. Clearly, there couldn't have been food shops there in forever as the directory at the end of the hallway had no restaurants labeled.

That's the store directory inside of the mall. I also found a document online from the Rehoboth Mall website that has a different list of stores that used to occupy the mall:

Due to the flyer being named RM_Flyer_09, I think this is a list of stores that occupied the mall way back in 2009.

In the food court area, there were three noteworthy things:

1) An indoor entrance to Peebles (which was locked)
2) A window looking into Any1Fitness
3) Alterations by Soulja (now closed)

The (Locked) indoor entrance to Peebles

Some windows looking into Any1Fitness. This used to be a discount movie theater, and the poster slots are still on the wall. Something odd about those posters, however, is that they advertise for CLUBFitness, which was Any1Fitness' name up until 2016.

I remember that once when I was little and the mall wasn't as dead, this used to be a Kick'n Chicken

Rear entrance to the mall

Notice the seagull logo has once again been removed from the wall

What used to be the food court

Alterations by Soulja

So that about wraps it up for the Rehoboth Mall. For those of you who are wondering, no there is no water left in those pools, and there probably hasn't been for 15 years. One thing I was surprised to see was that there were actual functioning coin-op dispensers scattered throughout the food court area, so if you want a small sticky hand for 25¢ come to the Rehoboth Mall (although by now its doors are probably sealed shut)

By the way, I found a picture of the old movie theater that used to be in the mall

Enjoy!

Until next time