The Mall Everyone Wrote Off Is the Real Story in Cowlitz County This Fall
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
Drive past Exit 39 on I-5 most weekday afternoons and the parking lot at Three Rivers Crossing still looks like it did five years ago: wide open, mostly empty, the kind of lot that makes people assume the mall is on its way out. That assumption isn't unreasonable. Sears closed there in 2013. Macy's followed in 2017. For most of the last decade, the story of the Kelso mall has been a story of subtraction.
That story stopped being accurate about two years ago, and most of Cowlitz County hasn't caught up to it yet.
The decline is real history, not exaggeration. The mall opened in 1987 on the site of a former golf course, right off I-5, and for its first two decades it worked the way regional malls were supposed to work: JCPenney, Sears, and The Bon Marché as anchors, a food court, steady traffic pulling from Kelso, Longview, and the smaller towns around them. Then the 2000s happened to it the way they happened to a lot of enclosed malls. Emporium closed in the early 2000s. Sears announced its closure in late 2012 and shut down in January 2013, which pulled down foot traffic for everyone else. Radio Shack, Sam Goody, KB Toys, Big 5 Sporting Goods, Fred Meyer Jewelers, Chuck E. Cheese's, all gone within a few years of each other. Macy's, which had absorbed The Bon Marché, announced its own closure in January 2017 as part of a wave of 68 store closings nationwide.
By the late 2010s, the mall's food court had shrunk to a couple of local tenants, and the building's reputation had settled into place: a mostly-empty anchor with a movie theater and a gym attached. That reputation is what most residents are still carrying around. It's also out of date.
Two local businessmen bought the mall for $20 million in November 2024. The new ownership group renamed it Three Rivers Crossing and started making the kind of moves that don't get noticed until you're standing in the parking lot wondering why there are suddenly cars where there used to be none. Their stated plan was to renovate the food court and build additional restaurants around the perimeter of the lot, and by February 2026 it was reported that Chick-fil-A had signed on for a new location directly south of Target, in the corner of what used to be JCPenney's parking lot. Full build-out on that one is expected in 2027, so it's not open yet, but the commitment itself is the kind of signal commercial landlords don't make on a property they expect to keep shrinking.
The mall still carries its original anchors today: JCPenney, Sportsman's Warehouse, and Regal Cinemas, alongside Target, Safeway, Bath & Body Works, and Planet Fitness on the surrounding pad sites. What's changed is everything filling in around them.
Two new food tenants have already moved into the space: Colby's Burgers and The Cheesecakery. An Italian concept is set to open this fall, joining a lineup that also includes an existing Dutch Bros on the property. None of these are the kind of national chain openings that make regional news. They're the kind of thing you only notice if you're the person who actually walks the mall on a Saturday, which is exactly why most of the county hasn't clocked the pattern yet.
Here's what's landed or is landing at Three Rivers Crossing within the last two years:
Put together with the food court renovation plan and the Chick-fil-A commitment, this isn't random tenant churn. It's a property that new ownership is actively trying to fill, on a site that still pulls real numbers: 49 acres, more than 3,000 parking spaces, and frontage on a stretch of I-5 that carries over 183,000 vehicles a day. That's not a dying property. That's a property that had been running on inertia and just started getting reinvested in.
The reason this matters right now, in late September, is that everything else on the Cowlitz County calendar just wrapped for the season. Longview's Squirrel Fest, the county's biggest single-day draw, ran its 15th annual edition on August 22 at Lower Columbia College, pulling in the crowds it's pulled in for over a decade to celebrate the Nutty Narrows Bridge that local builder Amos Peters put up in 1963 to give squirrels a safe way across a busy street near the library. The Rotary Club of Longview has run the festival since 2019, and this year's move to the college campus gave it room to add vendor space and parking that the old Civic Circle location couldn't offer. It's a genuinely good event, and it's also over until next August.
The Kelso Highlander Festival and Scottish Games at Tam O'Shanter Park ran September 12. That's done too.
What's still running, at least for a few more weeks, is the weekly stuff. The Cowlitz Community Farmers Market sets up every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the parking lot of the Cowlitz County Event Center at the fairgrounds, and it doesn't have a hard end date the way the festivals do. The Castle Rock Sunday Market, over at Haircut Express in downtown Castle Rock, runs weekly from May through October, which means it's in its last handful of weekends for the year.
So the shape of the season has flipped. Through summer, Cowlitz County's calendar was built around one-time destination events: Squirrel Fest, the Highlander Games, the county fair. Now that those are behind us, what's left is the recurring weekly stuff, the farmers markets, plus a mall that's quietly become worth checking on again.
Put those two threads next to each other and you get a version of the fall weekend that wasn't available two years ago. Morning at the Cowlitz Community Farmers Market at the fairgrounds, or the Castle Rock Sunday Market if that's closer, while both are still going. Evening at Three Rivers Crossing, where the food court now has three fresh options instead of the two tired holdovers it had been running on, with an Italian spot about to make it four.
That's a small thing on its own. But it's the kind of small thing that adds up to a different answer than the one most residents would give if you asked them what's changed in Kelso lately. The honest answer, right now, isn't a festival or a park project. It's a mall that spent a decade losing tenants and just spent two years quietly getting some back.
If you've been driving past Exit 39 assuming nothing's different, it might be worth pulling in this weekend. The parking lot still looks the same from the highway. What's inside it doesn't.
Whether you're settling into a Saturday routine here or thinking ahead to what a move in Cowlitz County might look like, Dawn Jensen-Beaudoin knows this stretch of Southwest Washington block by block. If you're curious what your home could be worth in today's market, reach out for a Free Home Valuation.
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