Full circle
In 1996 100 Oaks had a grand re-opening, including a new retailing focus on
discount and outlet stores, and, on the site of the demolished MegaMarket, the
Hollywood 27 movie theater, which was, and is, the most screens under one roof
in the region. The first level retail was remodeled to more closely resemble a
traditional strip mall, with big box retailers facing the parking lot.
Those retailers, and the movie theater, generally did well.
The interior mall did not, becoming increasingly empty and kind of creepy as
time went on. There are few sights more desolate than an abandoned food court.
The blaring canned music echoing down the largely deserted mall didn’t help things seem more cheery, either.
It was time for another revival, and when Vanderbilt Medical Center signed an
agreement in July 2007, to lease almost 440,000 square feet —more than half of 100 Hundred Oaks Mall—for the purpose of creating a second Medical Center campus, Carolyn Suschnick
smiled.
“I think it’s fabulous,” she said of Vanderbilt’s revival of 100 Oaks. “The mall has become embarrassing.”
Suschnick, who lives in Maury County with her husband, a senior network engineer
with GE Health Care, says that Vanderbilt planting its flag at her childhood
homeplace feels right to her.
“I was born at the old Vanderbilt Hospital,” she says. “My mother died [following a car wreck on the way home from church in 1991] at
Vanderbilt Hospital. My Daddy attended Vanderbilt and was a Phi Delta Theta. It
feels like full circle.”
Carolyn Suschnick
