Saturday, January 01, 2005

Hudson Belk, Triangle Town Center, Raleigh, North Carolina 12/30/04

Hudson Belk, Triangle Town Center, Raleigh, North Carolina. Upper level exterior entrance. Photographed with camera phone 7/15/05.

Hudson Belk, Triangle Town Center, Raleigh, North Carolina. Mall entrance. Photographed with camera phone 7/15/05.

This Hudson Belk store is the chain's newest under the hyphenated banner. Opened in August 2002 at Triangle Town Center, this 180,000 square foot, two-level store is an anchor of of the first totally new enclosed mall built in Wake County since 1979.

Design-wise, the store is done in Belk's 'millenium' style; substantially more contemporary than most of the chain's locations. A very similar design is used at stores in Durham (Southpoint) and Charleston (Citadel), South Carolina. A version of the design was also planned for the renovated SouthPark store in Charlotte, but was rejected as too contemporary, though many of the details of this store live on in the Neoclassical-themed Charlotte location.

Belk reorganized its corporate structure in 1998, replacing 112 seperate store corporations (!) with a single corporate entity headquartered in Charlotte. The Husdon family, half-owners of the former Belk Hudson Leggett corporation which controlled the Raleigh stores, became the largest non-Belk family stockholders in the new Belk corporation, which meant that while many of the other hyphenated names that typified Belk stores were retired, Hudson Belk remained.

There is a subtle nod to the new corporate structure, however. Contrast the sign on this store with the sign on the Crabtree store and you may notice the 'Hudson' portion of the newer sign is noticably smaller than it was on the older store. I think that Belk will probably remove the Hudson portion in the near future, as it is the last surviving hyphenated logo in an increasingly standardized company.


  1. It's a shame, y'know? I liked all those different names. Made it sound a bit more diverse. That's why I'm not shopping at Macy's.

  2. Those names had a lot of meaning at one point, but Belk had a habit of changing them periodically anyway. Doesn't make it any easier to take when your local store gets renamed, but it's pretty fluid when you think about it.

  3. Are there any areas/markets where Belk shoppers still refer to their local Belk stores by its older + retired hyphenated name? Or have most shoppers just long switched to just calling the stores by the singular name, Belk?


  4. That's an interesting question. For the most part, I hear people call then Belk or Belk's, and most of the hyphenated names aren't used a lot these days. On the other hand, there are a lot of people near me that still call the Belk stores in Virginia as "Leggett's."

    I tend to use some of the old names in describing Belk stores if I know them, like Belk Beck, Hudson Belk (still being used), and Belk Leggett.