A mall that buried its own anchors
Red Cliffs Mall opened in Saint George in 1990 at the Interstate 15 interchange on Red Cliffs Drive, built as the only indoor mall between Las Vegas and Utah's Wasatch Front. None of its original three anchors — Walmart, ZCMI and JCPenney — remains; each space has since been rebuilt, re-tenanted or torn down, most recently by H&M, AL's Sporting Goods and a donut shop called Not Enough Nelsons.
Every original anchor store eventually left the mall
Red Cliffs Mall opened in 1990 on Red Cliffs Drive, right at the Interstate 15 interchange. It was built to be the only indoor mall between Las Vegas and Utah's Wasatch Front. Shoppers came from three states. Its three anchor stores were JCPenney, the Utah department chain ZCMI, and a Walmart.
None of those three anchors is still there today.
Walmart left first. It pulled out in 2002 to build a bigger supercenter elsewhere in town. ZCMI went next. Dillard's took over its space in April 2001, then moved again into the empty Walmart slot once that lease ended. Barnes & Noble filled the old ZCMI space in 2008. Sears joined the mall in 1998 and lasted almost twenty years before closing in 2017. A four-screen movie theater on an outparcel opened in 1995. It shut down in 2016 and was torn down in 2023.
New tenants replaced the mall's vanished department stores
The replacements tell their own story about what a mall becomes once its original anchors are gone. H&M opened a large store in the fall of 2018. AL's Sporting Goods took over the vacant Sears building in 2023. A clothing shop called Sixteen opened in 2024. A donut and sweets shop, Not Enough Nelsons, opened in 2025.
A commercial building went up in 2004 at N Red Cliffs Drive. This was just off the mall's edge. The parcel was just under an acre. The mall itself opened fifteen years earlier.
This ground has a long history in the city's highway records. The records mark it back to 1964. What is now Red Cliffs Drive first carried a state route number then. It was Utah State Route 34.
Within a short walk
Washington County's hospital rebuilt itself three times over
Washington County's hospital kept starting over. Dr. Donald A. McGregor opened the county's first hospital in 1913. It was inside a converted hotel with seven beds. It carried his name until it closed in 1952. The county built a replacement, Dixie Pioneer Memorial Hospital, that same year. Decades later, it tore the building down to make room for something bigger. Intermountain St. George Regional Hospital went up on that site in 1976. A county bond funded it. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had just handed off its hospital network to a new nonprofit, Intermountain Healthcare. This was the first facility the new group bought.
Growth in the 1980s outgrew even that. Intermountain built an entirely new hospital a mile and a half east across the interstate. It finished in 2003. It renamed the whole operation in 2021, dropping "Dixie" after the word drew complaints about its ties to the Civil War South. The hospital sits about three-quarters of a mile northeast of the crossroads at Red Cliffs Drive.
A historian's grave outlasted every building nearby
Not everything near this crossroads kept reinventing itself. Juanita Brooks spent her life writing about this region instead. The ground beneath her never moved. Born in 1898, she became the historian who documented the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Her own Mormon community had mostly avoided this subject. She died in 1989. She was buried in Saint George City Cemetery. The cemetery had taken the city's dead since 1860. It sits almost a mile and a half from the mall.
Brooks wrote about silence and what gets left out of official histories. The cemetery holding her is the oldest continuously used piece of ground near this crossroads. Everything else nearby—the stores, the highway names, the hospital buildings—has been torn down and rebuilt inside her own lifetime and after it.
The highway beneath the mall changed its name twice
The road under the mall's parking lot has worn three different names. It was Utah State Route 64 from 1931 until 1969. Utah transportation officials renumbered it as State Route 281 that year. The new number held until 1991, when the designation was retired again. A separate stretch, State Route 67, ran nearby from 1962 to 1969 before it too was dropped. By the time Red Cliffs Mall opened its doors in 1990, the highway beneath it had already changed its own name twice.
A commercial lot filled in late beside the mall
A commercial building went up in 2004 at N Red Cliffs Drive. It sat on a parcel just under an acre, tucked against the mall's edge. The county classifies it simply as commercial. The building is 3,980 square feet. The land had sat undeveloped through the mall's first fourteen years of business. By the time it was built, Walmart had already left the mall. Walmart moved to its supercenter across town. Dillard's had already taken over the old ZCMI space twice. The lot came late to a crossroads that was already rewriting itself.
The crossroads keeps trading one name and one tenant for the next, while the cemetery up the road keeps its dead where they were buried.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.