Story here. South China Mall. It’s the world’s largest and the world’s emptiest.
Excerpt: “The people who work at the South China Mall, in the muggy, factory-filled city of Dongguan, have the honor of passing each day in the biggest shopping mall on the face of the planet … There was nothing else to do, because the South China Mall, which opened with great fanfare in 2005, is not just the world’s largest. With fewer than a dozen stores scattered through a space designed to house 1,500, it is also the world’s emptiest – a dusty, decrepit complex of buildings marked by peeling paint, dead light bulbs, and dismembered mannequins.”
The mall’s website is here and Wikipedia link here.
I have always found emply malls to be extremely depressing. I’m not sure why, I hate shopping, and I really hate going to malls, I havn’t been but 3 times in 7 years for things I couldn’t find on line.
But seeing empty and decaying malls just hits me with a big oppressive wave of depression. It’s the kind of inexplicable emotional over-reaction that would be a true phobia if it were fear rather than depression. I’ve never heard of a word for that, when depression is the emotion.
I don’t know why I did it but I followed the link to deadmalls.com.
I used to live near this one. http://www.ffgeeks.net/malls/Lakeside/lakeside.htm.
It’s no where near the scale of course, but just looking at the pictures, and thinking about the slow decay that happened there makes me :(. I think most of my furnature and kitchen stuff I’m using today came from that Wards.
I like dead malls. They fascinate me: Crass, mass-produced commercial buildings elevated to the status of ruins and functioning as a tomb for the commercial aspirations of a former time.
There’s a neat example of this very close to my office: Tobacco Dock. The architecture is a lot more interesting than your average dead mall, as it’s a converted 19th-century warehouse. The sole surviving shop is a small sandwich bar. What’s weird is that the piped music still works, all day every day, so you can wander the deserted building to the sound of a local radio station coming through speakers fixed to the old cast-iron columns. It’s kind of a spooky place.
A few more pics at the bottom of this page. I really must go there with my camera one day.
Edit: here is a neat bird’s-eye view of the place. Note the pirate ships out back.
A classic dead mall that many people have seen in film is the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois - better known as the mall that Jake and Elwood drive through in the movie The Blues Brothers. It was abandoned even when that movie was filmed, and has had a long history of problems and failed plans.
There were several small malls in MA, that never opened! One (Bell Tower mall, Norwood, MA), was demolished five years after it was finished, having never attracted a single tenant. My guess is, developer sgo crazy, and build malls that nobody needs. Once you reach a saturation point, there is no need for additional stores.
The Foothills Mall in Tucson used to be half-dead. I think most of the storefronts were full and open with local and interesting shops I’d never seen anywhere else (the store selling reconditioned arcade games was particularly neat), but there was almost no patronage. You could walk down the length of the mall and see maybe three people, all elderly folk using it as a walking space. The only thing worth going there for was the theater, and it wasn’t a particularly good theater.
Then the place got bought about 10 years ago, and the new owners completely transformed it. They brought in popular mall shops, revamped the food court, got a new theater company in that took the existing theater and doubled its size, and just completely renovated the place. It’s now one of the hottest shopping centers in Tucson. It was really fascinating to watch it change from a unique but dead little mall to American Shopping Center #34908 that’s just packed with people.
That Deadmalls site needs some updating. The Assembly Square Mall in Natick, MA has been completely revamped and is now a collection of large stores that are doing well – but they’re not grouped around a central mall as they used to be (and the K-Mart is still there, pretty much unchanged). The mall’s origional decline owed to the pullout of several stores (especially Macy’s) and the opening of other, newly refurbished malls on the North Shore, like Square One in Saugus and Nothshore in Peabody.
Shopper’s World in Natick has gone the same route – it’s a collection of large stores, all doing pretty well, all grouped together but with no indoor connection. It’s flourishing not far from where I write.
It was just announced that one of our local malls will be closing, Randall Park Mall. I remember going to it all the time as a little kid, but by the 90’s I was warned to stay away because it turned into a not-so-nice-anymore mall.
My folks have been talking a lot about the mall closing. They grew up in the mall’s neighborhood and they remember it’s fantastic opening. It was amazing…at the time. They are upset that their old neighborhood is going down the tubes.
When I was in high school one of the other local high schools had red carpeting in the hallways. I called their school “the mall” because Randall Park Mall had the same red carpeting. I just realized the other day that calling that school “the mall” made no sense because I haven’t been to a mall with carpeting in 20 years.
Now I almost feel like starting a “dead mall” thread, but by now it would seem redundant to this one, so feel free consider this thread it. Again, the Dead Mall link mentioned in the article is here.
I have my doubts. From what I’ve read , the malls problems are pretty fundamental. It was opened in anticipation that Dongguan was about to become a major new economic center with a middle class that would support the mall. But Dongguan went down a different path - it became a factory town. Its residents are lower working class transient factory workers who can’t afford to buy cars - so they can’t take a trip out to the mall even if they had money to spend. And they apparently have a different idea of what constitutes a good time; Dongguan apparently has China’s largest concentration of strip clubs and brothels. This is not a demographic that’s going to be easily converted to shoe shopping.
**CalMeacham **from 2008 was probably correct then, and certainly is today.
There’s a dead mall a few miles from me - the Fashion Mall. It was nice and pretty and had an attached garage for parking - a nice perk in South Florida where we have regular heavy rains in the summer.
But it was across the street from another existing, established mall - the Broward Mall.
The Fashion Mall never really took off, and between damage from Hurricane Wilma and general politics, the mall died in 2007. It’s been sitting there for years, with occasional rumblings of someone new buying it. Most of those either fall through, or go bankrupt.
