Eastland had a sporting goods/gun shop in the “lower level” (the one part always enclosed). Monchek <sic> Brothers as I recall. It was there at least into the late 70s. I got my .30 carbine there for the outrageous sum of like $98 and they also had a “pro shop” deal with Blackhawk Archery which had their factory a couple miles away. Want to say they were owned by the Cravotta family. Them I’ll always remember because I was making a run for some supplies there and some guy backed into my 67 FLH in the parking lot and crushed the fender. Saved about $10 and replacing the fender cost me about $40 and some paint
I could check but I’m feeling especially lazy tonight.
Have you ever been to the Catskills? I’ve spent pretty much every summer of my life there, and we had the Apollo Mall in Monticello. It used to be a hot place to go for bungalow colony and camp people, but it declined rather rapidly in the early 2000s, and is now completely vacant. I suspect the main culprit is the Wal-Mart that opened in Monticello at about that time.
Serious question: Where did they go? I remember our local malls were overrun with pasty-faced denizens who (it seemed) never left the place.
I wonder where their current teenaged counterparts “hang out” nowadays?
The internet and related places. Between online games and things like Twitter and Facebook I’m betting most of them are glued to their phones right this moment texting something.
My family never throws anything away if it could possibly be used again (although not in a hoarderish way) and I’m pretty sure there are still a few Stix shirt boxes in rotation for wrapping Christmas presents.
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White Flint Mall was the upscale mall in the Montgomery County suburbs of DC. It had lots of water features, and a section that was made to resemble a street in Georgetown, with streetlights and brick facades on thin store fronts.
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White Flint was more of a planned thing than a lot of the others mentioned in this thread. Plans for announced for an eventual redevelopment and I think that they just stopped renewing leases once they ran out. I think Lord & Taylor is still open, although most of the rest of the building has been torn down. Although I haven’t paid a ton of attention, I think the plan is for some sort of mixed use residential/shopping/office space development.
At home. They just don’t leave the house.
One thing I noticed about deadmalls.com is that they’re not exactly up to date. Which is not surprising for a website that depends on postings from random volunteers.
It seems their heyday for frequent updates was during the big recession which is now 5 to 7 years ago depending on when you want to mark the recovery.
Yeah, Greenspoint was sort of the “upscale” mall in the area when I was a kid, mostly due to it being the only mall near the tony northern suburbs.
But sometime in the 90s, when I was in college, there was a hideous bloodletting among the existing Houston malls when the far suburban ones opened up (Woodlands Mall and First Colony Mall). Those two basically stole all the well-to-do northern and southwestern customers, leaving Sharpstown, Westwood and Greenspoint to try and eke a living out of the decidedly low income people living near the malls. Westwood folded up entirely and became a Houston Community College campus, and Sharpstown turned into some sort of really crappy Latin themed mall aimed at low-income Hispanics that’s as much shitty flea market as actual mall. Greenspoint is as you say… declining fast.
Town & Country is an interesting story. When it was built, it was THE swanky mall in Houston outside of the Galleria, and remained so up through the early 1990s. So much so, that Memorial City Mall (a few miles east) was struggling and rather cruddy.
Then the Sam Houston Tollway / I-10 interchange was completed right nearby (the mall was literally tucked into a corner of the interchange. This meant that it was extremely hard to get to Town and Country mall (you had to exit really far beforehand, or drive well past and u-turn) , and that the signs, etc… weren’t really visible from the freeways. In an odd turn of events, Memorial City was positioned right at the next exit, and was highly visible, so it thrived, while T&C withered on the vine.
I just drove pass there the other day and Menards is up I believe. It was dark but I could see the outdoor section and maybe a building? It’s a comeback I guess, I’ll give it to Saint Ann for at least trying to build itself back up.
The Mall of America is a continuous success from what I’ve seen. They boast a continuous occupancy rate of 95% or better and are often at 100% during the holidays. Even their 4th floor “entertainment” district that died off last decade is full again with 4 restaurants and a comedy club.
They’ve done so well that a portion of their expansion is set to open this fall and more the following year.
And they still managed to miss The Shops at National Place and Georgetown Park, both of which went kaput around that period.
Al the new malls here (Boston area) are of the open-sky type. Nobody seems to be building the all-enclosed type anymore.I guess it is because of heating costs, concerns about security, etc.
They c all them “Lifestyle Centers”. I suspect one big reason is to discourage Mallrats and the like. The Marketstreet complex in Lynnfield (about 10 miles north of Boston) is one of these recent wonders.
The Gateway in Salt Lake City is another such.
what kills me is that both Boston and SLC are not particularly comfortable places in the winter. Both cities used to be surrounded by indoor malls (and still have quite a few), but the new ones are outdoors. They must REALLY want to discourage loiterers.
It was Mar 2015 when I last drove by on the Rock Road. I’m not in STL regularly any more, but today I looked at the aerial photos on Bing maps and on Google maps. Depending on which website, zoom level, and angle you pick you can see the mall intact, half torn down, gone completely, Menards under construction, or complete as a building and parking lot.
Kind of fun to have a sorta time lapse movie of the changes.
I was surprised to see the old Famous Barr building on the southwest corner with the white cupola thing is still standing. I thought that had been torn down with the rest of the mall. I wonder what it is now?
This linear one was totally torn down last month:
When I last saw this small enclosed one a year ago it was boarded up except for the cafeteria , a Dollar Store, and the cinemas:
The closest mall to us is the Upper Valley Mall in Springfield, OH.
I expect it will close within a year or two.
This place was Da Bomb when I was growing up in Des Moines. It’s been in decline, as has the part of town where it’s located, for many years.
Its biggest tenant is, of all things, a community college.
As noted above, the internet. My friends and I were on the cusp. We came from several different schools in the same district, and met on a BBS that someone in the school’s IT department ran. (Ostensibly it was for “homework help”. The only forums I ever saw posts in were the ones where we ran RPGs. Heh.) We did descend upon a local mall when we got together in person, but that was every few weeks – the rest of the time, we just typed at each other obsessively. Sort of an oscillating combination of mallrat and hacker cultures.
[ETA: A time frame would be helpful here! I graduated high school class of 1999.]
Here in Columbia MO is the Parkade Center. I gather it was once a busy shopping mall, but it’s in a now-shabby section of town. There are still some retail shops there, but it’s mostly office space now. One of the biggest tenants there now is a local community college, like the mall you mentioned. The USDA has a big field office there, too.