I haven’t been there in decades, but I remember Eaton Centre in Toronto being both large and apparently successful. And reading the Wikipedia article on it, it’s still successful. I’ve seen other apparently successful malls in San Francisco. And while I’ve never seen it, I’ve heard “The Grove” in Los Angeles is a successful outdoor mall.
For an example of a successful mall in a city , see Queens Center.. The only real differences between this mall and a suburban mall are 1) It isn’t surrounded by acres of free parking and 2) It’s at a transit hub and is reachable by about 10 bus lines and two subway lines. This mall is just a few blocks away.
all of the early ones are pretty close to Detroit, since they were built in the early days of white flight.
Northland Mall (dead): In Southfield, on Greenfield Road just north of 8 Mile. literally on the border with Detroit.
Eastland Mall: In Harper Woods, on Vernier Rd. (8 Mile) just west of I-94. Practically on the border with Detroit.
Southland Mall: Downriver in Taylor. Several miles from Detroit.
Westland Mall: In Westland, again several miles from Detroit.
as the sprawl grew, people gravitated to newer ones like Macomb Mall (Roseville,) Oakland Mall (Troy,) and Lakeside Mall (Sterling Heights.) Because, you know, it’s important to get further away from “those people” in order to shop. But those malls are hurting too with the loss of anchor stores. Twelve Oaks in Novi is supposedly still doing OK, but it’s in a relatively well-to-do area. Ditto Partridge Creek on the northern border of Clinton Twp.
Denver has a successful mall in the city. It is now at the center of a huge shopping area with tons of independently owned mostly upscale stores, but the original big, square enclosed mall built in the 80’s is still there. The whole area is doing well but there are no JC Pennys and such there. Neiman Marcus is one of the bigger stores in the original mall.
The Eaton Centre has multiple anchors including a recently opened Saks and is smack in the middle of our downtown business district. As far as I know, there is no significant empty space in the Eaton Centre except for the old Sears Canada head office which occupies the upper floors of the building when it was Eaton’s. Bank of Montreal is taking over the space apparently.
There many successful malls in Toronto, but the Eaton Centre is the biggest urban mall by far.
“A” mall, you say? Central Melbourne is infested with malls from top to bottom. Melbourne Central, Galleria, GPO, Australia on Collins, QV … I’m not even counting the tiny ones that are just a single walkway with a dozen or so shops on each side. I haven’t been paying a huge amount of attention to recent building works so I don’t know about any particularly new ones
Depending on how “suburban” you’re thinking, I’ll also point out that Victoria Gardens in Richmond is only 15 years old, and still seems pretty successful (it has an IKEA. 'Nuff said …)
Thank you for the confirmation that it is a successful downtown mall. My post was in response to someone who said, “I can’t think of any mall that was both successful and large and in a downtown area.”
Toledo at one time had three malls within the city limits: Franklin Park (the only one still open), Southwyck and Northtown. Woodville Mall was on the border. Franklin Park is thriving, expanding even, although two of the original anchors are gone (Jacobson’s and Hudson’s), JC Penney is still open. The other two have been replaced by other stores. Woodville mall was the only one in a suburb (Northwood), and that only by a few feet.
The big open-air centers, Spring meadows, Fallen timbers and Levis commons are all in suburbs.
Lloyd Center in Portland opened in 1960 on the inner east side is a direct competitor to the downtown stores. A very large mall for its time. Originally open-air and much later enclosed fully.
Malls do not have to be suburban.
I’ve “camped” overnight in it.
Isn’t Pacific Place a mall?
I came in to mention Rochester’s Midtown Plaza, but Exapno beat me to it.
That was by no means the only urban mall. Salt Lake City had two across the street from each other – the enormous Crossroads Plaza built in 1980 and the one across the way. Both are gone now, but in their place, Salt Lake has a “Lifestyle Center” , Gateway Plaza. Gateway makes no sense to me - Salt Lake gets fierce winters, and the whole point of those indoor malls was to let you stay indoors when the weather was bad. with Gateway you have to schlep through the snow from place to place. Salt Lake still does have an indoor mall in the form of Trolley Plaza, though.
New York City had at least one indoor mall. Toronto still has the enormous Eaton Center. Boston still has its Prudential Center and, linked to it by “gerbil tubes”, Copley Place. Indianapolis has City Center Mall, with its atrium suspended above a traffic intersection. Washington DC has City Center and Gallery Place. Philadelphia has several indoor shopping places.
I can’t think of a place where they do make sense, since in Florida, if you’re going to visit multiple businesses in one stop (which is the entire point of malls), then for literally half the year it is so hot that you will break a sweat walking between businesses. Not to mention the chance of downpours in those same months.
I think it’s the price of maintaining and conditioning an indoor place that trumps weather convenience.
I did forget one that I have been to - Crystal City in the DC area. Underground mall, but still successful enough with large enough businesses that it fits even my strictest criteria for a mall.
Oh, how could I forget this one – Providence , Rhode Island has Providence Place right downtown.
Several of DC’s suburban malls are metro-adjacent (Tysons Corner, Pentagon City, Ballston, Springfield, Chevy Chase, Mazza Gallerie).
I believe that space in the Eaton Centre that BMO is taking over was, at least in part, the upper floors of the original flagship Eaton’s store. The Sears headquarters may have been there, but it was originally in that inverted-pyramid-shaped building near Jarvis and Dundas.
There’s also Yorkdale Mall, which started out as a classic Fifties greenfield suburban mall surrounded by hectares of parking near the new freeway (relatives owned a farm a few blocks away before the Second World War, but sold out before they could become rich). But the city grew, and the subway extended, and the buildings grew up, and now it’s an major upscale destination mall, one of maybe three or four in the Greater Toronto Area. It has expanded considerably in recent years even.
The Eaton Centre was built explicitly as a mall in the Seventies, but it is dwarfed by the PATH network, or Underground City, dozens of kilometres of underground malls and concourses linking most of the downtown skyscrapers, the train station, and half a dozen subway stations. Smaller segments exist around other subway stations further out. With the frantic pace of construction in Toronto in the past twenty years, new buildings are continuously connected to it. The Underground City continues to expand, and is probably bigger than the one in Montreal by now. Every day it is filled with people walking between their offices and public transit, or having lunch at the many many food courts, and since many residential buildings are also connected to it or the subway, there are people who don’t go outside for months at a time (understandable in winter). This has actually drawn life from some of the downtown streets. I had a roommate who took one look at it during rush hour and called it The Ant Farm.
There are also a number of dead or dying malls in the GTA, such as Honeydale Mall. These tend to be smaller malls in the old inner suburbs, too small to survive after a major anchor tenant left, but too far from the street to benefit from passing street life and pedestrian traffic (if there even is any due to local automobile-centric street design).
My memory is that the Eaton Center was hurt pretty badly when the Eaton’s department store closed. I’m glad it’s coming back.
The Stamford Town Center is ten stories tall and attracts an interesting blend of ultra-rich suburbanites and ordinary cityfolk. Same for the smaller Westchester Mall in White Plains, NY. It has a Tesla showroom.
Manhattan is full of malls. There used to be a mall under the World Trade Center and I think something similar has replaced it.
Chicago’s Magnificent Mile downtown has three vertical malls, one of them many decades old.
You can’t expect that a downtown mall looks like a suburban mall. You can walk past Water Tower Place and not realize that it’s more than another storefront. I expect that every really large downtown in America has multiple malls. You just need to know where to look.
There’s the massive Galleria mall in the middle of Houston. Ottawa, Canada has the largish Rideau Centre in the middle of downtown. These sweeping statements of no big cities having malls in them and malls are pure suburbia are tres bizarre.
Pointing to something existing in Houston is not exactly a counterexample against it being quintessential suburban sprawl 
Lol,touché. The whole city is sprawl but the Galleria is definitely not surrounded by a parking lot ocean.