For malls in the D.C. area, Ludovic mentioned Crystal City and Tom Tildrum mentioned Tysons Corner, Pentagon City, Ballston, Springfield, Chevy Chase,and Mazza Gallerie. Look, I hate to get picky, but the Crystal City, Pentagon City, Ballston, and Springfield malls are in the suburbs, not in D.C. (and some of them are far from the city). The point of this thread is to discuss malls inside big cities, not those in suburbs. If we start including malls in suburbs, that destroys the entire theme of this thread, which is to figure out why there are so few malls in the cities as opposed to the suburbs and what the malls inside the cities are like.
I was going to mention Water Tower Place, but someone beat me to it. Yeah, compared to the more familiar suburban buildings such as the ones in my county, it doesn’t LOOK right—too vertical, not enough parking, no free parking, etc. but it’s a mall by any reasonable definition.
I’m pretty sure we went to an outdoor mall-like structure when we visited San Diego a while back.seemed like it wasn’t tied okay and probably in the city limits.
Most mid-sized cities don’t seem to have much retail within the cities themselves, instead they are usually outside the cities near freeeway exits and larger highway intersections. Detroit is a big city, so that does make it different.
Well, it’s a big city in terms of acreage but it’s debatable as to whether it’s still a “big city”. The population today isn’t even 1 million. I think that is the cutoff for what separates a mid-size city from a big city. But that’s just my subjective opinion.
Worse than that. It’s down to 672,795. I don’t think that matters at all for the importance of downtown. Nashville is right next to it with 660,388. Does that make Nashville a major city? Not really. The Detroit metro population is over 4 million - more than twice Nashville’s. Downtown Detroit still feeds the entire huge metro area just like Boston’s does, and Boston’s population is 673,184. Does anyone think Boston isn’t a major city? Its metro population is just a bit more than Detroit’s.
City populations mean almost nothing these days, because older city boundaries were fixed a century ago and newer cities have been allowed to annex freely. The cities of Philadelphia and San Antonio are next to each other on the population ranking. So are Dallas and San Jose. San Francisco and Columbus. Fresno is bigger than Atlanta. Miami and Virginia Beach. Stockton and Pittsburgh.
Only metro areas count for “city” size. Detroit’s is bigger than Cleveland and Cincinnati combined. It’s still a powerhouse.