This is a live issue here. Today is the last day for Meadow Glen Mall in Medford, MA. It was the closest mall to me for several years, and has been around for 37 years. It has suffered the same decline in recent years asa many other malls, with many large stores going away – I was surprised when CVS packed up and left – but it still retained its big anchors at each end, as well as a Party City. The food court was still going, and the mall catered to a large population of older folks (Mall walkers and just hangers-out) and teenagers. Because of the closed stores and the strictly one-off stores, though, the mall had been nicknamed “Ghetto Glen”. Last summer they announced that the central, enclosed portion would be closed. The two big anchors would remain, but the central portion would become a Wegman’s (the Rochester NY-based supermarket chain).
Much the same thing happened several at the nearby Assembly Square Mall in Somerville – the K-Mart remained as the anchor, but everything else closed, the indoor portion was rebuilt as a handful of Bog Box stores, and all access to each store is through the outside. (And the same thing had happened to Shopper’s World in Framingham, MA – the formerly indoor mall was essentially demolished and resurrected as a strip mall of Big Box stores with only external access)
I do not know why malls are dying – people still need to shop, and new malls are going up, but the new malls are “lifestyle centers” and other non-internal malls. While this makes sense in places like California, it seems bizarre in snowy New England. Yet Assembly Square and Meadow Glen are changing to external-only, and the new Assembly Row in Somerville and M Street Marketplace in Lynnfield are both upscale non-indoor malls.
I suspect that the new malls are more of a hit with owners than with the public. It keeps Mallrats and Mallwalkers and loiterers to a minimum in bad weather. It means that no one is responsible for HVAC and mainentance of the common indoor area (and taking care of an outdoor common space is easier and cheaper).
Two other cities that I have lived in have gotten rid of their downtown indoor malls altogether. Rochester NY dynamited Midtown Plaza, the first such downtown mall in the country, while Salt Lake City got rid of Crossroads and the ZCMI center, both right across from Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake. Salt Lake has replaced the two with a “Lifestyle” open mall. Both cities are subject to much snow and cold in winter.
I think the internet and related technologies (e.g. smart phones, video games, streaming video) deserve a lot of the blame, but not because shopping; it’s because they’ve taken over much of the entertainment and social interaction function that “going to the mall” used to offer.
I read a statistic that the last outdoor mall in America was built in 2006.
I think I’ve seen these in cities like Pittsburgh, Dallas, Jacksonville, Allentown/Bethlehem/Easton and other more sprawling suburban metro areas (in contrast to places like New York City). It basically is part of “New Urbanism” trend where they create these artificial “downtown” areas with mixed-use zoning for commercial, residential, entertainment and office. They are basically like giant strip malls with a few stand-alone buildings. It’s rare to find one that doesn’t have a Starbucks, Pottery Barn, REI, Banana Republic, a Verizon store, an nightclub and/or sports megabar, generic Italian restaurant, chain movie theater, maybe an upscale chain steakhouse and a number of large office buildings.
I suspect that shopping malls are struggling for a number of reasons:
-Internet, obviously. If you just want to buy something, it’s generally easier to just order it online.
-Big box stores. If you can’t buy in online, your next bet is to go to the nearest Walmart or Target for one-stop shopping.
-And the third one I think is more complex, which is the loss of the indoor mall as a sort of “town center” epicenter of social activity. As a kid growing up in the 70s and 80s and even in college in the 90s, “going to the mall” was sort of how one often spent their day. The whole family piles in the car and drove 20 minutes. You do a bunch of shopping, get lunch in the food court, maybe catch a movie. Usually you see some people you know and either try not to be bored while Mom chats with some neighbor or try to pretend like you don’t know these old people if you run into your high school friends.
My sense is that over the past decade or so, people don’t really do that anymore.
From what I can tell, malls aren’t so much dying entirely, as they’re dying back. Where prior to the advent of the Internet and e-commerce, malls were pretty much THE way to shop- that’s where department stores, specialty stores and whatever else were, even if they were sort of in the mall’s orbit, but not actually in the mall proper.
So there were LOTS of malls, and they tended to be a very visible symbol of the economic state of the immediate area, and would rise and fall in prestige, occupancy and general sketchiness with that economic state, with some eventually dying out, and others opening up in more economically favorable areas.
So to use Houston as an example, you had Sharpstown Mall (US59 @ Bellaire Blvd.), which was THE mall back in the 1960s and 1970s; it was surrounded primarily by middle and upper middle class white neighborhoods in the “Sharpstown” district. As time went on, the area declined, and so did the mall, leaving it nowadays as “PlazAmericas”, a rather ghetto mall without any department stores, and mostly selling ticky-tacky crap to primarily, but not exclusively Hispanic low-income shoppers.
It seems like the same thing has been happening in the Dallas area, but the malls that are doing well are very far apart, and really huge- Northpark and Stonebriar, and I’m not even sure Stonebriar is doing that well.
Where I live (coastal North Carolina) almost every housing development of any size has a commercial zone between it and the main road. It usually has a large chain grocery store, a couple of restaurants, some retail shopping, a coffee shop, maybe a florist. Where we don’t get a lot of harsh winter weather malls are kind of superfluous.
I’m speculating but it may be a matter of perceived safety. Suppose you have a mall which, like many, is getting run down and has a lot of empty storefronts. You want to go to one of the stores that’s still in business. But to do so, you have to park your car outside one of the main entrances and walk through the corridors of the mall to get to the store you want. With some malls, this is the equivalent of walking through a bad neighborhood.
Outdoor strip malls offer you the option of being able to park right at the store you want to go to and not have to travel through the rest of the mall on foot.
Besides I live in Albany NY and lots of outdoor malls are successful here too. On the contrary I would argue that they are more popular, if possible, than in the warmer climes. Sure, it’s cold, but people get cabin fever and they want to get out in the open air, and a walking mall, nicely decorated, where you can pop in and out of stores, is very popular. Put on a hat and gloves and it’s a lovely day.
Since you brought that up–up until my late teens, every mall had a large grocery store (A&P, Valu Food, maybe Giant) attached to the mall somewhere, like “in the back,” “off to the side,” almost as if the grocers was too low-class to be a part of the mall but still deathly necessary for that rental payment. While Mom shopped, the kids descended on the 5-and-dime, the record store, the PET SHOP, the toy section of the anchor store. I’m guessing rents got too high for the supermarkets?
Ballston Common, which is far from dead, will close everything without an exterior entrance by the end of the year then spend another year or so undergoing a complete remodel. Concept drawings of the finished shopping center resembles Tysons Galleria with its roof removed.
Pentagon City is undergoing a facelift. Escalators have been replaced, its one elevator has been replaced with two, and new stores are in the works.
This is interesting. I live in Bellevue, WA, and I’m familiar with two malls, the downtown Bellevue mall and the Crossroads mall, which is within walking distance of my house. They’re completely different beasts: downtown is what I consider a traditional US high-end mall, with glitzy expensive stores. Crossroads seems more down market but “useful”: they’re anchored by a grocery store, and have community things like a city hall outpost, a library branch and a bunch of kid’s entertainment related stores. They also have lots of tables setup for board games and other groups (knitting, etc), as well as a giant chess set on the ground. It seems more setup for actually hanging around.
Crossroads seems pretty busy all the time. I personally haven’t seen anything like it in the US. The food court is pretty diverse, and anchored by a huge discount book store. I think they’ve correctly identified their local community and successfully catered to it. Unlike other malls, I don’t find being there a form of torture.
The lack of grocery stores in malls in the US is also interesting. I really have no reason to go to a non-Crossroads mall, unless maybe I’m doing some Christmas shopping. My experience in South Africa was wildly different, with most malls (upmarket or not) having a significant grocery store presence.
It really varies. Where I live, I know malls that are dying, and I know malls that are thriving. It’s hard to say for sure what makes the difference, but the thriving malls are all located in affluent, yet populous, neighborhoods.
I think that’s the difference. My wife and I visited King of Prussia Mall a few years back and it was really nice. It’s the second largest mall in the country and it continues to expand. But it also caters to a more affluent crowd.
Then again, the more modest Newport Mall in Jersey City, NJ always seems busy, even though it’s sort of average-ish and the stores tend to be middle to low-end (more Dress Barn than Brooks Brothers).
Little Nemo has a point. Indoor malls need to maintain a critical mass of stores or the whole thing goes out of business. There’s nothing creepier than a half empty mall.
I think that was more a matter of convenience. If you bought a pair of shoes or a CD, you wouldn’t mind carrying it around as you walked the mall. But you wouldn’t want to carry a couple of bags of groceries through the mall. So supermarkets wanted to be located where they had direct access to the parking lot.
Decent trees (and natural wild lands, scrub trees and brush) were all bulldozed to Oblivion to create these Craptastrophes. If they die, do you think anyone will replant or re-sculpt Jack?
No. No, They Won’t.
I live in NJ. I KNOW…
You’ll get partially dirt covered broken asphalt, rotting shells of plasterboard (possibly covering dangerous foundation basements) surrounded by anti-tank-trap curbs to nowhere and rats, water-rats, possums, and raccoons…
all populated beyond reason by parking lot trash can food… and all fanning out to look for food. The smell will be even worse than the view.
Q: Do you REALLY want a brand new “Fresh Kills” landfills ‘all within easy driving distance’ of where YOU live?
Its something to think of the next time “Developers” want to grind flat the beautiful countryside you once knew as home for another strip[del]mined[/del] mall…
A major factor that has not been discussed is the massive over-storing of America in the 50 years or so. So it’s not really that the malls are dying, but that the massive over-storing is being eliminated.
Changing demographics is one. (One person upthread mentioned Sharpstown Mall being very upscale in the beginning. It was when The Fella grew up inside the Loop. Not so much now. Greenspoint Mall was the second closest mall near us when my family moved to the Houston area in 79. At one point it ended being renamed “Gunspoint Mall”. It still exists but you need an offroad vehicle for its parking lot.) The closest mall has been converted into a strip mall.
The other part of that is the aging of the populace. I’ve known two people that have had knees replaced (one with very severe complications. ) They want to be close, if it’s just a cane or walker and temporary, they don’t want to walk through a million places.
The Woodlands Mall seems to be ok, but it’s part of a large complex of offices, shopping and all that. The Exxon move and the general economics of the people in and near The Woodlands is helping.
Economic downturn for the middle class (One can’t afford to do shopping therapy.)
And people, like me, doing more of the reduce, reuse, recycle thing. Plus being cheap as hell.
In Orlando, we have two malls that are thriving and a bunch that are dying. The one that is thriving is the Mall at Millenia, half of which is super high end stores (Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Gucci, etc.) and the other half of which is still-upscale “regular” mall stores (Forever 21, GAP). M@M was designed and built as part of a giant hoity-toity residential development in the midst of what had previously been semi-urban wasteland, and opened in 2002. The mall itself serves as an anchor for other large retailers so IKEA opened its Orlando store nearby and there are quite a lot of other furniture/housewares-y type places opening around it.
The ones that are dying were all laid out as “regular” suburban malls in existing suburban areas. One is my “local”, the Oviedo Mall, which was only opened in 1998. It seemed like a brilliant move at the time (it’s convenient to UCF, which is the largest university in the country and has tripled in size since then) but for some reason it never really caught on with the college kids. It’s mostly empty storefronts displaying crap from the few remaining stores that are open.
Instead, they all go to the Waterford Lakes Town Center, which is just a few miles south (and about the same distance from the university), and outdoors. That one was built in 2002 and seems to be doing fine. It’s very close to a larger suburban development than anything near the Oviedo Mall, which probably accounts for the difference. I fucking hate it, though, because it’s outdoors.
Oddly all three were once Simon properties even though they cannibalized each other (Millenia to a lesser extent).
I think the reason Millenia is doing well and other malls are doing badly is the same reason the restaurant industry is being polarized between higher end places and fast food. Casual sit-down is a dying niche. It’s all because the middle class is shrinking.
Even here they don’t make sense. It’s over 90 degrees most of the time. So you can either walk much farther between stores in sweltering heat (since parking lots have to be built in the middle rather than around the outside) or drive between stores.
