This was my local mall.
Malls that are abandoned like that are eerie. It’s like seeing a once-living thing lying dead.
Hah! Malls.
Y’all don’t get it.
I live in a shopping desert.
The one nearest to me is a mess, partially because they tore down half of it and are replacing it with a Costco. Despite the fact there is one already two freeway exits away. We’ll see. Westfield Mall in Santa Clara is a high end mall, and seems to be doing fine, at least the last time I went. Westfield is walking away from the Westfield Mall in San Francisco, where the recent Dopefest was held. I call it a local mall since it is a good place to get off BART when we go to the city, and back before the pandemic when we kept winning Hamilton tickets we’d eat there.
Not that I go to malls very often. We go to thrift stores far more frequently.
I was there last year. It was mostly deserted, except for senior citizen mall-walkers and a few folks just sitting inside to get out of the heat. About a quarter of the shops (all at one end) were vacant. Macy’s was still open at the time but eerily empty. The smaller stores were selling mostly cheap tat like phone accessories or racks of tacky clothing. It used to be the biggest mall between San Francisco and Lake Tahoe! Now they’re looking to bulldoze it and build apartments, offices, and an outdoor shopping center.
Meanwhile, nine miles away, the Galleria in Roseville looked like it was doing great. Full parking lots and relatively upscale brand stores. Have you been over there lately, @WildaBeast?
Pittsburgh Mills is the newest mall around here. We actuall still call it “The New Mall”. It opened in 2005 and began going downhill almost immediately.
I haven’t been there in 5 or so years. The last time I was there, the only people walking around were in warm up suits and were using the mall for exercise.
From the link:
Starting in 2014, non-retail businesses began occupying space in the mall. These included real estate offices, armed forces recruiters, pharmacy and medical supply outlets, and fitness clubs. One of the largest non-traditional tenants, ITT Technical School, closed its location at the Galleria in 2016.
COVID seems to have been the last straw. The movie theater closed and never reopened.
The Towne West Mall in Wichita, which has been on life support for several years, just barely managed to keep its doors open by paying a past-due electric bill.
My purely personal criteria of what I would consider a “mall”. If someone told me they were going to a mall and it didn’t have all of these elements, I would feel disappointed:
- Protected from the elements. At some point an “outdoor mall” has enough awnings and fans that I wouldn’t be disappointed if someone called it a mall and it was outdoors, but I don’t know where that line is.
- Internal walkways. “Lifestyle centers” that are meant to feel like a downtown don’t count because they’re crisscrossed with roads.
- Adequate places to sit down outside the retail stores. (I originally had a size requirement also but I can’t think of an overly-small example that does have at least benches.)
- At least 1 place to get fresh and/or hot food that is not a kiosk.
- You can’t have more square feet dedicated to the food prep area of restaurants or the employee area of kiosks than to internally-walkable customer areas of non-restaurant retail stores, or else it just feels like a food court or a flea market. So that excludes places like the main building of Faneuil Hall in Boston or the Ferry Building in San Francisco.
Some other places might technically be malls by other definitions, but those are mine.
There’s a 2-story indoor mall in Waldorf - that’s the closest one to us and I honestly can’t recall the last time we went there. I do know they’d had a lot of problems with teen nuisances/crime and I got the impression from reports that people were avoiding the place.
There are a number of “Town Center” shopping areas that seem to be doing well - I’d call them fancy strip shopping centers rather than malls.
I was just thinking recently how walking the mall was our main entertainment when we were first married and when our daughter was little. We’d window-shop, make big plans that never seemed to materialize, then go to the food court for a cookie. The occasional craft show or car show added variety. But today, I don’t find that appealing at all - what a difference 40 years can make! 
I have two active malls next to me in SE Michigan/Detroit metro area, the Tweleve Oaks Mall is 10 minutes from me and the Laural Park Mall about 15 minutes from me. Both are doing fairly well. I also have the high end Somerset Collection Mall about 50 minutes away across town, and it appears to be doing quite well.
While most of the smaller malls around Detroit Metro have either shut down or have limited appeal to people who don’t live nearby these those that cater to higher end customers appear to be doing OK.
Many of our local malls have either expired or are sparsely populated. The big exception I know of is Orland Square and all the businesses around it up and down LaGrange Road between 165th and 151st. That area is teeming with shoppers and restaurants for them to eat at. . It seems like there is a restaurant every 50 yards, but they all stay open.
I live near three malls. One is the Mall of Georgia, which seems busy every time I’m there and doesn’t have any vacant stores. It does not seem as busy as the malls of my youth, though. This is the one I go to the most, mainly because of the movie theatre.
One is almost completely abandoned and is in the process of being renovated into apartments/new stores, which I am excited about from a using vacant space standpoint.
And the other one did a weirdly smart thing in building the more popular newer types of outdoor mall on the side of the indoor mall, so it is all in one place. This one also seems to be doing well every time I visit, but not as well as the Mall of Georgia.
Cincinnati was historically over-malled, such that many were faltering before online shopping and Amazon were players. Forest Fair Mall is a notable example of a mall that was nearly dead from the start, and it took 30 years to finally put it out of its misery. Anyway, Beechmont, Eastgate, Northgate, Tri-County, Western Woods, Newport on the Levee, and Tower Place are all dead or dying, with some being decanted into strip malls or big box power centers. Only Kenwood (the fancy mall) and Florence (a large middlebrow mall) remain viable. There are some outlet malls way out on the highways to Dayton and Columbus too. I think what’s keeping Florence going is that it’s way on the opposite side of town from Kenwood, and it’s the first mall between Cincinnati and Lexington or Louisville.
The other mall in western Pennsylvania is the Monroeville Mall. It was the first in the area. When I was a kid it was the coolest place to go. There was an ice rink in the center and you could watch people skate.
Dawn of the Dead (1978) was filmed there.
I haven’t been there in ages. It is the spot for kids to learn about crime. There are always shootings there.
Paradise Valley Mall, just down the street from my house, was once the premier luxury mall in Phoenix. As of today, it’s a dirt lot with lots of construction equipment, as it gets re-built into the typical, unimaginative “mixed-use” mall. Two business survived - Costco, and strangely, Penny’s. My wife and I can’t figure out what Penny’s game is - they are a ghost town, and can’t possibly be making ends meet. Maybe holding out for more money?
What it used to look like:
What they imagine is coming:
Our mall is dying too. It used to be the place to go, now half of it has been taken over by a big medical facility. They have their medical rehab, fitness center and physical/occupational therapy facilities in there. They took over the areas where two of the large anchor department store used to be.
I rarely go to the mall. I hate to say it but Amazon is so much easier.
I was at The Mall of America this past weekend. We took the grandkids to the indoor amusement park. We roamed around and looked at a few stores and had something to eat at one of the restaurants. To me it isn’t a mall that you’d go to grab something quickly. Maybe to people that frequent it a lot, but to me it’s more of a tourist attraction - somewhere to go and just look, not shop. It’s too big.
There is only one mall around here, and it’s pretty much dead. The only thing left there is a farm store.
For me growing up in the suburban Detroit area, there were 2 main malls- Oakland and Universal. Some of my earliest memories are being towed around by my mom through them. Then there were 2 super modern ‘futuristic’ malls, Lakeside and Fairlane, that looked to my 70s kid eyes like malls out of Star Trek or something. Glass elevators! Shiny! Those were too far for us to go to regularly, but they were sort of ‘destination’ places in themselves.
Of those 4, Oakland is still hanging on, though one of its anchor stores has been shuttered for years (it was a Sears, then a generic “Home Goods” box store). Universal was dying back in the very early 2000s when I took the future Mrs. solost on a $12 dinner and a movie date we still talk about- $4.50 each for two surprisingly good red curries at a Thai place in the food court, then to the attached Cinemark discount theater to see “Meet the Parents” for $1.50 per ticket. Later they tore down the indoor “mall” part of Universal, left the Cinemark as a free-standing theater, and turned it into an outdoor mall. Lakeside has closed, and I don’t know Fairlane’s fate.
For awhile I was going down a rabbit hole of “dead mall” videos on YouTube. The ones I liked the most were not the “urban spelunker” vids of long-shuttered malls that were falling apart, but the still technically open malls that were as empty and deserted as tombs, with only a couple anchor stores with outside entrances keeping the mall alive at all. There’s just something eerie about those- they’re like the ‘liminal spaces’ the kids talk about. In one of the mall videos, you can hear a variety of far-off alarm sounds, and the “guide” of the video is saying that, now that the mall turned off the Muzak you can better hear the alarms of all the shuttered businesses. She said she asked a security guard about it, and was told that false alarms are the responsibility of the companies that still own the spaces of the shuttered businesses, but they don’t care to shut them off and it wasn’t the guards’ responsibility.
Rochester malls:
The Midtown Plaza has been closed and demolished.
The Irondequoit Mall has been closed for years but the building is still there. There’s been major damage inside due to flooding.
The Marketplace Mall has some big building project going on that’s converting part of it into a medical facility. However I think there are still stores operating inside.
I was inside the Greece Ridge Mall a couple of months ago. It’s showing signs of age but it still has stores in it. Twenty years ago its current status would have made it a dirt mall but by today’s mall standards, it’s thriving.
I haven’t been to the Eastview Mall in a couple of years so I don’t know what it’s like now. But it’s still open.
Here in Northern Virginia, the only malls doing really well are those catering to tourists. The food courts in Pentagon City and Crystal City are popular with tour groups; I used to work in Crystal City and quickly learned when to avoid the food court during tourist season. Tysons Corner has the upscale Galleria across the street from the 55-year-old Tysons Corner Center, which has some upscale anchors itself.
Ballston – originally a shopping center called “Parkington” – has reinvented itself as sort of a mall/town centre hybrid.
Landmark went from being an open shopping center, to an enclosed mall, back to a shopping center, and then torn down. The site is currently being prepped for a brand new hospital.
Seven Corners also started as being an open shopping center, then an enclosed mall, but is now a shopping center again.
The mall which was closest to us – Skyline – is now just a Target store on the lower level with a gym on the upper level.