Tell Me About Your Local Malls

Many years ago I was given the hard sell at a JC Penny when I bought a bunch of pants and could save lots by getting a card. I said no. She presented the savings again and I said no more firmly with a bit of eye contact glare. She argued still again and I lost it, yelling NO I DON’T WANT YOUR STUPID FUCKING CARD.

She rang me up and I paid. When I got home (30 minute drive) I found one pair of jeans still had the security thing still present.

I drove back and they removed it. I told the person I would never shop at Penny’s again and I’ve held true to that. The store where this happened closed, as did several other locations in my area.

I can still remember my first trip to the newly opened local mall 197? when Burdines and Jordan Marsh were anchor stores. School shopping spent most my budget on a fabulous purse, a mauve crushed velvet bag with black fringe and yellow hip hugger bell bottoms and a wide paisley belt.

Lol. I’m wearing rags today.

Our local malls are are busy busy. One struggling mall transitioned successfully by adding stores to the exterior but parking lot is chaotic I avoid it except when I have to return something to SierraTP.

Forgot to add, that new mall, eventually lost anchors and shoppers and before it was demolished for a Walmart distribution center its last iteration was a flea market that specialized in stolen goods.

Is there any other kind?

Cool report! Thanks for the time and effort.

For work in Sacramento we used to stay right by the Arden Fair mall just off I-80 near the California State Fairgrounds. I was probably last inside there shortly pre-COVID, say summer 2019.

At that time the place was bustling, but the roster of stores seemed pretty whitebread to me whereas the clientele was largely Latino, black, and middle eastern, with at most 20% Caucasians. Who were generally (like me) much older than the other folks. Everybody looked pretty middle to working class, and folks of all shades were spending their money. So a fun time and I’ve bought both merch & lunch there a time or three. But it had the smell of a place where the stores were out of phase with the customers and the other shoe was hovering ominously overhead.

How’s it doing now? Their website appears pretty promising; there’s only a few vacant ordinary store slots, although one of the three big-box anchor spaces is unused.

A few more bits of information about Sunrise Mall: There used to be a fireplace in the middle of the food court. That’s not there anymore.

In December 2018 the mall was purchased by Namdar Realty Group. Another thing I learned from dead mall videos on YouTube is that there are a few companies that are considered the absolute bottom tier of mall operators. They buy struggling malls for cheap, then do the bare minimum of maintenance on them, if that. They’re the capitalist vultures of the mall industry, squeezing out the last bit of profit before the mall is completely dead. Namdar Realty Group is one of those companies.

And I found news reports saying the city of Citrus Heights approved plans to redevelop the mall site, although I can’t find an official closing date for the mall.

Lastly, I wish I had driven around to the other side of the mall, where JC Penny’s exterior entrance is – I’m not sure I’ve really spent much time around on that side. Because check out the exterior façade! Say what you will about brutalism, but I think that is a real architectural gem. And a complete time warp back to 1971.

Funny you should ask, because after I finished writing up that post about Sunrise Mall, I though to myself “Now I wonder how Arden Fair is doing.” I don’t really go to malls very often, and I’ve been to Arden Fair exactly once, shortly after I moved to the Sacramento area (so even less recently than you), because I had a gift certificate good at any store in the mall. I spent it on a cheap off brand suitcase that served me reasonably well until the handle broke maybe a year and a half ago.

But now I kind of want to take a trip to Arden Fair.

Oh, and a minor correction – it’s off 80 Business, not the main I-80 route.

my favorite mall when I lived in Cleveland was Crocker Park–small outside mall, no anchor stores, lots of f tables and chairs on sidewalk to rest in, and not one but 2 free standalone restrooms.

The nearest mall to me, Beltway Plaza, is better than you would expect it to be given that it’s mostly indoors (but the doors to some places in it are open to the outside) and doesn’t sell luxury items:

The best thing about it is the Free Market and Community Library, which isn’t mentioned in that article. It’s hard to find anything that mentions it. In the following website, you can find pictures of it if you page down far enough. I had to page down 24 times for a good view of half of the shelves. You can bring anything you like to the shelves there at any time the mall is open and leave them there. Someone will pick them up eventually, since they are free to all takers. It has 24 shelves, each about four feet long. Over the past two or three years that it has existed, those shelves have gone back and forth from being filled with interesting stuff to being nearly empty:

One of our daughters worked at Kohls for awhile. The cashiers were, shall we say, encouraged to push the cards. Both carrots and sticks. She hated that part of the job.

The PATH system of tunnels in Toronto has a lot of empty storefronts nowadays.

Still better than Pacific Mall (dozens of kiosks selling cell phone covers and not much else) or the catastrophically unsuccessful Shops at Aura (which is now owned by IKEA).

Depending upon how you measure it mebbe yes, mebbe no. Part of it is the indoor amusement park, which isn’t considered retail, so from a public building with retail shopping under one roof it is the largest but from a retail sq. footage metric it isn’t.

I hate the town square concept, especially on crappy weather days. Hmmm, let’s not make it like a strip mall where you can drive up near the store you want to go into, let’s build it like an enclosed mall, with parking around the perimeter & few entrances but let’s make it outside so you’re exposed to the rain & wind & cold. What idjit thought this was a good idea? In good weather I don’t mind it so much but in bad weather? I’m going somewhere else.

Hardly a local mall, but when I was in Hong Kong I was impressed by what amounted to a virtual mall in all the subway stations. Kind of one mall throughout the city connected by subway trains. Very impressive. Some real malls also.

It’s like that in Stockholm as well, and likely throughout most of Europe. There’s a good video (9m 48s) comparing US and European malls, including the producer’s opinion for why American malls are failing and European malls are not:

I bet the worker there was very happy to hear that.

Liminal space sounds like the 21st century equivalent of a folly.

In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but suggesting through its appearance some other purpose, or of such extravagant appearance that it transcends the range of usual garden buildings.

The jibes with what I’ve observed anecdotally. Malls that are integrated into dense urban areas near transportation hubs seem to do well. I think upscale malls in affluent communities (like the Danbury Fair mall in Fairfield County, CT or King of Prussia Mall in NJ) seem like they do well (although I haven’t been to either in years).

I would not expect a sprawling low-rent mall in one of those Sun Belt “surface of the Death Star” cities to do very well long term.

I feel like they are separate things.

A folly feels silly or fun because it is absurdly out of place.

A liminal space is unsettling or disorienting because it is a familiar space in an unfamiliar context. Areas like schools or malls or empty city streets (especially in the middle of broad daylight) should normally be full of activity or people. The lack thereof conjures up all sorts of terrifying scenarios because the spaces feel like they are in transition. Like a transition from a space filled with people going about their business to whatever is coming that drove all the people away. Or a feeling that you aren’t supposed to be there (because the space is in a transition from when it was open to being ready to be open again). And if you aren’t supposed to be there, your mind tends to wonder who or what else might also “not supposed to be there” with you.

I live in Metro Manila*. The sheer density of malls here is absolutely mind-boggling. I live a short drive away from SM Megamall, the third largest mall in the Philippines and the fifteenth largest in the world. If I care to drive further away north, I can get to SM City North EDSA, the second largest mall in the country and thirteenth largest mall in the world. About the same distance in the opposite direction is SM Mall of Asia, the largest mall in the country and fifth largest in the world.

I rarely, if ever, go to these giant malls (I’ve never been to the Mall of Asia). There are two other malls closer to me, both within walking distance if I care to brave the heat (or rain). There’s what Americans would call a strip mall just outside easy walking distance (but still doable). Across orthogonal streets from the Megamall are two other malls. Down the street from Megamall is another mall and if you go in the opposite direction you get to yet another mall. Aside from those already enumerated, I estimate there to be at least five other malls that I can drive to in less than an hour.

*Not Manila but one of the other cities in the giant conurbation known as Metropolitan Manila, but that’s a topic for another post.

Here’s a tour of the Megamall, where they just took a walked camera up and down the main corridor, traversing each level. They skipped entire sections of the mall, including the ice skating rink. The video is still almost forty minutes long.

A friend of mine told a story about shopping at Sears not long before they closed here. He wanted to buy a pair of shoes or something, and the sales person tried their best to get him to walk up to a computer and order them through some sort of Sears online ordering system. He just wanted to walk into a store and buy shoes. It’s no wonder most locations are closed now.