For your shopping pleasure: Dead Malls
Not a real addition to any reasons here, but I just a did a commercial property photo shoot near what was once was of the largest, busiest indoor malls in this state. On weekends, a small portion of it is now an ethnic centered (Hispanic) “open air” (all inside but marketers everywhere) shopping area. Even the satellite strip centers are pretty much empty. I was shooting a reclaimed building that is now a tech lab.
I was there on a Thursday, about 1:00pm. I drove around the mall just for grins. A few cars with people eating lunch under a tree, some semis parked in the middle of parking areas, but otherwise no one. Remembering some other jobs I had done there when it was busy, just some 10 or 15 years ago, made the large, abandoned structure seem even a bit more creepy.
My Post Is My Cite! and it’s just one anecdote anyways…
Enclosed malls have fallen out of favor. They seem dim, old-fashioned, and maybe a bit seedy. It doesn’t help that they are all old (since no new ones are being built). Outdoor malls, some with mixed-use development, have been all the rage for the past 10 or 15 years.
In 30 years consumer preference will probably flip back the other way.
The plural of anecdote may not be data, but an anecdote is a datum. So here’s one, plus a couple of other thoughts.
I worked in Orange, CA before I moved up here. My best friend lived in the area before that, so I spent some time there. There was an enclosed mall called The City at the intersection of the 5 and the 22. In the mid-to-late-'80s it was a going concern. By the late '90s The City was a ghost town. Lots of empty stores. It was eventually torn down, and replaced by an outdoor mall called The Block at Orange (now called The Outlets at Orange). So there was definitely a ‘decline’ that affected The City. The Block was quite busy when I left in 2003 though.
Up here, the Bellis Fair Mall has had its ups and downs. When I moved here, it was pretty full. But not long after, it began to empty out. The last few years it seems to have its stores rented out again, and there are plenty of kiosks in the aisles (or whatever you call the wide passageways in a mall). The shops seem to be less interesting when I was younger. I’m sure that the malls I went to in the '80s and '90s had them, but there sure seems to be a lot of shops that sell cheap ‘jewelry’ that teens might find attractive, and beauty stuff. There are adult jewelry stores usually found in malls like Kaye and Ben Bridge. Of course you have Men’s Warehouse, Aéropostale, and ‘anchor’ stores (Macy’s, JC Penny, Kohl’s, and Target – Sears closed a couple of years ago). Basically, it’s your generic indoor mall. Boring.
The cinemas at Bellis Fair closed, and I noticed a couple of weeks ago that that part of the mall has been gutted. No idea what’s going in there. Regal Cinemas put up a huge new theatre complex in a more upscale part of town, and it conforms to the wants of modern consumers. The auditoriums are steeply raked so one’s view isn’t blocked by the person’s head in the next row, the seats are large and very comfortable, and the screens are large. There’s no way such an auditorium could be retrofitted to an existing multiplex in an indoor mall. And cinemas are one thing that, IME, draw people to malls. When better ones open up elsewhere, business is likely to drop off.
I used to go to malls a lot, usually for lunch when I worked near one. The variety of the food court was fair. I liked buying my clothes at Banana Republic (are they still around anymore?) when they sold ‘adventure-themed’ clothing, and cheap duds at Aéropostale. There was a toy store where I got a couple of toy gliders from Germany that had vacuum-formed fuselages and wire-frame wings that were very cool. I used to smoke a pipe in my 20s, and there was always a tobacconist’s shop where I could buy tobacco. I liked browsing the cutlery store, too. Now that I’m older, I don’t buy clothes unless I have to. I certainly don’t give a crap about fashion. I have too many toys as it is; and now that I have a female in the house I can’t even put them out to look at them. The SO doesn’t like crowds and is obsessively frugal and doesn’t want to pay mall prices for things, plus she doesn’t care to go to the cinema when there’s plenty on cable to watch. My tastes have changed, and my needs and wants have changed, and there’s little reason for me to go to a mall.
Sometimes I have to go to the mall. I get my work clothes from Men’s Wearhouse, and it’s at the mall. My watches need overhauling occasionally, so I need to go to the mall to drop them off at Ben Bridge so that they can send them to Rolex. Every so often there’s a particular item that I need to get from a particular store that is in the mall. But most things, I can buy online. It’s much more convenient, as I don’t have to go to drive to the mall and go to different stores that may or may not have what I want. I think the biggest factor is that malls have always been social places to me. The people I hung out with are 1,200 to 2,500 miles away. So for me, malls are only occasionally useful.
A previous thread on this topic.
More abandoned malls:
The shopping mall as we know it in the U.S. was basically a development of the 1950’s, and perhaps it’s not going to far outlive people born in the 1950’s:
I’m not going to get all nostalgic about the malls; I remember when Downtown Houston was the place to shop–low end to high. Then all the dime stores closed–because dime stores were on their way out everywhere. Sakowitz (anchor of the defunct high end local chain) is a parking garage–blame the Sakowitz heir for bad business decisions. Neiman Marcus is a CVS–but there are outlying locations of That the Fancy Store From That City Up North. Foley’s became Macy’s for a while & was imploded–because the landlords wanted a new building. Downtown now has some good bars & restaurants. Residential projects are underway & some still hope the retail desert will bloom again.
Houton’s first Shopping Centers were handy for the outlying areas. Then they were closed in to become Malls–which are in the decline. This site lists five Houston “Malls” but only the Galleria is a true Mall. A few other malls are doing OK in the vast urban sprawl, but clusters of large & small shops (& restaurants) in vast parking lots are the norm.
There’s still plenty of shopping to be done…
Yeah, malls were always a bad idea, contributing to urban sprawl, gas consumption, killing local business, contributing to non-walk ability/car culture. The “urban villages” springing up now are definitely an improvement.
Empty mall turned into a massive koi pond
I think we should turn the abandoned malls in the US into something like this. This way we could get more fish in our diets, without wrecking the oceans!
In the 70s and 80s, I thought malls were getting us ready for space travel. Imagine each mall as a RAMA type vessel. Everything you need was there, esp the malls that also had hotels (like Houston Galleria). Food, entertainment, place to sleep (mattress dept at Sears or Macy*s, plus the hotels), etc…
I know I get tired just thinking about going to a mall. You know exactly which store you want to go, but first you’ve got to transverse a football field worth of hot parking lot asphalt, navigate through throngs of Cinnabon-eaters, and take two slow-moving escalators to get there. And then you have to remember which entrance you came in so that the search for your car only takes ten minutes versus thirty.
I think this is why the “town center” type malls are so appealing. You don’t get lost in those places.
I’ve wondered why they don’t re-build them into apartment complexes.
This, and the mention of cinemas upthread. Every mall had a bust video arcade and a multiplex. Parents could leave kids at the video arcade or at a movie while they shopped. People who went to the movies sometimes found their movie sold out, so they bought a ticket to the next show, and wandered around the mall for a couple of hours-- or they went for a movie, and did shopping as long as they were there, because there weren’t cheaper prices elsewhere.
This was even before the mega-bookstores, like Barnes and Noble, so the mall bookstore was usually the biggest one in town, and if you didn’t have a Toy R Us in your city, the biggest toy store was usually in the mall. They were jam-packed at Christmas, and it probably kept them in the black for the next year.
Few people go to movies in theaters, and video arcades exist in a few places for nostalgia, but they are rare. Barnes and Noble and Amazon drove out the smaller booksellers, and toys are cheaper at Walmart, so malls lost their main draws. People will shop for other stuff there, but you have to get them in the door.
Massive reconstruction is going on at a former Kmart where my pharmacy is located. It has been difficult to get in and out of the parking lot. Rumor has it that it will be a church.
An outlet mall is being built out in the woods near a freeway intersection.
I wonder how much of the decline of the urban mall has to do with White Flight.
In the '90s I used to go to The Beverly Center from time to time. Then one time, it just weirded me out. I got the feeling, ‘I don’t belong here.’ This was probably about the time I was becoming utterly sick of L.A. The shoppers in the mall started feeling like something out of They Live.
I suspect (and some of the cited articles support) that it’s in part the DEcline of the Middle Class. Who else went to these places?* Part is changes in buiying habits. All those stores that used to be book stores and record stores and the like have pretty much vanished, replaced by online streaming and the like. The only bookstore I know of in a Boston-area mall is the Barnes and Noble at the Prudential Center (there are Barnes and Nobles at other mall complexes, but none that even have a door opening into any enclosed mall space)
An interesting development is the Tearing Down of Downtown Enclosed Malls. Midtown Plaza in Rochester – the first downtown indoor mall in the country – was torn down a couple of years ago. So was Crossroads in downtown Salt Lake City, across from Temple Square. The ZCMI Plaza closed, too, although I hear it’s coming back in some form.
We’re now getting outdoor “Lifestyle Malls”, so the Mall is not dead, but these are outdoor things, with no connected indoor space. Salt Lake put one up that sorta took over from its torn-down mall. Lynnfield MA just put up the Marketplace. I notice that these tend to be in upscale markets. You’d think the lack of a cozy indoor space would be a detriment, especially in places like northern Utah or in Massachusetts, where the winters can be long and brutal. But maybe they’re a positive, since they discourage loiterers, mallrats, and power walkers.
*I note that the ritzy malls to the west of Boston have either closed or toned it down. “The Natick Collection” has changed its name from that pretentious one to “The Natiock Mall”
I see people using the term “outdoor mall”. What’s the difference between an outdoor mall and a street or a retail district?
Parking lot?
Nowadays there’s social media and other things for teens and you can buy just about anything you need at a Walmart, including the weeks groceries. Shopping as a recreational, day long activity is passe. If you just need a pair of socks there’s a lot more convenient places than the mall to get them. Not many people shop at mid-priced department stores, typical mall anchors like Sears or JCPenneys anymore.
carnivorousplant writes:
> I wonder how much of the decline of the urban mall has to do with White Flight.
You do realize that “white flight” is a phenomenon mostly of the 1950’s through the 1970’s, don’t you? Yes, it started in perhaps the 1930’s and continued into perhaps the 1990’s, but it’s mostly associated with the 1950’s through the 1970’s when it was clearly the most obvious movement. It’s largely not that noticeable anymore because of gentrification, which is mostly a thing of the 1990’s and this century. Again, it really started in the 1970’s, but it’s more obvious today.
So the suburban mall has been decreasing in importance lately and the urban shopping experience has come back.