Abandoned malls

The downtown Redding mall was creepy, I used to walk through it to get to La Cabana for the spicy shrimp burrito. No inhabitants but a Rite-Aid and a police substation, and a few dozen zombified senior citizens shuffling around in the air conditioning for what little exercise their tickers could stand. Oh, and a custodian who rode around on his silent electric golf cart, sneaking up on people and scaring shit out of them.

Yeah! I told the owner of the printing company I worked at that he should buy the mall property and create North America's biggest indoor skate park. If he'd listened to me instead of embezzling every dollar out of the company, he might not be in the pokey right now.

I will say this: "Dress to the nines, Spend to the Fives"
Also, the DEB store is still open.

The American ones all look creepily... LIGHT and CLEAN!

http://static.flickr.com/104/303526390_1877987a0f.jpg?v=0

Photo is practically a pixel-for-pixel copy of the mall in downtown Columbus. Not quite on the brink of zombie rampage, but so close you don't want to go there, even for the photo booth.

http://www.nashvillescene.com/Stories/Columns/The_Fabricator/2005/08/25/100_Oaks_Climbs_in_Rankings_of_C/index.shtml

http://www.flickr.com/photos/76944759@N00/sets/72057594071409861/

It was right across from my high school and if it weren't for all the teens flooding the place in the mid-afternoons it'd have been permanently abandoned. Half the shops were just plain empty - the food court was wasted with maybe 40 percent of the slots in use, only thing I can remember about that was a pizza joint. otherwise that mall had a few anonymous department stores, a crap record store (Maxie Waxie's? Sam Goody's? I don't remember), a store selling cheap Asiatic objects/paintings/whatever, a Toys'R'Us megastore, a kiosk shilling aeromatic oils, a Bank of America, a tiny comic book store, a Marshalls, and a few other odds and ends lost to the ravages of time. Oh right, there was a sports card shop too and an arcade for a while. But at best 50% of the place's commercial space was utilized - it's sort of amazing that it lasted as long as it did.

Still living malls visibily creeping towards extinction are almost as chilling as dead malls (cf. Owings Mills Mall)

(Arundel Mills Mall is totally opposite this, thriving and crowded and awesome.)

Latham Circle Mall - one of the first malls I ever visisted.

Northway Mall - this was dying even as long ago as the 80s. It was right across a busy highway (with no crossings) from the Colonie Center - why bother?

Mohawk Mall - this place has been torn down? Just shows you how long it's been since I left Upstate NY.

It's weird, the cycle of which malls survive and thrive and expand, and then eat up the clientelle of surrounding malls. The Colonie Centre put paid to a lot of surrounding strip malls - and then Crossgates Mall knocked the Colonie Centre for 6. And we thought Crossgates wouldn't last - too many shoe stores.

The architecture looks so dated now. Not that it ever didn't, really... but it's kinda creepy the way malls across America all look so similar.

Also meant to mention: drove by Wonderland Mall in Livonia, MI a couple years ago and it appeared to be on the critical list.

That Phoenix Sears looks just like the Pasadena Sears, which is still open and doing OK.

"The Potter's House Christian Fellowship bought the abandoned mall for $4 million in 2002. The church then converted the old Sam's Wholesale Club building into a 4,000-seat sanctuary, a 600-seat children's church, nursery, classrooms and offices."

I remember this single-anchor mall being a big deal on the Westside of town when I moved there in 1984 (1 of 3 single-anchor malls flourishing then).

Then I remember it basically being a dollar theater and a game room for teen-weekends, with virtually nothing else but a Christian bookstore for daytime hours before becoming boarded up in the 90s.

To see pictures of it revamped as a church is O_o

(although the Grand Boulevard Mall on the rich side of town was converted to a branch of the community college w/o ever boarding up long before I left Florida!)

my good friend and bandmate greg schaal has been documenting the dead malls of MN:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregschaal/sets/72057594096281909/

dead malls really are fascinating.

this thread got me thinking about when all K-Mart's used to have a lunch counter.
http://www.the80sshop.com/WindowsLiveWriter/k-mart.jpg

the dead malls series on youtube by dan bell (not the techno dan bell) is fascinating

and also awesome

This one's epic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lWZLYa8FoM

The Corpus Christi one, too. Almost makes me want to watch The Legend of Billie Jean.

https://heisenbergreport.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/teaser.png

These 21 retailers are closing 3,591 stores -- who is next?
Number of distressed U.S. retailers at highest level since Great Recession
The collapse of retail chains is leaving America's shopping malls empty
A third of American malls will close soon

http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/54da22f8ecad04ed701f0fc5-1104/snowy-deserted-empty-mall.png

Somehow I never posted this here. The mall has since been completely closed, not sure if it's been knocked down yet.

http://www.splicetoday.com/writing/a-requiem-for-maryland-s-owings-mills-mall

This was hard to scroll through.

http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Abandoned-Mall-Photos-Owings-Mill-Mall-Maryland--412570033.html

The dead malls video of owings mills is definitely the most depressing we've watched so far.

http://img6.photobucket.com/albums/v16/Celedux/msuic1.jpg

I'm looking it up now, though I shouldn't. That's my childhood/young adult mall.

Well, this was soul-destroying to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCj2hRc_F6Y

He should really bring along a few people who grew up with these malls when he shoots the videos, but then again, maybe he shouldn't.

A friend just shared this one with me, from North Carolina.

http://skycity2.blogspot.com/2011/08/lenoir-mall-lenoir-nc.html

Its astonishing how much/how rapidly this is happening in the US. Whats changing thats causing this? We dont seem to have this problem in Aus. But then again I dont think we have quite the massive proliferation of malls? We still have a lot of local community/village strip shops and such.

Punctuated equilibrium. Malls hung on for as long as they could. Strip malls cost a lot less to keep up than the big indoor suckers, but they'll die too.

i think the widening gap between the upper middle class and lower middle class is a huge factor--in an internet shopping environment there's room in b&m for low-cost retailers and attainable luxury retailers but malls always kinda lived in the middle.

where i live there are a small handful of malls that have upscaled sufficiently; i think the rest are fucked.

The malls that survive are all going mixed-use with residential and office space mixed in, including the urban ones. It'll be interesting to see how long Pentagon City holds out.

I'm not sure Australia experienced the role the mall played in American social life. The old world certainly didn't.

American suburbs are all less than 70 years old, they never had town squares or other common places like well frequented social boulevards. For people my age and younger, they may have been the only place to meet others in youth outside of school sanctioned events.

I never enjoyed them (as noisy, shallow exemplars of the craving for status tokens). But I spent a good portion of a summer in the video arcade at one (which is now a refitted as a satellite community college).

However, without the mall, American suburbia is just endless cul-de-sacs and pointless lawns, stretched along unwalkable avenues with their grocery and convenience stores. Where I grew up in the sun/bible belt, there were no pubs, no well-populated parks, and very little to make anyone to feel attached to place. I can easily imagine that malls, over the last 4 decades, played this role for many. Perhaps other have megachurches (many occupying former malls) to fill this void, but for me, its all flyover territory.

I wouldn't be surprised, that when the historians and archaologists are done picking over our remains, they'll ask why Americans couldn't value investments in community that could preserve their neighborhoods. The town square, the friendly pub, hell the neighborhood football club. It was all facades of commerce, piety, or professional sports, that could be abandoned as easily as they once were built.

There are some areas of outer suburban aus cities like that - the huge mall/shopping centre is the hub of life and the surrounding suburbs dont have much else on. But yes, even despite this most areas here at least have small community areas in each subrban cluster - a single street or 2 with a row of local grocers, or an Aldi, some parks, pubs, cafes etc.

I suppose it never occured to me large areas of the US arent like that, and I suspect car culture might be one reason why?

American suburbs are all less than 70 years old

a lot of smaller cities have neighborhoods that were former suburbs that are quite a bit older, but became incorporated with the city proper rather than becoming rural area-bordering exclaves!

Americans got rich, relatively speaking, during the heyday of the automobile. In future histories people will learn that some of the idiosyncrasies of US urban planning (exurban planning?) were basically because the height of middle class economic activity coincided with the broad utility of the car, and they fed off each other until you had 3-car households and highways that all but exited directly onto cul-de-sacs surrounded by mansions. There's no room in that model for a town square - parking would be a bitch! So you build a new kind of town square, a mall, a GALLERIA even, with surface parking as far as the eye can see. Next to a highway. Tomorrow we're going to talk about the rise of personal computers, and the "dot com bubble!"

This is just making me want to go home and play Sim City.

Tiny Tower is more appropriate imho. vertical, mixed use, fewer pixels, etc.

LOL I'd forgot about that one.

Not uncommon I realise but wild to me he could just get in and film this and the stuff just left in there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV_c_c_RZdE

I'm interested in malls that find a life after death, like the Gwinnett Place Mall in suburban Atlanta, which was used as a location for the mall scenes in Stranger Things.

When I was a kid, Cinderella City in Englewood, Colorado was, to me, the height of opulence. Its decline is a case study in the death of a mall.

I heard about one in downtown Portland that was not quite abandoned, but almost.. so they started having like a Thursday night street walk kinda thing, with pop-up comic shops, guitar stores, food stands, etc.