Aw… I guess Gwinnett Place makes sense for such a thing. They’d eventually take it apart anyhow, cause apparently, they’ve sold the location to make room for a cricket field/stadium (I think)…
The king of dead mall clusterfucks had to be Dixie Square in Harvey, Illinois. Best known for the mall scene in The Blues Brothers, it stood rotting for 32 years before it finally came down in 2012, after years of half-baked redevelopment ideas that somehow never panned out.
I’m (barely) old enough to remember being taken there with the family in its heyday.
A dead mall really is the ultimate symbol for encapsulating ‘final stage capitalism.’
That one has been dying for a good 2 decades now…
It is weird because they heyday of malls was both fairly recent and fairly brief. (Seems like anyways)
Lots of late-70’s/80’s media talk about huge malls as a new and recent thing. Then they were on the downturn by the start of the 2000’s.
I think that’s true to an extent… I think maybe the nature of a mall has changed? People are moving back to city centers, and so those live/work/play type developments are going up. In Atlanta, it’s like Atlantic Station or Ponce City Market - which renovated the old City Hall East, a huge building that had sat vacant for ages. So, older, suburban malls are on the wane in favor of live/work/play locations and downtowns in smaller towns (which they dub as historic and use that to try and draw in tourists).
The Ponce City Market is a great example, I think - it’s right on the belt line in a quickly gentrifying part of town, there are bars, restaurants, a couple of clubs in walking distance, they even tore down the murder Kroger that was right there (RIP, MURDER KROGER!!!)…
But at the end of the day, Ponce City market is just another mall. Same thing with Atlantic Station - it’s a mall, just most of it is outdoors.
Indeed. Plenty of malls near me are doing fine (flourishing even), but some are dying.
One in particular (Woodfield Mall) seems to do well because the mix of stuff there makes it a Place You Go To Do Stuff, even if you are middle aged. Lots of money in that town, too, but I guess the local hotels get a lot of people whose vacation is a destination shopping trip. That is their weekend business when all the business travelers go home on Friday.
Another mall in between Aurora and Naperville seems to be flourishing because half a million people live within 20 minutes drive of it. (Best guess anyways)
Perhaps due to the internet, the mall business has just gotten tougher. And the weak ones are dying off.
I doubt the new Mall is better than the old. At least the mega mall offered shelter from the weather. Here, the trend is to mega strip malls. Miles of roads with parking lots and individual shops. Each parking lot is separated from its neighbour by concrete dividers so people don’t use connected parking lots as bypasses. So if you want to shop at the clothing store then go to the supermarket, you park at the clothing store, shop there, get into your car, drive 100 meters down the road to the supermarket parking lot and shop there. And woe to the person who leaves their car in the clothing store parking lot to shop at the supermarket. That’ll get your car towed pretty often.
You can’t blame Leonardo DiCaprio for losing this piece of natural paradise, this time.
…with no sidewalks. And big drainage culverts in between the lots so you can’t cross over on foot. Though there are bus stops along the side of the road, for some reason, where you can debark and stand next to the traffic, wondering how the hell you’re supposed to cross the road/ditch/guardrail.
While efforts by Kroger have been made to reduce the murder rate at this location, future data will be required to fully analyze any long term benefits from the ongoing murder reduction strategy.
LMAO, that wording is hilarious.
I’m guessing Wikipedia editors haven’t read this one recently? Awesome work though.
Fox Valley mall still seems to be doing well, based on inputs from my offspring who still like to hang out there. Interestingly the same cant be said for the strip malls immediately around it which are shuttering after the loss of Sam’s Club, Toys R Us, and other big-box draws.
Cricket? I thought you only got cricket if you promised to keep your harbours tea-free?
Apparently not:
My grand-uncle-in-law, Uncle Dick (grandmother’s brother-in-law) was a shopping mall architect. I don’t know much about his work, though.
It’s not about better or worse, it’s about continuity of the concept of a mall.
We have a substantial south east Asian community in that part of the ATL.
Brilliant! I know people think it’s a British game, but Ashis Nandy makes a strong case that, at least spiritually, it’s an Indian game that just happened to be discovered by the Brits.
Hope to see the US at the 2023 World Cup, and if the soccer is any guide, it’ll probably be the US women’s team leading the charge.
The best exemplar of pedestrian unfriendliness in my part of the woods, is “Cosco” Plaza’s gas station. 6 lanes of unpredictable traffic in a big old parking lot.
It’s also fun when the construction crews close off sidewalks.
“Just walk back a quarter mile, and cross the street there, you ambulating prole!”
cough walmart cough
I remember Isaac Asimov said something about how he wished he’d seen one of those giant indoor mega-malls before he wrote The Caves of Steel and the Foundation series as it would have helped him write physical descriptions of the futuristic environments he was trying to create.
