In my locale, once the malls start dying they get more unusual lease holders, Korean video stores, nautical museums, art galleries… Doesn’t save them, though.
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They are, it turns out. One of the things you learn watching Dan Bell’s Dead Mall Series on YouTube (strong recommend) is that malls are maintenance nightmares. The second you stop repairing the roof daily, they leak like crazy. They cost a fortune to heat and cool, and are devoid of insulation or sealing.
The other big problem for reuse is that, once the stores are gone, they are really ugly buildings. Even worse than big box stores. Water stained acoustic drop ceilings, nasty commercial carpet, low ceilings, no natural light, strange maze-like layouts, etc. It would probably cost just as much to rebuild as it would to renovate them into something useful.
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True. Once the independent art galleries find the rents affordable enough to move in a mall has entered the terminal stage. At that point the anchor stores are long gone (except perhaps for a big dollar store), some stores have been converted into non-retail uses, half the space is mothballed and walled off to reduce the number of empty storefronts. It’s so depressing that foot traffic enters the death-spiral phase.
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Most malls are like that and might as well be razed when they die. The exceptions are interesting, though.
Google is renovating the 1980s-vintage postmodern Westside Pavilion mall in L.A. as it’s local HQ, but they have deep pockets and the layout is a straight multi-level long arcade-with-skylight style (similar to the one @smulder posted above) that seems to lend itself more easily to renovation to office space. There’s also a mass transit stop nearby, something lacking at most malls.
The mid-century department store that became the later mall’s anchor is being completely gutted into office space by another developer, retaining the period facade elements but nothing else.
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And locally, we usually get an off-brand international furniture store in one of the large spaces formerly occupied by one of the anchor department stores.
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I’m not surprised; my assumption was that mall construction is just as cheap and nasty as other modern commercial buildings. I was being overly cautious with my “may not be,” thinking that early malls might have been built to better standards. But probably not, unless those early malls themselves repurposed older buildings - this kind of shoddy commercial construction likely pre-dates '80s malls by quite a bit.
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Old Towne Mall in Torrance, CA may have been the greatest shopping mall ever, although I can barely remember it ('twas like 45 years ago).
There’s footage out there of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo performing at Old Towne Mall (this might be some, at around 4 minutes in). I don’t recall ever seeing anything like that, although I did see some sword swallowers there once.
(I also recall a big, concrete, Flash Gordon-ish retro-rocket sitting out in the parking lot, but that may have been somewhere else in Torrance – like the liquor store shaped as a boot with a spur)
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Lincoln Mall, one of the malls of my youth, started its inexorable slide in the mid-1990s. Eventually, after two anchors shut down, they had the idea of lopping those wings off of the mall. The work was never completed, and for years the sawed-off stubs of the mall were covered over with plywood. It was ordered closed in 2015 after years of half-assed revitalization schemes, and then demolished, with special effort taken to turn the Carson’s into a freestanding store - only for it close in 2018 and be demolished.
In its later years, its outlots were so crammed with buildings that you’d hardly notice there was a mall there.
I’m just glad it was actually demolished (relatively) right off the bat, instead of allowed to rot for decades like Dixie Square.
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There was an indoor mall in the middle of the Columbia River that was whittled away and then turned inside out, into a conventional strip mall with no interior concourse, in 2013
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I’ve read that Landmark Mall in Alexandria, VA started as an outdoor shopping center, and was then enclosed as an indoor shopping mall, and… now it’ll be an outdoor shopping center again. (I also just read it’s where some part of WW '84 was filmed.)
Closer to where I live, the same thing is set to happen with Beltway Plaza, which is weird because it’s one of the rare malls that’s doing well:
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Cleveland actually has a few of the earlier malls and while they are generally built substantially better than the equivalent 80s structures, they still rot incredibly quickly once you stop continuous maintenance. The acres of flat roofs are the biggest culprit, but everything contributes. People have had more luck renovating old commercial buildings that have been vacant since the 80s (or earlier) than they have with old malls and big box stores.
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That, and massive skylights, and just simply that it’s a Big Fucking Building. But those flat roofs – that’s a killer. There was a contract job I worked on for a while that was in the customer’s 1950s-era headquarters. A few years after my work there was done, they moved into smaller quarters in a modern office park. I can time-lapse through Google Earth and actually see the old building’s roof decay, before it was finally taken down.
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