Dying Malls

Beth Gallagher

Beth Gallagher

Well-known member
Are malls disappearing in your area? I think it's kind of sad; they were such a mainstay during the 1980s-90s. I guess online shopping coupled with Covid was a death knell but I miss going to the mall. There are still malls in the Houston area, but the one that was closest and most convenient was shuttered a few years ago and the entire thing has been bulldozed. I have no interest in driving an hour just to get to a mall so I rarely do so these days.

Our kids spent a lot of teenage years hanging out at that mall. It had the giant food court, multiple movie theaters and of course the video game arcade. The stores died out one by one, until there were just a few kiosks and a couple of anchor stores (JC Penney, Macy's) left. The end of an era.
 
We had one up in my neck of the woods that was all but dead for the last few years. The movie theater closed down years ago. A couple of months ago, it closed for good. There are a couple of anchor stores (how they are surviving, I can't imagine) and a big health club that can be entered from the outside, but the mall itself is shuttered. Every year, an announcement is made that SOMETHING WONDERFUL is coming but so far, NOTHING WONDERFUL has come. The latest rumor is that a Costco is going in. There are whispers of "multi-use" with apartments.

There's another one that opened a good 30 years ago and has never truly caught on, but for some reason it's still hanging on by the skin of its teeth. It has one big anchor store, a couple of chain stores and quite a few interesting little independent stores. And there's a multi-plex.

What we used to call "the people's mall" petered out some years back but has a few things still there, but it's a shadow of itself.

One big highly-functioning mall in the north part of the area and a ritzy mall off I-4 and a big mall down in the Disney area where all the tourists go seem to be doing OK. There are two big outlet malls and several smaller strip outlet malls toward Disney.

Outdoor shopping centers seem to be the big thing now.
 
Here they keep trying to refurb and repurpose portions of them for other things. That might be keeping them open for the few original stores that remain. But I barely ever enter one these days unless it's for something like an eye exam for new glasses. Lots of weird crap now like department stores replaced by indoor electric go-cart tracks and gaming arcades aimed at Peter Pan 40-somethings.
 
Mary Robi said:
We had one up in my neck of the woods that was all but dead for the last few years. The movie theater closed down years ago. A couple of months ago, it closed for good. There are a couple of anchor stores (how they are surviving, I can't imagine) and a big health club that can be entered from the outside, but the mall itself is shuttered. Every year, an announcement is made that SOMETHING WONDERFUL is coming but so far, NOTHING WONDERFUL has come. The latest rumor is that a Costco is going in. There are whispers of "multi-use" with apartments.

There's another one that opened a good 30 years ago and has never truly caught on, but for some reason it's still hanging on by the skin of its teeth. It has one big anchor store, a couple of chain stores and quite a few interesting little independent stores. And there's a multi-plex.

What we used to call "the people's mall" petered out some years back but has a few things still there, but it's a shadow of itself.

One big highly-functioning mall in the north part of the area and a ritzy mall off I-4 and a big mall down in the Disney area where all the tourists go seem to be doing OK. There are two big outlet malls and several smaller strip outlet malls toward Disney.

Outdoor shopping centers seem to be the big thing now.
Click to expand...

They are constructing a Sam's Warehouse Club on the site of our old mall. I'm actually kind of happy about that because right now the nearest Sam's is in an "iffy" part of town.

I watched a Youtube video a while back that was about a mall that has been converted into small apartments, complete with the refurbished food court and other "services" (dry cleaner, drug store, etc.) still within the complex. The occupants all seemed to be young people who enjoy having the convenience of riding the escalator down to Taco Bell for dinner. (Actually that doesn't sound half bad now that I consider it.).
 
Jacob Petersheim said:
Here they keep trying to refurb and repurpose portions of them for other things. That might be keeping them open for the few original stores that remain. But I barely ever enter one these days unless it's for something like an eye exam for new glasses. Lots of weird crap now like department stores replaced by indoor electric go-cart tracks and gaming arcades aimed at Peter Pan 40-somethings.
Click to expand...

I hate to admit it, but my last few trips to the mall have been to make returns of items I ordered online at Macy's and Dillard's. So I wasn't doing much to support the brick-and-mortar stores.
 
I have never been a mall person, and have seldom even been in a mall; but we do seem to still have them here in Huntsville. People love the malls here, and they are almost like a small village.
The main one that my daughter goes to is called Bridge Street, and it is a huge area with streets (walkable, not cars) and all kinds of shops and upscale cafes and coffee shops. It is a lot different from the older malls from earlier times , where it was just one large building with a lot of shops and little fast food courts.
I think that this is what malls developed into , at least in this town.

One of the older malls is not that far from us, and it seems to always have a lot of cars in the parking lot. There used to be a license place there, so I went there to renew the plates for the car each year, but they closed that.
One time we went there and had lunch at a nice Italian restaurant, but Bobby didn’t like having to hunt so hard for a place to park, so we have not been back since.

At the Bridge Street mall, there is parking around the outside, and then you walk up and down the streets in the mall. I have been there with my daughter because that is where the Apple Store is at, but I would never even consider shopping there.
www.huntsville.org

Bridge Street Town Centre

www.huntsville.org

I actually like the idea of turning the older ones into apartments, and I think I would like living at an apartment where there were food courts, theaters, and shopping in little stores, all in one place. A person could walk around and get their exercise every day, all in a safe place and inside of a building, so weather would not matter.
 
It has at least been 20 years since my last trip to a mall. It seems like a lot of stores got replaced with chains carrying inexpensive merchandise and flagship stores are shifting to less quality. No reason to drive into town for that. Not to mention that I lack the “shopping gene”. Do I really need to spend an hour walking around to buy a card at Halmark:)
 
Beth Gallagher said:
They are constructing a Sam's Warehouse Club on the site of our old mall. I'm actually kind of happy about that because right now the nearest Sam's is in an "iffy" part of town.

I watched a Youtube video a while back that was about a mall that has been converted into small apartments, complete with the refurbished food court and other "services" (dry cleaner, drug store, etc.) still within the complex. The occupants all seemed to be young people who enjoy having the convenience of riding the escalator down to Taco Bell for dinner. (Actually that doesn't sound half bad now that I consider it.).
Click to expand...

Beth turning these malls into apt complexes may not be a bad idea. We sure need some kind living arrangements for the middle class now that rents have went to the moon in price.
 
The Bangor Mall is mostly empty, with only a few discount businesses that are not well-known existing, plus I think a church is leasing one of the areas. Several of the chains didn't close, though; they moved out of the mall into stand-alone buildings nearby. They don't even bother repairing the parking lot, which doesn't help matters any. On the other hand, the one in Presque Isle, further north, looked dead a few years ago but the last time I went by there, it seemed to be bustling, but maybe they were holding some kind of event in the parking lot.
 
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The city centre shopping area of Adelaide is a mall, it was still thriving last time we went there to the Apple store prob 3 years ago

One store I used to go to the city for was lincraft for sewing bits it had a good range and it was only in the city as they’d closed the couple of suburban stores that didn’t carry much of a range anyway , then they closed the city store and opened 2 in the northern suburbs again ….one has since closed and the other is having sales and closing now , so all we have left is spotlight where I got that fabric to make a cosmetic bag a few days ago ( is was in the city as well but that went years ago ) it gives spotlight the green light to jack up prices now they are the only major homewares / crafty shop left , I used to get pint size Ball mason caning jars from them but they only sell, made in China jars now days called Lime ..nah they can keep them …as I don’t need any I’ve got enough and I simply don’t buy made in china food storage items

most of the stores in the city can be found in a huge suburban shopping centre down south of the city anyway
 
Like many others on here, I was around for the Genesis and the Revelations chapters of the Great American Shopping Mall. We moved from Appalachia (Southern Ohio) to Columbus Ohio in 1964, which is when Northland Shopping Center opened:

Lazarus at Northland Shopping Center, 1964. Northland, the first of the city's three compass-point shopping centers, opened to immense crowds on Aug. 13, 1964. The Columbus Citizen-Journal reported that more than 50,000 people walked through the mall before it closed that evening. The 4,500-car parking lot was filled 30 minutes after the doors opened at 10 a.m.

Northland closed in 2002 and was demolished in 2004

There are still a few Malls around Columbus and some around the Orlando area where I live now. Not sure how long they will last. I suspect that when my great grandson reads about Malls, they will be as foreign to him as a wild west saloon is to us.
 
The last mall in Charlottesville died when their anchor stores (Sears and Penny's) went under. I went in a couple of times after that, and it was kind of post-apocalyptic. There were few people and more closed storefronts that active businesses. Last year Home Depot bought it, tore down the mall and built a huge store. I've not gone in yet but have bought some stuff from them...they do next-day delivery for free.

There are very few places left where a variety of stores are co-located. I miss shopping.
 
In Eureka, there was a grocery store called Ray's Food Place, which was part of a local chain of a few stores. This particular one wasn't doing all that well, so it was closed. The building at empty for almost 4 years. Then it was announced that a Party City store was taking the building for a new store. Part way through the set up of the new store, one of their investors pulled out, leaving them with not enough money to make the grocery store sized store selling party supplies. So they leased half of the building to Sportsman's Warehouse, and after 2 years (and a year after Sportsman's Warehouse opened) the setup of the Party City store was almost done, and they would be ready to put stock out and open the doors. But the business Gods had other plans. Party City ran out of money.

The construction crew was putting the store logo lights on the wall above the front windows. Not all of the letters had been installed when the workers left. So the sign stayed the way it was... :ROFLMAO:

party city sign.png
When it finally opened, it flopped big time because locals preferred the locally owned "Party Place", and Party City closed in less than a year.
 
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