the-economics-and-nostalgia-of-dead-malls OWINGS MILLS, Md. — Inside the gleaming mall here on the Sunday before Christmas, just one thing was missing: shoppers. The upbeat music of “Jingle Bell Rock” bounced off the tiles, and the smell of teriyaki chicken drifted from the food court, but only a handful of stores were open at the sprawling enclosed shopping center. A few visitors walked down the long hallways and peered through locked metal gates into vacant spaces once home to retailers like H&M, Wet Seal and Kay Jewelers. “It’s depressing,” Jill Kalata, 46, said as she tried on a few of the last sneakers for sale at the Athlete’s Foot, scheduled to close in a few weeks. The Owings Mills Mall is poised to join a growing number of what real estate professionals, architects, urban planners and Internet enthusiasts term “dead malls.” Continue reading the main story Share of malls with vacancy rates of 10 percent or higher (considered a sign of trouble) “It is very much a haves and have-nots situation,” said D. At Owings Mills, J.
A New Life for Dead Malls In case you haven’t heard, suburban malls are on the way out (sorry Paul Blart). Some have become abandoned wastelands popular for ruin porn. Others have been torn down and turned into industrial sites. According to Ellen Dunham-Jones, an architect and professor at Georgia Tech, there are about 1,200 enclosed malls in the United States, and about one-third of them are dead or dying. “The malls died for a reason,” she told me. As anchor brands such as JC Penney, Sears, and Macy's close stores and Americans show a preference for shopping online or in walkable urban centers, more malls are expected to close. But there is good news: In many areas of the country developers are finding new uses for dead malls. “Malls are being turned into medical centers, colleges, elementary schools, churches,” she said. The Highland Mall in Austin, Texas, for instance, was named one of "America’s Most Endangered Malls” by U.S. “What happens when a mall begins to deteriorate and no longer function as a mall?”
Euclid Square Mall | Architectural Afterlife Euclid Square Mall – Abandoned? Or just an eerie reminder of how easily we forget? I wanted to post this here, before more lies begin to surface across the face of the Internet. This is Euclid Square Mall – it’s not abandoned, though it has been re-purposed in ways. Though it has indeed been a dead mall since the 90s, these eerily quiet, seemingly abandoned halls are still filled with the chorus ensembles of their equally as eerie, almost post-apocalyptic church groups. In 1997, rumors erupted when talk started that Kaufmann’s would soon be closed, being dragged into expansion plans for a separate shopping center. By 2004, vendors by the name of Outlets USA took over the former Kauffman’s space, moving in if only for a short couple of years. That same year, a proposal was made to include this vacated space as part of a reconstruction project, dealing with a nearby abandoned industrial park. I remember first visiting this mall, waiting for the final store to close. Like this:
Are Malls Over? When the Woodville Mall opened, in 1969, in Northwood, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo, its developers bragged about the mall’s million square feet of enclosed space; its anchor tenants, which included Sears and J. C. Penney; and its air-conditioning—seventy-two degrees, year-round! Two years later, the Toledo Blade published a front-page article about the photo-takers and people-watchers who gathered around the mall’s marble fountain, “that gushing monument to big spending and the shopping spree.” This week, Woodville is being torn down. Part of what’s hurting the mall, obviously, is that, increasingly, people are shopping online. It’s worth noting that Caruso has a good reason to pitch the reinvention of malls to developers: outdoor malls are his company’s focus. Reinventing malls—and the stores that they house—might not be as straightforward as it seems. But, like Gap, Taubman sees its future in the two malls that it’s developing in China and in a third mall, in South Korea.
The death of the American mall | Cities It is hard to believe there has ever been any life in this place. Shattered glass crunches under Seph Lawless’s feet as he strides through its dreary corridors. Overhead lights attached to ripped-out electrical wires hang suspended in the stale air and fading wallpaper peels off the walls like dead skin. Lawless sidesteps debris as he passes from plot to plot in this retail graveyard called Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio. The shopping centre closed in 2008, and its largest retailers, which had tried to make it as standalone stores, emptied out by the end of last year. When Lawless stops to overlook a two-storey opening near the mall’s once-bustling core, only an occasional drop of water, dribbling through missing ceiling tiles, breaks the silence. “You came, you shopped, you dressed nice – you went to the mall. Gazing down at the motionless escalators, dead plants and empty benches below, he adds: “It’s still beautiful, though. Shopping culture follows housing culture. And it shows.
Death of Canadian malls: Future of suburban shopping centres in jeopardy Photo from Michael Galinsky's Malls of America series, circa the 1980s. In the classic 1995 film Clueless, Cher and her bestie Dionne spend a disproportionate amount of time shopping at the mall. Like the soda shop before it the mall has long been the quintessential destination in pop culture, and IRL (texting speak for “in real life”), for teens to waste away the day. But in the two decades since Clueless premiered many malls across North America have been dying a slow, undignified death. Things have only gotten worse as of late. Several experts say malls must adapt to the times, or the retail model will die off. “There is an abundance of choice out there now,” Doug Stephens, a retail industry futurist based in Toronto, told Yahoo Canada News in an interview. Related stories: Renovations: Forget Ruin Porn: 5 Awesome Adapted Spaces That Used to Be Dead Malls A New Life for Dead Malls Can a Living Wage Save America’s Malls? Entrance to the abandoned Randall Park Mall.
The Canadian Shopping Mall: Neither Canadian Nor A Mall, Anymore There was a time when the Canadian shopping mall was more than a mecca for consumer culture. It was a community space that functioned as an exercise circuit for seniors, a fun escape for moms on maternity leave and the default weekend hangout for teenagers. Today, it's an environment under threat. A hyperspeed revolution in the retail sector promises to transform the Canadian shopping mall into something that is neither “Canadian” nor “mall.” That trend is clear in the fast-paced turnaround at the Toronto Eaton Centre. As Canada’s busiest shopping mall adapts to survive, it is rapidly becoming less Canadian. In just the few years since the 2008-2009 recession, the number of Canadian retailers in the mall has fallen by 10 percentage points, to half of all stores, according to an analysis by the Huffington Post Canada. The number of U.S. retailers has risen by nearly the same percentage, to 35 per cent, from 2008 and 2014. But it is Canadian apparel chains that are faring worst. Close Eaton's
How teens are spending money, what they like, and where they shop Why Teens Are the Most Elusive and Valuable Customers in Tech If Facebook's $19 billion Whatsapp acquisition can be attributed to one single instigator, it's teenagers. Having lost its $3 billion bid for Snapchat, and with teens consistently fleeing Facebook by the millions each year, it's clear that Facebook was willing to pay just about any price to get them back. When the world's largest social network and a major purveyor of data considers this demographic priceless, you pay attention. Today's teens are at the center of a massive turf war that's roiling the tech industry. One thing's for certain: today's teens are not doing business as usual, and in order to keep them happy, you need to do a lot more than get an endorsement from Justin Bieber. Why Teens Matter Teenagers have always been important to brands because they tend to be early adopters and because, traditionally, their brand preferences aren't yet firmly defined. Teens also wield significant purchasing power. What They Want Our lightly edited text conversation went as follows:
uk.businessinsider A Farewell to Mallrats When I was a young Girl Scout I attended a yearly event called Mall Madness, at which scores of local troops were locked in a mall overnight, until 3 or 4 a.m. It was the pinnacle of my 12-year-old social calendar, and it was madness, if fairly contained—preteen girls given the run of the mall, running through Spencer’s Gifts hopped up on Orange Julius and too many Cinnabons; making their first tentative forays into Hot Topic without fear of encountering the scary, be-pierced high schoolers that were its daytime denizens; buying CDs and T-shirts and keychains with slogans and other earnest, embarrassing expressions of burgeoning identity. The mall experience is not quite so vibrant today. A few months ago I went to a mall in Maryland, because it has an Old Navy and an Olive Garden, and I wanted to buy pants and eat pasta alone. Other malls are faring even worse. Overall the landscape seems uneven.
It Takes a Village: EBSCOhost Loading... citation_instruction It Takes a Village Detailed Record Title: It Takes a Village. Authors: Source: Vancouver Magazine. Document Type: Article Subjects: CHINATOWN (Vancouver, B.C.)RETAIL storesREXALL Drugs International (Company)T & T Co.SHOPPING malls Abstract: The article looks at the role of the International Village in the growth of Chinatown in Vancouver, British Columbia. Accession Number: View: Tools
America's Oldest Mall Now Contains 48 Charming Low-Cost Micro-Apartments With online retailers making shopping an efficient, no-fuss experience, it's no secret that brick-and-mortar malls aren't as popular as they used to be. Yet, what's to be done about the shopping malls that are no longer populated by crowds of shoppers? What can we do with structures like Arcade Providence, America's oldest shopping mall and a National Historic Landmark? To solve such a dilemma, Northeast Collaborative Architects decided to stage a $7 million revival by transforming the Providence, Rhode Island space into mixed-use housing with 17 shops on the ground floor and 48 low-cost micro-apartments on the top two levels. Starting at an affordable $550 a month, residents can rent an Arcade Providence, one-bedroom unit that's 225 to 450 square feet in size. Inside, there's a built-in bed, full bathroom, refrigerator, sink, microwave, dishwasher, seating, and storage. As for the building as a whole, it stays true to its original Greek Revival style.