The Real Reason Malls Are Closing

[Inkstainedwretch]

Another reason the enclosed mall is fading is that it can only operate at a profit if it is fully occupied. Whether occupancy is 100% or 50%, the whole mall has to be heated or air-conditioned. New malls are being built, but they are open-plan, really just shopping districts with limited motor traffic.

 

[Bushman]

Open air markets are as old as permanent settlements themselves, they won't be going anywhere any time soon. And really, who wants to have to run all over town when you can go to one localized location and buy everything there? The indoor mall is simply an inefficient version of that format for the marketplace.

 

[BlueTrain]

Fair enough but they're nice when it's raining or freezing. Downtown Minneapolis has many of the buildings connected by enclosed walkways at the second story level, making a sort of mall. Don't know what shape it's in now.

 

[Fading Fast]

Fair enough but they're nice when it's raining or freezing. Downtown Minneapolis has many of the buildings connected by enclosed walkways at the second story level, making a sort of mall. Don't know what shape it's in now.

NYC has several "underground" malls that, IMHO, are great because they feel organic. When Grand Central was built, many of the surrounding buildings were connected by tunnels (the same thing at Rockefeller Center) and those corridors are lined with stores - everything from humble shoe repair and barber shops to a bunch of regular stores - food, clothes, pharmacy, etc. - and, some (added later), upscale stores.

But it's not a "mall" in the "we built this entire structure here to suck money out of you" way. It's actually convenient to be able to drop off a pair of shoes to be resoled or grab a tube of toothpaste on your way home from work - that's my idea of an "organic" and useful mall. And the architecture of these corridors is humble but incredibly Golden Era with a lot of Art Deco details - not the schmaltzy ugliness of most new malls.

Like the outdoor markets referenced above, these "malls" make sense for the community and are not just pure "Boys From Marketing" money-and-soul-sucking constructs.

 

[BlueTrain]

No offense but "humble but incredibly Golden Era with a lot of Art Deco details" doesn't make sense to me, although I understand what you're trying to say, I think.

The main street in my hometown that I frequently refer to, all of four or five blocks long, had some nicely constructed buildings, although that didn't describe all of them by any means. A couple were monumental and they're still in use for the same purpose they were fifty years ago. I wouldn't call the nicer ones humble at all. None were art deco but a few were "art moderne," which had evolved from art deco. In fact, the best known building in town, the county courthouse is in that style and was designed by a man who was educated at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. He probably designed more coal company stores than anything else but he also designed several building at the university I graduated from as well as the high school I attended.

I certainly wouldn't describe any building in town as schmaltzy or for that matter, any building I can think of.

 

[Fading Fast]

No offense but "humble but incredibly Golden Era with a lot of Art Deco details" doesn't make sense to me, although I understand what you're trying to say, I think....

These aren't elaborate affairs. They are, basically, tunnels with stores cut into their sides, but since they were built in the era of Art Deco, they have a general Art Deco design to them.

At the time, I bet they didn't seem impressive versus Grand Central or Rockefeller Center - which these tunnels fed - as those are Art Deco monuments, but the tunnels have small Art Deco details that, today, FL members would greatly appreciate.

It might just be the design of the window frames and doors, or the signage, but it is all very cool Art Deco. You see these, IMHO, humble but very GE Art Deco tunnels and modest retail stores, etc., in many film noir movies. They are cooler to us today than, my guess, they were at the time.

 

[BlueTrain]

Remember that much of what you saw in movies was filmed in a studio or studio backlot. It isn't fantasy by any means and backlots (that is, outdoor sets) are still being built. They are representative of what you might see in a town somewhere, though, and as such, usually have a mish-mash of styles, just like towns always have. There are still things about smaller towns and cities that impress me, though. I'm not talking about New York or San Francisco or places like that. Instead, places like Cumberland, Maryland, Asheville, North Carolina and like places can have some surprising examples of architecture, most of which seems to be in the art deco style, probably because the boom years for those places coincided with that style in building. Interestingly enough, a man who designed some remarkable and very well preserved art deco buildings in Ashville was also educated at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, too. A local boy who made good.

I'd say that the key factor in producing such things all over the country was a robust local economy that was controlled by local people, rich though they may have been. Very nice buildings are still constructed but the style is, well, they have no style. Were a new building built with a lot of the ornamentation found on or in art deco buildings would be criticized today as ostentatious, pretentious, wasteful and pointless. That might be true but what we have left is cheap, dull, boxy, and not necessarily as utilitarian as it might be.

Locally, in Washington, D.C., there are many interesting buildings, mostly residences, built in the Neo-Romanesque style, which has a certain charm. None of these styles are that rigid and at a glance seem to contain elements from art deco.

They don't build them like they used to.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

I think it's a bad sign when people don't like dealing with other humans.

"L'enfer c'est les autres." -- J-P. S.

 

[BlueTrain]

Absurdité!

 

[Bolero]

The Internet has changed everything regards Shopping...We have to get used to it regardless of our age....
Visiting a Mall used to be a Social Experience for me and the Wife, People watching was a real experience with shopping being secondary if at all....
I still occasionally visit the Mall...but its only to people watch and do a lunch....\
I believe Malls are losing their popularity because people have become lazy in the new social environment and buying on the Internet is so easy...

 

[BlueTrain]

The Mall of America near Minneapolis is an experience.

I don't know who dreams up things like this but the latest thing (meaning within the last 20 years!) is the so-called Town Center, usually spelled centre. They are okay but all the ones I know of are rather upscale. They usually don't have grocery stores or hardware stores. The ones around here have rather expensive shops and rather expensive restaurants, at least by my modest standards. I'd probably have to admit that reasonably priced restaurants as I think of them don't exist anymore. But most of the chain restaurants like Applebee's, each one identical anywhere you go, aren't too bad but naturally there's a lot more to it than the menu prices. It's funny there are no chain Chinese restaurants that I know of but there are Chinese restaurants almost everywhere with authentic Chinese employees, mostly.

The new Town Centers do offer some of the ambiance of the older downtown, at least of small towns, but without many of the essential services you used to find on the main street in a small town. In addition to hardware stores, there would be barber shops, beauty salons, perhaps a bakery, an office supply store, a drug store or two, and so on. That's how I remember the small town where I grew up in the 1950s. I wonder what a small town would have looked like in the 1850s?

 

[Fading Fast]

Remember that much of what you saw in movies was filmed in a studio or studio backlot. It isn't fantasy by any means and backlots (that is, outdoor sets) are still being built. They are representative of what you might see in a town somewhere, though, and as such, usually have a mish-mash of styles, just like towns always have. ...

The tunnel "retail" stores I'm discussing in NYC are still in existence today and when I reference seeing them in film noir movies of the period it is because they were filmed on location in those same tunnels. It's great to see them in a movie form the '40s and then walk through them later that week.

Either because of historical preservation regs or because the present owners understand the historical value and appeal, many of these "tunnel" stores still have a lot of their original architectural details including the signage which is funny as the sign will be in a 1940s Deco Design but for a modern store like "The Gap" or "CVS."

 

[Fading Fast]

...It's funny there are no chain Chinese restaurants that I know of but there are Chinese restaurants almost everywhere with authentic Chinese employees, mostly....

Definitely Americanized "Chinese" food, but Panda Express and P.F. Chang's are two Chinese Food chain restaurants.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Mall of America near Minneapolis is an experience.

I don't know who dreams up things like this but the latest thing (meaning within the last 20 years!) is the so-called Town Center, usually spelled centre. They are okay but all the ones I know of are rather upscale. They usually don't have grocery stores or hardware stores. The ones around here have rather expensive shops and rather expensive restaurants, at least by my modest standards. I'd probably have to admit that reasonably priced restaurants as I think of them don't exist anymore. But most of the chain restaurants like Applebee's, each one identical anywhere you go, aren't too bad but naturally there's a lot more to it than the menu prices. It's funny there are no chain Chinese restaurants that I know of but there are Chinese restaurants almost everywhere with authentic Chinese employees, mostly.

The new Town Centers do offer some of the ambiance of the older downtown, at least of small towns, but without many of the essential services you used to find on the main street in a small town. In addition to hardware stores, there would be barber shops, beauty salons, perhaps a bakery, an office supply store, a drug store or two, and so on. That's how I remember the small town where I grew up in the 1950s. I wonder what a small town would have looked like in the 1850s?

Those "ye olde fashyonde town centre" ersatz-small-town things really bug me, even worse than a tawdry old run-down '80s mall. A fake-facade of a small town downtown built in the middle of a parking lot somewhere, surrounded by multiplex movies, Tony Macaroni's Italian Grill, and Chucky Cheese, is just another gimmick from the Boys. A real downtown has to grow up organically from the needs of the community that it serves, and it's a mish-mash of architectural types from all different eras, not something that looks like it was pulled out of the back lot at Disneyland.

 

[BlueTrain]

I think you're exaggerating for the effect but I sort of understand what you're getting at.

One town center that I'm thinking of, in fact, the only one I've been to, really, has no outstanding architecture theme. It does have a nice layout but the parking isn't as good as you might wish, although better than in my hometown. To be honest, though, I'm really only comparing it with the few small towns that I'm really familiar with and that's a limitation right there. All the stuff I said about the way more ordinary business being absent still stands and that's now true of the real small towns I'm remembering. The business that remain might include a bank, professional offices (doctors, lawyers), real estate offices, and in places close enough to the big city to have undergone gentrification, probably restaurants.

Basically a town center, and there are several round here, is just another form of a shopping center. Sometimes there are office buildings, generally very upscale, and from which flow very upscale restaurants. In one, at least, they've taken the "town" part way too far and now you have to park in a parking garage. One might as well go downtown for all the convenience they offer. But the downtown (of the big city) is already developed, so thirty miles away, they're starting over. In the city, they're tearing down small buildings (and literally eliminating street-level neighborhoods) and building newer buildings.

Believe me, however, you don't want to live where they're tearing things down and not building anything new.

I'm not too sure if a town can be said to "grow up organically." It's not a plant. A town, all the ones I know of, were designed by humans (who may not have lived there). The streets are laid out in nice in-organic straight lines with sidewalks and paved streets (eventually). And so on. That wouldn't describe a few places I can think of but that was true for a little town that had at most (in 1950) about 1,000 residents, now down to about 250. Not a ghost town but it's dead, just the same. Anyway, my point is that such places are planned. The place I'm thinking of, which is Matoaka, West Virginia, did not really have a mish-mash of styles; nothing had any style whatsoever..

Which of course is a slight exaggeration.

 

[ChrisB]

Those "ye olde fashyonde town centre" ersatz-small-town things really bug me, even worse than a tawdry old run-down '80s mall. A fake-facade of a small town downtown built in the middle of a parking lot somewhere, surrounded by multiplex movies, Tony Macaroni's Italian Grill, and Chucky Cheese, is just another gimmick from the Boys. A real downtown has to grow up organically from the needs of the community that it serves, and it's a mish-mash of architectural types from all different eras, not something that looks like it was pulled out of the back lot at Disneyland.

It's genuine simulated authenticity.

 

[ChrisB]

In my town, they have adopted the slogan "Hometown Friendly", and have banners on every lamp post bearing it. It seems to me that if you really were hometown friendly you wouldn't have to advertise the fact.

 

[BlueTrain]

The effectiveness of advertising is always debatable but it still usually pays to advertise. You have to do it yourself, too. Nobody else will do it for you.

In my wonderful hometown in the 1950s, there was clearly a community spirt, which together with the merchants, made it a nice place to live. "Nice" is the most suitable word I can think of but it was nice, all right. The merchants, a word not used so much these days, were in it for the money, of course, and some were chain stores, even then. G.C. Murphy being the best known. The others were really franchises. But there were parades at Christmas, 4th of July fireworks at the city swimming pool and naturally the high school was the center of attention for sports for nine months out of the year. I suspect that high school sports there are still important as ever. Rod Thorn graduated from that high school. But at some point along the way, the quit having parades and fireworks. It was as if the spirit of the city went away.

I don't remember anyone claiming it was a friendly town, although it was.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Old Home Week" used to be a tradition in many small towns in the Northeast, and possibly elsewhere -- a week-long series of celebrations of community spirit where all the folks who'd moved away were invited back to renew old acquaintances. That really doesn't exist anymore -- you rarely have towns with deep-rooted populations these days, with people being pushed out of their native communities by gentrification or the need to find jobs that don't exist anymore. There's nobody left to welcome the Old Home Folks back home.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Fair enough but they're nice when it's raining or freezing. Downtown Minneapolis has many of the buildings connected by enclosed walkways at the second story level, making a sort of mall. Don't know what shape it's in now.

Along those same lines, downtown Houston has a large underground tunnel network connecting buildings. Within the tunnels are shops and restaurants that form a sort of mall, I guess you could say.