Shopping Centers In Your Town

[Bear Up North]

I was looking through some archived Cyburbia threads that dealt with shopping centers. Noticed quite a few rants concerning the design and placement of shopping centers, big boxes, etc.

Thought it might be interesting and fun to post some info about the big centers near you......and what is right or wrong with them.

Toledo:

The Colony - This was Toledo's first shopping center. It was really just a line of stores in what was considered the suburbs back in the 1950's, with a big parking lot in the back. In addition to the stores it had a movie theater and a basement bowling alley. It was close to this Bear's home. It's gone now, gobbled up by an aggressive Toledo Hospital.

Great Eastern, Miracle Mile, Southland - These shopping centers were built in the 1950's and all had the same design. Basic near-horseshoe pattern with a BMF parking lot in the front and a major department store as an anchor.

Westgate - L-shaped center with an anchor at the junction of the two legs. The anchor was originally The Lion Store, a 2-story building. They added a third story in the 1960's. Eventually The Lion Store became part of Dillard's and this store is now empty.

Woodville Mall, Greenwood Mall, Franklin Park Mall, Southwyck Mall, North Towne Mall - These first-generation malls were built during the "great mall building craze" in the 1970's. Greenwood is long gone. North Towne has converted itself to some sort of office building. Woodville Mall and Southwyck are dying.

Only the Franklin Park Mall, purchased a couple years ago by an Australian company, is alive and kicking.....with a new name: Westfield. This BMF is in the process of adding more stores, new movie theaters, and parking garages. It is the only successful shopping mall in the metro.

Traffic in the Westfield area is horrible. Hundreds of other retail, taverns, restaurants, are all around the Westfield area.

Bear At The Fountain, Looking At The Pennies

[Michele Zone]

What the local mall does right:
It has a large theater at one and a cluster of food places has sprung up down there. My husband and I have been known to take in "dinner and a movie" all at the mall. I like that.

It is designed so that there are some entrances on the upper level and some on the lower from the parking lot. They are spaced pretty well.

It has good access from the Interstate but also has reasonable access to the main downtown area of town. It is now smack in the midst of downtown but it is one Interstate exit down and you can run errands in the main downtown area and then take a road straight over there.

What the local mall does wrong:
There is no food court.

There isn't really adequate parking for the theater: that section of parking is almost always crowded.

[Zoning Goddess]

The two main shopping malls from my childhood have been turned into "destination" big-box centers, neither of which I have ever visited.

A small shopping mall remains at a main intersection in my hometown, with several of the original decades-old anchors.

[SkeLeton]

Gee.. I only go to my nearest mall because of the cinema, and the donuts besides that... I rarely stay much around there... so what's good about it? read above... what bad about it... besides having a weird layout due to the numerous patches and additions made through time, the stores are generally lame and expensive becuase it's located in the high income area...also it's crowded with yuppies having coffee at the local starbucks...

[zman]

Growing up, the MASSIVE Park Meadows mall in South Denver was built. we thought it would overtake the smaller, Southglen Mall nearby. Park Meadows is still truckin' (and acutally spurred the regrowth of a long abandond K Mart across the street... a subject of many tails of lore growing up). The Southglen Mall has been kicked in the head, but is still going with minimal vacancies. It offers a less congested alternative to shoppers in Denver.

Up here in the No. Colo., they plan on putting in a mall (tax free for 25 years) across I-25 from a "barely breathing" factory outlet mall. Hmmm, interesting. But things are optimistic as both malls are SUPPOSED to boost eachother.
I'll keep Cyburbia posted.

[nerudite]

The closest mall to my house is the largest mall in the world, which come complete with minigolf, go kart track, indoor amusement park with world's largest indoor rollercoaster, underwater submarine rides, reproduction fo the Santa Maria, etc. etc. etc. And I AVOID IT LIKE THE PLAGUE.

The new big thing in Edmonton is what they call 'the power centres', which is basically a breeding ground for big boxes (like Ikea, Home Depot and lots more).

[Suburb Repairman]

NorthStar Mall in San Antonio is a nightmare to get to and has insufficient parking (San Antonio=very auto dependant). There's a major highway interchange project going on right next to it that really does a number during rush hour. They are doing some major remodelling that should help the outside appearance.

Good ol' San Marcos, TX, home of my alma mater, has the pruod claim of having the largest assembly of outlet malls in the U.S. (two malls that probably cover at least a square mile). One of them makes a good attempt at creating a pedestrian atmosphere that allows people to walk from one side to the other without much trouble and has great landscaping along the walkways and courtyards. The other sucks. You have to go back to your car to drive to the other side because it is set up more like an old-style strip center. Fact-of-the-day: these outlet malls are the third most popular tourist destination in Texas after the Alamo and Riverwalk.

[Super Amputee Cat]

Only the Franklin Park Mall, purchased a couple years ago by an Australian company, is alive and kicking.....with a new name: Westfield. This BMF is in the process of adding more stores, new movie theaters, and parking garages. It is the only successful shopping mall in the metro.

The name is worse than that: It's actually called Westfield Shoppingtown at Franklin Park. What kind of bull$hit name is that! Might as well call it Westfield Yuppietown or how about Westfield Soccermomtown.

In the end though, the name fits, as utterly stupid as it is. A mall that was once affordable and relatively diverse has gone totally uppity. The hobby stores, ice cream shops, and affordable deli-counter style eateries of the 1970s have been replaced with hoards of women's apparel shops (er..shoppes) and botiques.

Traffic in the Westfield area is horrible. Hundreds of other retail, taverns, restaurants, are all around the Westfield area.

Yep, and did you ever notice...the bigger the SUV the closer it is to the mall entrance?

What really sucks though is the demolition of the old AMC Franklin Mall Cinemas. They were built in 1985 (I was there for the grand opening) and were bought out by the hated National Amusements around 1994. That spelled the end for competitive ticket pricing and affordable movie-watching in Toledo: Within ten years, National Amusements has shut down all the old AMC Theaters they had purchased, including the beloved Southwyck 8. They had no intention of ever keeping those screens running. All they wanted to so was drive out the competition and jack up prices.

I heard somewhere that Toledo has the second highest average ticket prices after New York. I believe it.

[BKM]

The name is worse than that: It's actually called Westfield Shoppingtown at Franklin Park. What kind of bull$hit name is that! Might as well call it Westfield Yuppietown or how about Westfield Soccermomtown.

In the end though, the name fits, as utterly stupid as it is. A mall that was once affordable and relatively diverse has gone totally uppity. The hobby stores, ice cream shops, and affordable deli-counter style eateries of the 1970s have been replaced with hoards of women's apparel shops (er..shoppes) and botiques.



Yep, and did you ever notice...the bigger the SUV the closer it is to the mall entrance?

What really sucks though is the demolition of the old AMC Franklin Mall Cinemas. They were built in 1985 (I was there for the grand opening) and were bought out by the hated National Amusements around 1994. That spelled the end for competitive ticket pricing and affordable movie-watching in Toledo: Within ten years, National Amusements has shut down all the old AMC Theaters they had purchased, including the beloved Southwyck 8. They had no intention of ever keeping those screens running. All they wanted to so was drive out the competition and jack up prices.

I heard somewhere that Toledo has the second highest average ticket prices after New York. I believe it.

I hate Westfield's branding. What was once nice and local sounding is now "Westfield Shoppingtown at Solano" What is a "Shoppingtown"? Darn Australians!

I don't really like the local mall very much. The Department Stores are strictly b-line (a Macy's with no suits or nice ties!!!???), and most of the smaller stores seem geared strictly to the tacky or the teenage rebel and goth crowd. I've been in there once or twice during the past three years. Although, there is a good Best Buy store attached at one end (horrible parking)

Across from the mall is a much nicer series of regional strip centers, with Barnes and Nobles, Trader Joes, Circuit City, better restaurants, Cost Plus. etc. Generica, of course, but nice Generica.

[biscuit]

For a large metro area with a near stagnate growth rate, we have more new malls and shopping centers than you can shake a stick at. And many of them were built in greenfields using TIF money. And,that is wrong, wrong, wrong considering all of the urban brownfields we have here.

We really didn't have any shopping centers in the community I grew up in. Except for maybe Robert's Gulf Station where you cold get gas, diesel, milk, bread, beer, some livestock feed, plumbing supplies, along with live crickets and night crawlers. Would that count as a shopping center?

[mendelman]

[snip]...Except for maybe Robert's Gulf Station where you cold get gas, diesel, milk, bread, beer, some livestock feed, plumbing supplies, live crickets and night crawlers. Would that count as a shopping center?

No, it would be a "definition of use" nightmare.

[biscuit]

No, it would be a "definition of use" nightmare.

Absolutely it would... That is, if Robert's was located in a place that required any use definition to begin with.

[Dan]

The biggest shopping centers near my house are:

Beachwood Place : an upscale enclosed shopping center. Nothing extraordinary, though; it's basicaly a typical two-story late 1970s-era shopping center with foo-foo tenants like Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom.

Legacy Village: just across the street from Beachwood Place, Legacy Village is a textbook lifestyle center; faux Main Street; upscale tenants like Restoration Hardware, Crate and Barrel, Cheesecake Factory, and the like; and horrendous parking because the place is so popular. Beats an indoor mall or a strip plaza, though; you can take a date to one of the many restaurants there, and out for window shopping afterwards.

Richmond Town Square : a plain-jane, old-school 1960s-era mall in middle-class Richmond Heights, two miles north of Beachwood Place. The mall is somehow doing well, even though many of its peers in other parts of the country have ended up on the Dead Malls Website. The shopper mix is very diverse; probably 50% middle-income black (as opposed to Beachwood Place's 99.9% white).

University Square in University Heights on the South Euclid border, is a planner's power center. Imagine a two-story Target store on top of a Tops supermarket on top of some other stores, a three-story Kaufman's to the side, and a huge multi-level parking ramp. It's basically a 600,000 square foot shopping center stacked on four levels, on a 12 acre site. How can you not love that?

[michaelskis]

Our mall, The Crossroads, is made to look like a Spanish Plaza inside the foot court, and a little like a downtown streetscape in the rest of it. Which is good because we don’t have a real downtown.

[Dan]

Up here in the No. Colo., they plan on putting in a mall (tax free for 25 years) across I-25 from a "barely breathing" factory outlet mall. Hmmm, interesting. But things are optimistic as both malls are SUPPOSED to boost eachother.

The lifespan of a typical mall now is 25 years.

I don't see the folks of Northern Colorado as very mall-happy. There was far more foot traffic in downtown Fort Collins than in Foothills Mall, even though that shopping center had pretty good occupancy and no scotch tape stores.Crossroads Mall in Boulder is dead. Twin Peaks Mall in Longmont and Greeley Mall are yawners; both have the same tenants, including Dillards, JC Penny, and Sears.

A mall (would it be a real old-school indoor mall, or a lifestyle center?) across from the Loveland factory outlet would kill the Foothills, Twin Peaks and Greeley malls. it's a great location, mall-wise, but would it work? Would they need to expand the Larimer County UGA to permit it, or just annex the land to Loveland? Traffic on I-25 from Denver's northern suburbs to Fort Collins is already congested; a mall certainly won't help. The Foothills Mall and Twin Peaks Mall sites could probably be redeveloped, but what about Greeley Mall?

[BKM]

The lifespan of a typical mall now is 25 years.

I don't see the folks of Northern Colorado as partocilarly mall-happy. There was far more foot traffic in downtown Fort Collins than in Foothills Mall...

Sounds a bit like "everyone's favorite California small town" San Luis Obispo, whose downtown basically killed their 1970s enclosed mall, the last I had heard.

[RaneyOnline]

Nearly all the malls have the same stores in it. I guess you pick a mall to shop in by the interier design. I tend to shop were the biggest food court is located

P.S. Pittsburgh Mills will open with-in a year. It will feature a multi-screen theater, an IMAX Theater, and a go cart track. The outer edge parking will include big box stores including Wal-mart and Sam's Club.

[Queen B]

Actually, as I reminisce there used to be a strip mall out what is now my back door. I remember shopping there with my grandmother. It was close to her home.
I remember Penney's was in it. Since then they have torn it down to make a medical office complex. The hospital has eaten it's way though our neighborhood. But the historic society has taken a stand and said no more. So they have jumped the street and are heading into another less prominent neighborhood.

We do have a fair mall here. We are a shopping destination for many small towns in the area. I have always found a good supply of items here.

[Bear Up North]

A bit of a coincidence that raneyonline reopened this thread.....a thread that had been dormant since October, 2004. This morning the local Toledo, OH, newspaper, The Blade, has a long and interesting article about the person who owns the majority stake in a mall in Toledo that is close to dead.

Sherman Dreiseszun is a Kansas City, MO, gent who, with his company and partners, owns seven (7) other malls. These other malls are located in the Kansas City area, in Denver, and in Cincinnati. Some are dying, some are very successful.

The Southwyck Mall here in Toledo (owned by Dreiseszun) is dying a slow death. Montgomery Wards was the southern anchor.....gone. The other two (2) anchors were Dillards For The Home and Dillards. They will be gone, also, as a new "lifestyle center" is going to be built in suburban Maumee.

Dan mentioned that the typical lifepsan for a mall is twenty-five (25) years. Southwyck is a product of the 1970's so it has a few more years on it. I can't see it being successful as mall retail......its' location is cumbersome when compared to other newer retail venues (planned or built). Typical mall.....wings with a big fountain in the center.

Those of you that read another thread of mine, "De Noc", know that I put a lot of time into working on my fake (Amish/pencil) city. For my drawings I developed a code for retail that I use to distinguish what I draw. That code is actually applicable (by me when I wander past retail) for the real word.

Code 1, Single retail building
Code 2, Single retail with apartments above
Code 3, Building with ground-level businesses that include retail
Code 4, Multiple retail building (strip stores)
Code 5, Multiple retail building with apartments above (strip stores also)
Code 6, 1st Generation shopping center, sometimes with anchor stores, usually built between 1952-1970)
Code 7, 2nd Generation shopping center, enclosed mall, always with anchors (1971-1995)
Code 8, 3rd Generation shopping center, enclosed mall, fitting description of "regional mall" because of size, scope and success of nearby development, etc.
Code 9, 4th Generation shopping center, open concept, usually called "life style centers" (cat calls them "yuppie centers")

This coding system helps me. You planner folks probably have codes of your own.

Bear Looking For The Food Court At Southwyck

The latest news here in Toledo, OH (this is being written in late July) is that the nearly-dead Southwyck Mall is going to be redeveloped into a "somewhat" lifestyle-type center. No real details have been released. They may tear down the whole existing mall, they may just change the configuration to allow retail with outside and classy entrances.

It also sounds like they will move the focus of the center much close to Reynolds Road, the major road that the mall faces.

There are a bunch of guys running for mayor of Toledo and this mall's slow death walk has already been a topic with the candidates.
_____

Bowling Green, OH, a small city south of Toledo has a small mall that has struggled in recent years. When I was in that fair city last weekend I noticed that the mall has changed so the retail on the US 25 side each have their own outside entrance.

Bear

[cololi]

Our downtown malls are about to go through a major redevelopement. With the added Gateway "lifestyle center" (about 4 years old now) and the new redevelopment, downtown slc should look pretty interesting. Our suburban malls are the typical 1970's fully enclosed, no windows, a parking lot that surrounds the entire place type things. They tend to do pretty well, but some new commercial development in the south part of the valley, including a Gateway South, will reduce their vitality and hopefully spur some redevelopment of those malls as well.

[DetroitPlanner]

Bear, all the stores at the Southwyck food court have been closed for some time, only places open are the pretzel guy and the fancy french take out place.

Hasn't the Home store already been gone for a while? Can you recall what used to be there? It certainly looked like a re-use to me.

Regarding Bowling Green;s mall, last time I was there it had a tiny sears store and an empty Penny's. Why doesn't Sears move into the Penny's spot and add a few departments that would help it cater more to the Collge Kid? not too many buying riding lawmmowers I imagine.

[donk]

My life is split between downtown living and shopping and suburbia.

The claim to fame of my work municipality is this mall. The largest indoor mall built in Canada in the past 20 years. Having been to it, it is nothing special, mostly just big box type retailers joined together with a few thematic flooring patterns.

[DetroitPlanner]

My life is split between downtown living and shopping and suburbia.

The claim to fame of my work municipality is this mall. The largest indoor mall built in Canada in the past 20 years. Having been to it, it is nothing special, mostly just big box type retailers joined together with a few thematic flooring patterns.

Donk your crappy mall looks a lot like this crappy mall: Greal Lakes Crossing

Right down to the racetrack style layout and the giant Bass Pro Shop

[noj]

I am pleased to say that my local town has no mall at all, just a few shops in the town centre. There are a few 'retail parks' in the local cities (basically a few big warehouses and a supermarket), but these are on reclaimed land. The nearest 'mall' is probably Meadowhall near Sheffield (or Meadowhell as I prefer to call it). It's on brownfield land and has good transport links (tram, train, bus) but it had a massive detrimental impact on the city centre when it opened.

Thankfully British planning policy has now changed to stop anymore of them being built now. Even the mighty IKEA are being blocked now from out of town locations.

[Bear Up North]

Toledo's aging (and almost dead) Southwyck Mall is in the news again. A couple days before Election Day (coincidence?) the Mayor announces a "handshake" deal with another area developer. The mall will be completely re-done, changing it into a kind of "lifestyle center".

On paper, it looks interesting, as it mixes various-size retail with apartments, etc. (The area around this mall is very middle-class predominantly-ranch homes built in the 1970's. The center is in a high traffic area, just off the Maumee/Toledo Ohio Turnpike Interchange.)

Will it be a success? We shall see.

Bear