The customer-service office is cordoned off by a metal gate. The plants underneath the skylight droop toward a ring of yellow caution tape, and the piped-in music echoes off barren walls. The mall used to have a dance club. A decade ago, the Schuylkill Mall and its 90 stores, restaurants and knickknack kiosks was a nexus of daily life in this part of Pennsylvania coal country, where teenagers met to flirt as warm-up-suited seniors walked laps around them. Now we get a million phone calls a day asking, Are you still open?
In early May, management gave the remaining tenants 60 to 90 days to close up shop. Tenants expect the property to be demolished. The wrecking ball will put the mall in good company around the nation. By , analysts estimate that 1 out of every 4 malls in the U. This year alone, more than 8, stores could close, according to industry estimates, many of them the brand-name anchor outlets that real estate developers once stumbled over themselves to court.
In April, Payless Inc. The mall staple RadioShack has filed for Chapter 11 twice in two years. So far this year, nine national retail chains have filed for bankruptcy. Local jobs are a major casualty of what analysts are calling, with only a hint of hyperbole, the retail apocalypse.
The growth of online retailers, meanwhile, has failed to offset those losses, with the e-commerce sector adding just , jobs over the past 15 years. Some of those jobs can be found in the massive distribution centers Amazon has opened across the country, often not too far from malls the company helped shutter.
One of them is in Breinigsville, Pa. But those are workplaces, not gathering places. The mall is both. And in the 61 years since the first enclosed one opened in suburban Minneapolis, the shopping mall has been where a huge swath of middle-class America went for far more than shopping. It was the home of first jobs and blind dates, the place for family photos and ear piercings, where goths and grandmothers could somehow walk through the same doors and find something they all liked.
Sure, the food was lousy for you and the oceans of parking lots encouraged car-heavy development, something now scorned by contemporary planners. Think of your mall. Or think of the one you went to as a kid. Think of the perfume clouds in the department stores.
The floating Muzak. Now, many malls in the United States have either collapsed or are on the verge. So, how did we go from this to this? The story of the mall begins in the s, when America was experiencing an unprecedented economic boom.
The middle class had more money to spend than ever before, and they were spending it on houses and cars. Along with this came Eisenhower's Federal-Aid Highway Act, which meant that people could drive to their jobs in the cities while living in a new kind of development, the suburbs. Suburban populations rose astronomically, but they lacked what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called "third places. The second place is the workplace.
And third places are the vital spaces where people go to exchange ideas, form relationships, and create communities. This could be a park, a bar, or, in today's times, social-media platforms. In other words, the third place is a place to hang out.
Enter Victor Gruen, a man who would later become the "king of retail" for the era. Gruen, who ironically was a staunch socialist, had already made a name for himself in America designing boutique shops and storefronts, but now wanted to create something far more ambitious, an indoor downtown. In what would prove to be his boldest and most enduring project yet, Gruen set about designing the mall.
Like no building ever constructed before, the Southdale Center not only had shops, but fountains, art installations, a bird sanctuary, and a sprawling courtyard, all within a single indoor complex. The mall received mostly rave reviews, deeming it an attraction on par with Disneyland, which had just opened a year earlier, in Walt Disney himself even cited Gruen as his main influence for the ideas behind Epcot.
With Southdale all over the news, everyone wanted to go to the mall. Malls began springing up in every American suburb, along with large shopping-center-mall hybrids and everything in between.
By , just four years after Gruen's first mall, there were 4, large shopping complexes in the United States, which averages to at least three new shopping centers opening every day. But Gruen's utopian vision for the mall had not been realized.
Cheap food courts were installed where courtyards were supposed to be. Instead of cosmopolitan communities, developers often surrounded malls with enormous parking lots and suburban housing projects, exactly what Gruen was trying to thwart. Whereas the mall was designed to be the communal remedy for suburban individualism, it instead became its most potent catalyst. If a mall were to lose multiple department stores at the same time, the drop in footfall would be catastrophic.
The Starbucks Effect For the malls that do end up closing, the space they occupied offers a vast range of opportunities for entrepreneurs, investors and government bodies alike see Fig 2. This might mean dropping retail space from one million square feet to , square feet — a level far more sustainable in the long term. Gibbs outlined another alternative: tear the mall down and redevelop the property into a walkable and dense mixed-use community.
The popularity of this style of development can also be very profitable for developers, with buyers showing a willingness to pay a premium to live in a more connected area. In , research firm Zillow identified what it called the Starbucks Effect, in which properties located within a quarter-mile of a Starbucks increased in value substantially faster than those further away. The huge footprint left by a failed mall presents the perfect opportunity for the development of such a community.
While the malls that fail may find new life as mixed-use centres or be completely redeveloped, the malls that remain will not necessarily survive unchanged. With added pressure from online shopping, merely boasting a wide selection of shops is no longer enough to draw customers in their droves.
Change in management Matt Billerbeck, Senior Vice President at architecture, planning and design practice CallisonRTKL, believes the current wave of mall closures is at least partly due to the sheer number of sites that opened between the s and s. The natural evolution of competition is some of those would start to fade no matter what, even in a decent economy.
With added pressure from online shopping, merely boasting a wide selection of shops is no longer enough to draw customers. With online shopping taking somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of mall sales, customers no longer need to travel for the basic and frequent purchases that once got people through the door.
To combat this, Billerbeck said leading malls are improving their selection of stores and creating more reasons to visit. So on a big shopping day, if you want to shop, they have the entire collection. But the way stores operate is also changing. While some department stores like Nordstrom are generating strong interest, the classic format of a store stocking a curated selection of brands is dropping in popularity.
Billerbeck believes, with the right management, those shopping malls freed from the demands of a department store could make substantial changes to cater for more specialist and attractive brands. As they go away, all kinds of new opportunities open up.
Malls of the future However, it is not just store selection that is being reconsidered. Since shopping no longer commands enough draw for people to make the trip to centres, both current mall owners and developers are working to incorporate residential, office and other facilities into malls. The trend of more connected malls has long been the norm overseas. Unlike the US, these malls are generally located in urban centres and are well connected to public transport. By virtue of this, the facilities are often composed of far more than just shops; incorporating services, amenities and even event spaces.
Since there is more to do, they have a greater appeal. Less formulaic and more individualised, more personality driven. While the explosion of mall construction in the US may well be over, those that remain are on the brink of a new future for retail. Whether taking a revised role in the urban landscape or being completely reimagined, the self-destructive model adopted by previous mall developers appears to have come to an end.
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