Dead Malls

Yep. There’s a pretty cool Reddit sub about them.

I will NEVER forgive the people who still live in my hometown for what they let happen to the mall. It’s almost like they don’t know that I was practically raised in the JC Penney.

I was visiting my parents last week. The once thriving mall behind my old high-school has become a dead mall with homeless and crack heads. Sad

I just checked the vendors list for my childhood mall. Childhood mall has rolled with the punches and seems to be thriving. There's a Target. The anchor stores (Sears, Macy's, Penney's) are gone. A couple of dine-in restaurants, now. More food vendors, in general. A dental office. Disappointed to see that the DMV is no longer in there.

Hot Dog on a Stick ... remains.

Cinnabon ... gone.

Those dead malls can be used for lower income housing.

r5 I think it may cost to much to repurpose them into... well, anything really. Cheaper to just tear them down and build new things in that place.

I was just telling my husband that Facebook feels like a dying mall these days.

I'm with R5. Section 8 them.

The amount it would cost to bring malls built in the 1970s and 1980s up to 2023 code would be astronomical. It's a nice idea on paper.

What SHOULD happen is that a lot of these places should be demolished, and have housing built in its place.

Some small/medium size malls that are in good shape have also built housing nearby, to make it more of a multi-use community place. Hilldale in Madison, WI is one such place.

Went to the Moorestown (NJ) Mall just yesterday. Built in the 1960s, it was always the red-headed step child to the more popular Cherry Hill Mall just two miles down the road on Route 38.

At its biggest, it had four anchors: Macy's, Lord & Taylor, Sears and Boscov's. Today, only Boscov's remains. Sears is being converted into an outpatient facility for Cooper University Hospital. Macy's has been subdivided into smaller discount stores, but the western and southern half of the building are vacant and forlorn looking. Lord & Taylor has been converted into a liquidation center called Turn 7 where "merchandise" is piled in giant cardboard boxes and it's up to the customer to root through them. Carpets are frayed and torn and the second floor is completely unused. The founders of Lord & Taylor would turn over in their graves if they saw this shit show of retail happening in their building.

The mall itself is about 40% vacant. The food court has 3 vendors (out of at least a dozen spaces). Many of the kiosks on the mall are empty. Foot traffic was sparse, even for a Monday.

An apartment building is being built on a portion of the mall parking lot. How or even if this building will relate to the mall itself is unclear now. I think a lot of these mall owners are simply throwing shit at the walls in the hopes that something, anything, will stick.

More than the huge shopping malls of the 80s, I miss the standalone, multi-story department stores, usually located in the downtown area of a city, that came before. Meier & Frank in Portland had 15 floors!

[quote] Meier & Frank sold just about everything, except motor cars and farming implements, however the Hardware Department would gladly sell you a shovel, rake or hoe. Meier & Frank would deliver their merchandise in one of their ubiquitous green trucks if you couldn’t make it to the store, no matter how small the order, even a spool of thread.

This sounds like Amazon!

OP, Do you hate shopping?

I knew a girl who had a grand mal once.

And then she died.

Here's a great youtube channel about dead malls. Very relaxing vibe. They also have videos about dying retail chains like Best Buy and JC Penney.

There is a documentary called Jasper Mall about a dying mall which is quite good. You can watch it (with ads) on YouTube.

We lived about an hour and a half from one of the more famous dead malls, Cincinnati Mills. It's gone now but my teenage kids would "pick" to go there for their birthday, then eat at one of the restaurants surrounding it. I believe we had more fun there than if it had actually been a fully functioning mall.

Google Hawthorne Plaza Mall (CA). The End. It was the end of my hometown…

One near me was bought by some guy in California and turned into a college off campus student housing complex

R18 so it isn’t dead. That’s a good thing.

Dead malls surrounded by acres of parking?

Build apartments in the surrounding parking lots, then demolish the mall in the center and use it for parking and green space.

Binghamton? ‘Cause they did that to the old Vestal outdoor plaza, and it worked. R18

I was just reading about a mall in Charlotte, NC. called Northlake Mall. The mall is suing a bunch of former tenants for up and leaving due to crime.

Lenox and Phipps in Atlanta are still as popular as ever, but they are high end, but a few of the suburban malls have either closed or on their last legs.

The death of the mall was when I realized that I was o-l-d. I've lived long enough to remember the advent/explosion of mall development to the end of the concept and re-purposing of the properties.

When I was a kid a two story, four-anchor mall (it was a 1/4 of a mile long and the region's FIRST two-story complex) opened in my hometown 1973. Its presence destroyed a local shopping center (whose design was a precursor of indoor shopping).

The town's mall became the place to be for years. But no longer... now it's 65% occupied.

Where I live now, the region's first indoor mall (built in 1968) is being demolished.

My how things change.

There's a two-anchor mall near me that was completed just as the mall craze had started to wind down.

In the planning stages, it was supposed to have a Macy's at one end and a Robinson's at the other, but even before it opened Macy's (Federated) had swallowed Robinsons-May, so suddenly there were no longer two anchors. They couldn't find another tenant to come in, so oddly, Macy's was at both ends of the mall.

For a long time, they put most departments in the one anchor, and all the other anchor had was menswear, furniture/mattresses, and electronics. They then shut that store down about five years ago and consolidated everything in the other store. Since that time, the shuttered store has just been sitting there as a big vacant building.

In the meantime, the owner of the mall went bankrupt and some capital investment firm has bought the place. I hear the current plan is to knock the unoccupied anchor down and build a three-story apartment complex in its place. .. At least it's not going to be a mega church.

My first mall was Arcadian Gardens, in Edison, NJ, which became Menlo Park Mall. I moved away before getting to shop at Menlo Park. That's all I remember. I lived in cities after that, and didn't go to malls that often (Tyson's Corner, White Flint).

There are several YouTube channels for this. Sal from Baltimore here is my favorite of them. I live within walking distance of a mall that’s dead for all intents purposes. Only a crappy Macy’s still exists as an anchor after the other 4 closed. They’ve put some medical back offices into a refurbished Sears building, but at the end of the day a dead mall is a sad and depressing thing because of the configuration of a huge horizontal concrete box inside a sea of empty parking lot.

That Cincinnati Mills mall has a really interesting back story, and was pretty much a failure from its opening in 1988 as Forest Fair. It was built by an Australian developer who had bought several high end department stores, and he built anchor space for all of them. I think it was Bonwit Teller, B. Altman, Sakowitz (from Texas) and Parisian (from the South). Who he thought was going to shop at these upscale places in a mall beside a large freeway in an industrial suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio I’ll never understand. None of theses department stores were even in the state before, so there wasn’t even any brand recognition. Anyway the developers went bankrupt and they all shut in about a year. The place never filled up in the 30 plus years the mall stood despite several name changes and gimmicks meant to bring in shoppers.

There’s a dead mall in my neighborhood in Houston that the state government wants to make as the terminal of high speed rail between Houston and Dallas. That was ten years ago and nothing has happened

One of the malls where I spent my teen years is long gone. Another - the one where a famous horror movie was filmed - is, shockingly, still around (though tends to be caught up in shootings every so often).

Another mall on the other side of town closed a few years ago and apparently parts of the roof are collapsing. It will be only a matter of time before it either collapses or is demolished.

R27 I've actually spoken with Sal a few times in the distant past on Discord. Really cool guy, humble yet funny. He also has local connections where I am and from (NOLA) so we hit it off. Small world for you to mention him.

I've been fascinated with dead malls and vintage retail since I was basically a kid, maybe ten years old. The old Deadmalls.com website in the 2000s was horror catnip for me, especially the abandoned classics like Dixie Square and OP's photo which is Rolling Acres in Akron, OH. I've since watched probably thousands of dead mall videos, admiring the liminal space, thinking about what these spaces once were and whatnot. The non-important historical significance of American capitalist culture just gets demolished the closer these places strike around 50 years of being around.

My favorite retail era is the 1960s I've recently decided. So many people are into the "vaporwave" 80s malls but there's something so intriguing about the 60s.

I was at a mall in Michigan today. No signs of dead mall here. Lots of cars in the parking lot, lots of people inside and lines at the registers. So they're not all dead yet.

I spent probably half my childhood at Clackamas Town Center outside Portland, OR—I even saw Tonya Harding skate in the ice rink there with my parents. I was very young (about 3 years old) but remember that her practice was a public sensation of sorts, as my parents and other people were there to watch (this was obviously during the whole Nancy Kerrigan scandal). The skating rink is long gone and the mall has been redeveloped, but it's still a fairly bustling place with a lot of stores.

Lloyd Center in NE Portland, on the other hand, is probably 80% empty with no anchor stores. There is a Barnes & Noble, but I'm surprised it has held on this long. It is truly dire. Growing up in the '90s and early 2000s, I remember the Lloyd District being considered a sketchy area due to gang activity, but I think it's much scarier now—the mall and the area surrounding it is very "Dawn of the Dead"-esque and absent of people. The MAX light rail station they're used to bustling, and now you rarely see a single person standing there (Portland in general has this problem for a myriad of reasons—the main signs of life on the street are drug addicts and schizophrenics, especially in downtown).

I'm in my early thirties and spent a lot of time at Lloyd Center throughout high school. I have good memories there. Christmastime was crazy and it still did quite a bit of business all year round, but the anchor stores (Nordstrom, Macy's, JC Penney) dropped like flies. It really wasn't all that long ago that it was still an active shopping mall, but things really took a nosedive in the last decade. There has been talk of redeveloping the mall or even building a stadium there.

As far as dead mall content goes, Dan Bell has an archive on his YouTube channel where he has documented numerous dead shopping malls. It is some of the best, and I believe he was the first to really do it.

Do you think 100 years from now society will look back on shopping malls as a strange concept? Much how we think about the middle class and wealthy strolling on the promenade to show off their attire back in the Gilded Age?

The deadest mall of them all: Voorhees Town Center, Voorhees, New Jersey (formerly the Echelon Mall).

Built in the 1970's, the mall at one point had four anchor stores, a movie theater and a library. It was built in a fairly high income area and prospered until the late1990's.

Two of the four anchors, Penney's and Sears, have been torn down. The former Macy's store is empty. Boscov's is the only remaining anchor store.

The east and south wings of the mall have been torn down as well, so all that is left is the original mall itself. There might be a few non-profit organizations in the store fronts, but all the other commercial tenants have left. The food court is completely unoccupied by food stalls or customers. The only reason the mall is open is because Voorhees Township moved its municipal offices there as a way to attract customers to the mall (a task at which it has failed spectacularly). Even the mall walkers have forsaken this place.

I stopped there last summer on the way to the shore to use the restrooms. A shady looking man and woman entered the mall the same time as me. The guy followed me into the bathroom. I was really fearful I was going to be mugged. If I had, no one would have been around to help me as we were the only people in the mall. I quickly did my business and hurried out of there.

No blowjob? Not even a handjob?

[quote]A shady looking man and woman entered the mall the same time as me. The guy followed me into the bathroom.

But if there's nothing in the mall, then he and the woman were likely there for exactly the same reason you were -- to use the bathroom.

Plot twist: the poster was the shady one!