Posted on 04/27/2024 4:38:37 PM PDT by DallasBiff
Malls are dying—but a dead mall gives a community the chance to rebuild something that might have been doomed to begin with.
For countless Americans—especially those who came of age in the postwar years—malls were the new town square: a place to shop, eat, gather and meander. Envisioned as perfectly pristine, cast against the gritty danger of urban centers, the American mall became the image of suburban consumerism, the "pyramids to the boom years," as Joan Didion once wrote. But like the pyramids, the culture that the malls once honored—and survived off of—is starting to vanish. In 2014, traditional retailers will, for the first time, generate half of their sales growth from the web. For the American mall mogul, the reality is clear: rethink what it means to be a mall, or die.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
(I know :)
Ours, too :-(
Amazon is killing off suburban malls, not buses. If suburban malls were jammed with people as they once were, buses wouldn’t matter so much. There’s always the urban mall troublemakers can go to.
“Dead malls” do offer communities a lot of opportunities, but they’d probably rather have the property taxes, so nothing much is going to be done with them.
Yes, my teenage hangout, the Springfield Mall in the DC metro area - Virginia suburbs was ruined by public transportation being extended to that area.
That happened after I had grown up and moved away. It deteriorated and I think it’s completely gone now. It was a great mall when I was a teenager. My friends and I even had part-time jobs there.
Thanks.’
Too many FReepers don’t take care about that and it’s ridiculously easy to resize images to fit people’s screens.
HTML has code for that.
I was waiting for it. And you did not disappoint!
:0)
Amazon is killing off suburban malls...
Prolly so they can buy them on the cheap ... to house old folks, in a few years.
You heard it, here, first.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY_bhVSGKEg
I thought they could put solar panels or windmills on top so they weren’t wasting open land on such things.
There’s one by me in NJ, Jersey Shore Premium Outlets, that’s pretty good. It can actually be fun to shop there. It could use a really good place to eat though.
Bus lines, and theaters. Both of them are big trouble for malls.
Malls only work if the people going there are civilized. Back when I went to the malls, in the late 70s, 80s and into the mid 90s, people were civilized.
When you look back at who frequented the malls back then in those promo clips, almost everyone was white. It was a safe place. As the demographics changed, they got more dangerous and many died as the crime issues either propelled the mall to go under, or was the final nail in the coffin.
Get rid of bus lines, and get rid of theaters in the mall. The mall will do much better and be safer.
Lighten up Francis, he got the message. And the mods are arbiters of this web site, not you.
CC
Are you sure you’re not the arbiter? As you butt in other people’s business?
Go report me to the manager, Karen.
Thus the oversizing of the photo. He was looking to make sure they fitted in the frame later in life.
If you're a mall, you want to remain as the "white mall". Once your mall turns ghetto, that's the death of the mall. Your white customers won't return and after that, it will be no longer profitable.
One of the males here is becoming condos...another is a part Charter School, and non profit bicycle shop (they get donated bikes and fix them up to sell at a fair price). Another part of the mall is a Spouts Supermarket and a Burlington. Also, USF is building student housing on the grounds, too.
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