Nordstrom closing Circle Centre store

Cory Schouten

May 26, 2011

 

Nordstrom plans to close its store at Circle Centre mall, dealing a substantial setback for downtown Indianapolis.

 

The swanky department store chain helped launch a revival of the city's core when it opened in 1995 as an original anchor of the $320 million mall project.

 

 

http://www.ibj.com/nordstrom-closing-circle-centre-store/PARAMS/article/27384

Long live the suburban shopping mall ( rolls eyes)....disgusting!!

Downtown malls rarely succeed once there is significant competition and they do not add that much to the street life of an area.  This could be the beginning of the end for Indy's downtown mall. 

The Nordstrom at Keystone is a better business model then a 210,000 sq. ft. downtown store. As jbcmh81 said, people like to walk the street. Might work on Michigan in Chicago but even Lord & Taylor or somebody closed a store in WaterTower mall there.

The problem was the wealth of Indianapolis lives on the northside and there really was no direct fast access (what are they going to use, IndyGo from Carmel?) to downtown.  Nordstrom would've worked greatly in downtown Indianapolis had it been a higher-income residential downtown and/or connected transit/(and realistically, interstates) to higher-income areas.  Meridian Historic District ain't gonna cut it.  Keystone's Nordstrom is horrific yet it's close to Fishers, Carmel, etc and that's why it was kept.  A shame as the downtown Nordstrom was fantastic.  Hopefully downtown Indianapolis gets a Target out of it.

This story reminds me of what happened in Cincinnati, shortly after the Nordstrom opened in Indy: the city was trying to lure Nordstrom downtown, and went so far as to tear down an occupied building to make way for the new store.  The project came to an abrupt end, and the site is now a parking lot, when Nordstrom announced that they were going to open a second location less than 30 miles away. 

Less than 30 miles away?  More like just 12 miles away.  Kenwood is (in this day and age of West Chesters and Masons as booming suburbs) relatively close to downtown. 

The Nordstrom at Keystone is a better business model then a 210,000 sq. ft. downtown store. As jbcmh81 said, people like to walk the street. Might work on Michigan in Chicago but even Lord & Taylor or somebody closed a store in WaterTower mall there.

 

You have to look at the bigger picture.  You can't just chalk it up to a store and a location, sometime corporate issue are the problem.

 

Like the Barney's issue with the Cleveland location, much the same happened to the Lord and Taylor store in Chicago.  Good traffic and sales, but the corporate level there were bad management decisions ultimate affecting the entire chain.  When Barney's went BK, they closed all their new stores and a NYC flagship, even though the Cleveland store was to expand and had the 2nd biggest sales of any of the new stores.  L&T was sold, they closed several stores and downsized the Fifth Ave store.

 

Lord and Taylor stores were poorly run and the stores were categorized at different levels and very inconsistent.  Federated wanted to keep Bloomingdales at top Tier and when merging in Macy's Stores, the L&T stores overlapped.  The loser L&T.  Today L&T is considered a second tier American only brand department store.

 

Downtown malls work if they are integrated with what's already there, most aren't so they don't.  Its ashame planners allow developers so much freedom without thought to the community.