I think malls would do better if they were still relaxing to visit, without the bazaar-like kiosks with people in your face, "Smart Screens" babbling propaganda at you and more seating. And bring back the fountains. Basically, like they were until the '90s.

OMG Winklemans, Faflik Shoes, the 700 fussy tailors at Richmans.  Is one of those Severance?

 

I think the top is Severence.  I don't think Richmond had a Higbee's.  That was one of the best Higbee's in the system.

OMG Winklemans, Faflik Shoes, the 700 fussy tailors at Richmans.  Is one of those Severance?

I think the top is Severence.  I don't think Richmond had a Higbee's.  That was one of the best Higbee's in the system.

Both are Midway Mall in Elyria, circa 1970, linked from:  www.elyriapride.elyria.com

The Higbee's in that area was at Beachwood.

What's the big attraction with outdoor shopping centers on Ohio? Who wants to walk outside from store to store when it's 26 degrees outside? Or when it's 96 degrees outside?

 

People have been doing their shopping out doors for centuries, and remain attractions in any number of cold weather cities. What's the attraction of driving, parking, walking through an asphalt wasteland, and into a generic indoor space that could conceivebly be in any place on earth. How the trade for urban shopping was traded for suburban malls was made I'll never understand.

 

True, but that first picture is an interesting one to illustrate your point.  The arcades were the prototype for the mall.  I think that there is a place for some indoor shopping.  I like walking around outdoors as much as anyone, but on a cold-as-hell, wind-whipping-your-face day Downtown it is real nice to duck into the Arcade, or Tower City to do some shopping.

OMG Winklemans, Faflik Shoes, the 700 fussy tailors at Richmans. Is one of those Severance?

I think the top is Severence. I don't think Richmond had a Higbee's. That was one of the best Higbee's in the system.

Both are Midway Mall in Elyria, circa 1970, linked from: www.elyriapride.elyria.com

The Higbee's in that area was at Beachwood.

 

Euclid Square also had a Higbee's, now Dillard's outlet.

Severance for MTS, courtesy of clevelandmemory:

 

 

 

The Geranium Room at Halle's Severance store

 

What's the big attraction with outdoor shopping centers on Ohio? Who wants to walk outside from store to store when it's 26 degrees outside? Or when it's 96 degrees outside?

 

People have been doing their shopping out doors for centuries, and remain attractions in any number of cold weather cities. What's the attraction of driving, parking, walking through an asphalt wasteland, and into a generic indoor space that could conceivebly be in any place on earth. How the trade for urban shopping was traded for suburban malls was made I'll never understand.

 

True, but that first picture is an interesting one to illustrate your point. The arcades were the prototype for the mall. I think that there is a place for some indoor shopping. I like walking around outdoors as much as anyone, but on a cold-as-hell, wind-whipping-your-face day Downtown it is real nice to duck into the Arcade, or Tower City to do some shopping.

 

If I'm going to deal with auto-oriented development and massive chain stores, I at least want to be comfortable. I have no problem with weather when I'm in a walkable area with diverse, interesting businesses.

I took these two of a "dead mall" in Toledo last year:

 

 

 

Okay, technically the second one is a post office, but it was in the mall parking lot.  :-D

Cleveland Scene ‏@Cleveland_Scene  17m

20 Eerie Photos of the Old and Abandoned Euclid Square Mall

http://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2014/07/16/erie-photos-of-the-old-and-abandoned-euclid-square-mall …

Surreal photos of America's abandoned malls http://f-st.co/OIAk7ws 

They are reposting something from last year. Cross post of my comment:

"As stated by a previous commenter, the mall is not dead. There are no less than 20 "storefront" churches that operate in the mall. As well as a barber, an online radio/tv broadcaster, daycare and one food provider. Yes, the outlet store closed, but the mall owners are receiving enough rent to keep up on the property. Now the out parcels on the other hand... yeah, those are mostly dead."

Richmond Town Square: Dying, reinvigorated, now dying again (photos) http://t.co/if4EAZBCGM via @sara_dorn http://t.co/69mwsPaP6V

Richmond Town Square: Dying, reinvigorated, now dying again (photos) http://t.co/if4EAZBCGM via @sara_dorn http://t.co/69mwsPaP6V

 

I cannot remember shopping at Richmond.  I don't think we ever shopped there.  As a shop-aholic........That sort of bothers me.

Richmond was my mall in the 1970s. I often walked and rode my bike there. Then Randall Park came along. Then we moved to the sticks so we could drive five miles each way for a gallon of milk.

Richmond was my mall in the 1970s. I often walked and rode my bike there. Then Randall Park came along. Then we moved to the sticks so we could drive five miles each way for a gallon of milk.

 

We shopped at Severance as my Mom was a BIG Halle's customer.  My brother and cousin went to Randall to meet girls. 

Richmond was our mall growing up in Highland Hts, my parents were too cheap for Beachwood haha. When I was very young, my mom worked at the JCPenneys there. I remember as a kid the crazy red 70s carpeting and weird red plastic benches and trash cans. Then I remember the renovations to what it currently looks like. Most of the movies I saw as a teen were at that movie theater.

 

It never had a good selection of stores though, we had to go out to Mentor sometimes for some stuff.

 

Nowadays, my dad has been working out at the Planet Fitness there, which is really nice actually.

Richmond was our mall growing up in Highland Hts, my parents were too cheap for Beachwood haha. When I was very young, my mom worked at the JCPenneys there. I remember as a kid the crazy red 70s carpeting and weird red plastic benches and trash cans. Then I remember the renovations to what it currently looks like. Most of the movies I saw as a teen were at that movie theater.

 

It never had a good selection of stores though, we had to go out to Mentor sometimes for some stuff.

 

Nowadays, my dad has been working out at the Planet Fitness there, which is really nice actually.

This pretty much sums up why we didn't shop there!!  LOL :wink2:

"I never noticed the decor," the straight man said.

"I never noticed the decor," the straight man said.

 

LOL, it's not exactly like Elle Woods tripping up a witness because he noticed her shoes. 

 

I joked years ago about decor so bad straight guys notice it.  I think we were talking about either the Mining Company or Akron Agora, so it's an old joke...

I have been obsessed with the photography of Tag Christof recently. His ongoing, provocatively-titled photo project is called "America is Dead" and he shares his work on Instagram and Flickr. He mostly captures decaying suburban and rural retail spaces, which of course includes a lot of dead malls. Unfortunately I can't embed his photos here, but you can check out his gallery of photos taken in Ohio.

 

Also, as a plug for those of you who may not keep up with the Cincinnati Mall/Cincinnati Mills/Forest Fair Mall thread, here is my gallery from that mall, taken in Sept. of last year.

Cincinnati Mall/Cincinnati Mills/Forest Fair Mall has to be the most "beautiful" dead mall out there.  And by beautiful, I mean tacky.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124294047987244803

 

The WSJ warned a while back that the number of dead malls was pushing 10% of the total and in a recent followup (which I can't find) they said the number expected to close was about 40% - death attributable to population shifts and online shopping.

 

Soon we'll be looking back on malls the way our parents looked back on once-great downtown department stores.

Many analysts expect the growth in online shopping to slow significantly as the peak amount of products that it feasible to actually purchase online vs. offline is reaced.

Many analysts expect the growth in online shopping to slow significantly as the peak amount of products that it feasible to actually purchase online vs. offline is reaced.

 

I dunno ... I bought my first pair of shoes online a couple of month ago; and I never thought I'd do that.

 

The company promised that if you are comfortable in one pair of their shoes you can trust all their other styles will fit exactly the same. I held my breath and ordered. The result was just as advertised.

People have been buying shoes online for a long time. Getting them to buy produce, jewelry, drywall and lawn tractors online is tougher.

I have been obsessed with the photography of Tag Christof recently. His ongoing, provocatively-titled photo project is called "America is Dead" and he shares his work on Instagram and Flickr. He mostly captures decaying suburban and rural retail spaces, which of course includes a lot of dead malls. Unfortunately I can't embed his photos here, but you can check out his gallery of photos taken in Ohio.

 

Also, as a plug for those of you who may not keep up with the Cincinnati Mall/Cincinnati Mills/Forest Fair Mall thread, here is my gallery from that mall, taken in Sept. of last year.

Great photo set of the Cincinnati Mall. That place seemed huge! Am I wrong in that statement?

 

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Wikipedia says it was 1.5 million sqft.  That is pretty big, but Randall Park Mall was 2 million sqft.

People have been buying shoes online for a long time. Getting them to buy produce, jewelry, drywall and lawn tractors online is tougher.

 

I still hear a lot of younger folks assuming the trend will continue until it encompasses everything and wipes out retail as we know it.  I don't believe that, but has anyone even thought it through?  The economic results would be devastating beyond comprehension, for workers and for local governments.  That shouldn't be anyone's goal. 

Wikipedia says it was 1.5 million sqft.  That is pretty big, but Randall Park Mall was 2 million sqft.

 

States and localities are going to have to be able to tax online transactions the same way they do in-store purchases. That will go some way toward evening the field. I tend to think that there will be a balance achieved in the next two decades, assuming that there are no major innovations or new efficiencies in shipping or assembly of goods. So i don't think that retail stores are going to disappear. I think those that will thrive in the future are innovative experiences and products that you might not think to search online for.

Why not combine the two?  I would love to be able to go shopping for the things I need at a huge showroom store downtown that has absolutely everything you can imagine, but only as displays, with your order shipped to the house.  If they don't have to have 10 of something for people to take home, they could have more things to display.

 

This would be a great use for an old department store in a downtown.  One could spend the day shopping, then go out for the evening without having to take everything home or to the car.  It would make public transit or walking or biking downtown more convenient as well.  I am a little surprised Amazon hasn't tried something like this.

Brick and mortar retail will never fully go away because people enjoy the experience of shopping and browsing--its a social experience.

People have been buying shoes online for a long time. Getting them to buy produce, jewelry, drywall and lawn tractors online is tougher.

 

I still hear a lot of younger folks assuming the trend will continue until it encompasses everything and wipes out retail as we know it.  I don't believe that, but has anyone even thought it through?  The economic results would be devastating beyond comprehension, for workers and for local governments.  That shouldn't be anyone's goal. 

 

The other thing is that Amazon's profit is spotty. So if all the money flows from moneymaking entities to a money-losing one where are we then? The type of investors that throw fundamentals out the window because they like buying things on the site have inflated the value of the company's shares way beyond what it would be if the shareholders were paying attention to the profitability of the company. Amazon having to shut down over lack of profitability would be the apocalypse for online shopping since that one company is such a massive portion of online shopping.

What's insane is that Amazon is crushing so many retailers and yet Amazon does not even make a profit most quarters. Their strategy is to keep their prices super low and build out their delivery network now, losing money in the process, and put their competition out of business. Then, when Amazon is the only option, their can raise their prices to whatever they want.

They've been at it like that for 20 years now, too.

Lifestyle centers such as crocker park and legacy village are the future as well as projects like uptown. Now only if Cleveland would stop building shopping plazas in favor of these, especially more uptown type developments.

Wikipedia says it was 1.5 million sqft.  That is pretty big, but Randall Park Mall was 2 million sqft.

 

It was huge and pretty close to fully rented when it opened.  I grew up two exits (and one mall) away from it, and some parents took their kids out of school to go to the opening day.  Those were the same kind of parents who kept their kids home the day that dude predicted the earthquake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iben_Browning

 

 

^That earthquake prediction scared the crap out of me when I was little.

When I was a freshman and sophomore in high school, you would beg a junior or senior to let you jump in their car on Friday afternoons in the fall because they'd go hang out somewhere cool (or not) before coming back to the school for the football games.  You were at their mercy.  So you might go hang out in a city park and smoke or you might go to...the mall.  Either way, you were probably going to hear some pretty obnoxious music like Mr. Bungle, Pigface, Ministry, etc.   

 

Most of the guys went to the mall to go to the video arcade or music store.  I remember going to the music stores and looking for CD's by the bands that were just played in the car.  That's how I became acquainted with a lot of stuff way ahead of its appearance on local radio or on MTV.  Even mall music stores carried a fair amount of fairly obscure stuff.  They never had the complete discography of an obscure band in stock, but they'd usually have at least one disc.  I remember systematically going through the sections of those music stores and looking at most of the CD packaging to see what year it came out, etc., because I never had money to buy any of this stuff.  If not for the BMG music club I probably would have left home at age 17 with a paltry collection of just 10-20 CD's.  I still have all of them and I think I could accurately recall where I bought each of them. 

 

CD's were expensive but going through physical records in a physical music store meant you picked up all sorts of extraneous information about bands you weren't even interested in.  You could easily spend 30-60 minutes in one of those stores.  I don't know what's left in the world of retail where people spend a lot of time really getting to know the products.   

Video games

When I was a freshman and sophomore in high school, you would beg a junior or senior to let you jump in their car on Friday afternoons in the fall because they'd go hang out somewhere cool (or not) before coming back to the school for the football games. 

 

It's funny, there was a whole cultural byplay associated with the football games that some of us missed entirely.

 

I'm always reminded of Lenny Haise's line in "That Thing You Do", "Where was I (when all this was going on)?  Oh yeah, playing songs on my guitar.".  :)

If any of you know Chicago, you should read about the history and current issues plaguing the Block 37 mall in the loop. One of the more interesting clusterf-cks of any city, it still survives in a weird zombie-purgatory state. On the one hand, it has high end apartments (recently built), an expensive theater and nice Latin-esque foodcourt, both of which are less than a year old (before those entire floors were completely desolate), and tremendous access to the red and blue lines under ground.

 

On the other hand, there are just countless empty storefronts to the point of it being a ghost mall on several floors). The mall feels like a combination of the Galleria and Tower City. Very new and clean, lots of commuters coming and leaving...and empty for the most part despite being located in the heart of downtown Chicago.

 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-block-37-architecture-kamin-met-0612-20160610-column.html (pretty current overview)

 

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/April-2012/A-Brief-History-of-Block-37/ (though the mall is in better condition today than when the article was published)

 

There's even a book about the history of the mall/that specific area, and that's from 1996.

If any of you know Chicago, you should read about the history and current issues plaguing the Block 37 mall in the loop. One of the more interesting clusterf-cks of any city, it still survives in a weird zombie-purgatory state. On the one hand, it has high end apartments (recently built), an expensive theater and nice Latin-esque foodcourt, both of which are less than a year old (before those entire floors were completely desolate), and tremendous access to the red and blue lines under ground.

 

On the other hand, there are just countless empty storefronts to the point of it being a ghost mall on several floors). The mall feels like a combination of the Galleria and Tower City. Very new and clean, lots of commuters coming and leaving...and empty for the most part despite being located in the heart of downtown Chicago.

 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-block-37-architecture-kamin-met-0612-20160610-column.html (pretty current overview)

 

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/April-2012/A-Brief-History-of-Block-37/ (though the mall is in better condition today than when the article was published)

 

There's even a book about the history of the mall/that specific area, and that's from 1996.

If that mall and housing design is bland the a lot of Cleveland downtown architecture is as bland as they come lol. I understand though Chicago architecture is next level.

 

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I think the peak time for dead mall exploration was in the mid-2000s. Now, almost all of the interesting dead malls have either been remodeled, demolished, converted into some non-mall use, or turned into a faux urban "towne centre" type of shopping center. It's hard to find malls built in the 60s, 70s, or 80s that are still open and still have their original architecture (i.e., didn't get totally remodeled in the 2000s or 2010s).

Summit Mall seems to be still going reasonably well with largely its original floorplan.  But I get that that certainly might be an endangered species considering all the other Summit County malls that have closed since the 1980s (and Chapel Hill is certainly struggling and probably in an unrecoverable downward spiral).

Tri-County looks like it's in real danger of closing.  It is anchored only by a Sears and Macy's, both of which are in decline.  I went there in December a week before Christmas and the place was deserted. 

^ That's pretty crazy. A lot of these other malls which have been closing have been nearly dead since I was a kid, but I remember Tri-County was always busy, new, and nice when I was in college at Miami ten years ago. For all the hubub about dead malls, there are plenty of malls doing fine, just that each metro area can support fewer malls than in the past and the losers lose big. In Cleveland Beachwood and Crocker Park are good, in Columbus you have Tuttle, Polaris, and Easton all are fine, and in Cincy it seemed Tri-County and Kenwood were doing well. Then again, I visited none of them this year so maybe my ideas are dated...

^Crocker Park is not a mall.

Yeah Tri-County's getting really slow. A friend of mine was able to make good money with his store there until only a year or two ago. He was doing a lot better than most of the other stores there since he had been there for a very long time. He's now thinking of moving it into a strip mall nearby.

... there are plenty of malls doing fine, just that each metro area can support fewer malls than in the past and the losers lose big. In Cleveland Beachwood and Crocker Park are good, in Columbus you have Tuttle, Polaris, and Easton all are fine,

 

True, but taestell's original statement was

 

It's hard to find malls built in the 60s, 70s, or 80s that are still open and still have their original architecture.

 

(Emphasis added.)  Tuttle, Polaris, and Easton are all newer than that.

Tri-County looks like it's in real danger of closing.  It is anchored only by a Sears and Macy's, both of which are in decline.  I went there in December a week before Christmas and the place was deserted. 

 

Tri-County Mall has already started the conversion process into a strip mall. They started building out new strip mall buildings in their parking lot and stores that used to be in the mall have started moving to those new buildings.

 

It was a really awful idea to have three shopping malls in the northwestern burbs of Cincinnati (Forest Fair, Tri-County, and Northgate). If Tri-County was the only one and the other two never existed, it might be doing okay.