The hot shopping places here are the new outdoor shopping venues where it looks like Main Street USA with individual storefronts. Can barely park at the places and there are few if any vacancies.

The old indoor malls are dated and inefficient. Tear them down and rebuild new outdoor venues to keep up with the current trend or maybe build a park. Stay still in business and you get left behind.

clinics, and even rooms for growing medical marijuana. The multi-story ones could even be made into small specialty hospitals or nursing homes.

People could still use them for walking when the weather was too cold or hot and there could even be community exercise rooms.

Lots of uses for many of these buildings if communities and/or businesses use their creative genes.

It has to cost a fortune to heat or cool and maintain those old properties.

went to a local mall
when it his me

i had not been to a shopping mall in a number of years
strip malls sure--i love costco and there are other stores in that same area... but an enclosed mall.....years

living in the upper midwest, enclosed malls made sense.

hit a number of stores-who cares if it is a gamillion degrees below outside.
and for that reason, the new-streets of the small town everything outside- malls that they are making now, also leave me cold literally.

that one of the anchor stores was empty & the other big name store had a small section of new product & the rest was just racks & racks of clothing - like a place where you dump the stuff you can't sell. A lot of vacancies with the small units, too. This was a mall in a well-to-do area.

Remember that film? Romero was absolutely prophetic!

Thank you so much for posting!

It was the late 50s, maybe as late as 1960. Ourdoors it was winter and noise and traffic. Inside the mall were living trees and goldfish ponds and a small artificial waterfall and since this was all new, people weren't screaming and shouting, trying to find each other in the crowd.

The walk from shop to shop was comfortable, no raindrops to dodge, no unexpected slush puddles with skins of new snow on them, no lunatic drivers to watch out for.

It didn't take long for the Disneyland aspect of the climate controlled retail "village" to become first cloying and then infuriating. The peace and quiet were shattered by teenagers who didn't want to go home and showed up to hang out at the malls where the weather was always perfect.

Mergers and hostile takeovers have decimated the big retailers who used to "anchor" the malls and the stores with the largest square footage are blocked out as though they no longer exist. As the article says, about the only retailers left are clothing retailers, food stalls, and the occasional small jeweler.

I honestly don't know if I'm happy or sad to see them go. I am sad to see them become nothing but clothing. They used to be so much more.

I grew up in the era of them being noisy and a place to hang out. I hated everything about them, and people like me as adults are no doubt, at least in part, responsible for their current demise.

Your original recollection of how they were brings to mind an idyllic image of what they were originally envisioned to be. I'm not sure if it makes me feel sad for their decline, or guilty for hating what they became, really. What I know is it makes me wish I'd seen them in their prime and not as I've known them to be.

I appreciate your sharing. It made me think about things from a different angle than I would have otherwise. Which is never a bad thing.

Thick syrup, standing in lines.
The malls are the soon-to-be ghost towns
Slow long, farewell, good-bye ...

(writtten in 1993, btw)

Even though these empty spaces are a blight on the landscape.

I'd like to see less uniformity across the country and more individualism (among cities and towns), if that makes any sense.

Southdale was just renovated/modernized/expanded last summer.

By all accounts, business is good there.