| Eastland Mall, North Versailles, PA...a brief follow-up |
[18 Jun 2009|04:21pm] |
When I posted my pictures of the Eastland Mall, I forgot to include this short video that fueled my fascination with the mall. This was from a local TV auction show that was filmed at the mall, and this collection of some of their bloopers is quite funny! Hope you all like it!
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| Eastland Mall, North Versailles, PA |
[15 Jun 2009|07:15pm] |
The Eastland Mall, once located east of Pittsburgh in North Versailles, Pennsylvania, was torn down quite some time ago. I took these pictures even longer ago, in December of 2006. I finally got inspired to post them, yes, 2 1/2 years later. I had good intentions of getting these posted, well, 2 years or so ago, but that's water under the bridge. There are 50 pictures of different parts of the old mall under the cut.
( Pictures of a place that once was )
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| Bannister Mall in Kansas City, Mo |
[30 Jan 2009|08:53pm] |
a friend fowarded me a link to a flkr page of Bannister Mall pictures... here it is
and here's an article on the mall in general
Ive been to the mall before... and it definitly is a creepy place... not the kind of place or neighborhood you want to find yourself in after dark. Not only is the mall praticaly abandoned, but the surrounding strip malls and mega stores (wal marts, best buys, etc) have also been abandoned. Definitly has that post apocalyptic urban decay feel to it.
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| When Dead Malls Were Alive... |
[14 Jan 2008|09:51pm] |
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I saw this video, and couldnt help but think of the dead Bannister Mall in KC, and about it probably looks like this in its heyday...
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| Owings Mills Mall reprise. |
[25 Jun 2007|02:44am] |
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predatory |
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Siouxsie and the Banshees -- Nicotine Stain |
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http://public.fotki.com/failuretothrive/dead_malls/owings-mills-mall-2007/
This weekend found me at Owings Mills Mall not once but twice, as it now counts a blacklight miniature golf course as one of its tenants. The putt-putt course rocks, but everything else about the mall is depressing. 1.2 million square feet, five anchor spaces, a great location in an affluent area where luxury condos and office buildings are sprouting like mushrooms in the rain, a Metro subway terminus with 3,000 parking spaces next door, nothing comparable to its west, and it's still losing stores left and right while the smaller, more claustrophobic Towson Town Center and dated, pedestrian White Marsh Mall are thriving. I can't figure out why. Crime? There were a couple shootings a few years back. If I remember correctly, neither was random. The same cannot be said for the 2005 murder of a prep-school teacher in Towson Town Center's parking garage and a subsequent spate of muggings, which did little to deter shoppers from going there. Changing demographics? Sure, there are people who won't go to the mall because of the "urban" crowd that the Metro tends to bring in (which is no different from that of other malls in this bus-centric city). Most of them are from Carroll County, the lily-white conservative stronghold to the west, where one mall (Carrolltowne) is dead and the other (Westminster TownMall, née Cranberry Mall) isn't doing so great either. The surrounding area is overwhelmingly middle- to upper-middle-class, with pockets of phenomenal wealth. That might not have been enough to support the ambitiously upscale tenant base that originally occupied the mall, but there's no good reason why it couldn't have soldiered on in the same vein as White Marsh -- as a thoroughly middle-of-the-road mall with a diverse enough range of tenants to please mostly everyone. It just hasn't.
Anyway, I didn't have time to take numeric stock of the mall's occupancy level, but even the center court and the wings for the three occupied anchor spots have empty storefronts, some still with labelscars. One of the two spaces that flanks the food court's entrance from the mall (a branch of Vaccaro's, an Italian pastry/coffee shop) is vacant, and the other (LuvYa.com, a gift store that moved in when a really awesome and unique candle store whose name I forget moved out) is closing. Express is closing. The Bombay Company is down to light fixtures and a couple boxes in the middle of the store. There were no sullen kids in Tripp pants and Invader Zim shirts skulking around Hot Topic, no tired shoppers happily partaking of the massage chairs at Brookstone, and no more than a handful of teenage fashionistas scouring the racks at H&M. Boscov's, the great white hope that jumped into Baltimore's retail paradigm when the old Hecht's stores became Macy's and the old Macy's stores closed, was all made up with nowhere to go. The store managers with car payments and mortgages and kids were too eager to see me come and too sad to see me leave. The kids working summer jobs were even more indifferent than usual. I've seen it all before. Orange Plaza, 1992. Hunt Valley Mall, 1997. But those were far easier to explain. Orange Plaza was a relic, a cramped, dank, and dingy mall that couldn't hope to compete with the shiny new Galleria across the highway. Hunt Valley never should have been built in the first place; it wasn't big enough or convenient enough to be a draw. Owings Mills had it all, then lost it, and try as I may, I can't figure out why there's no room for it anymore.
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| Hi Folks! |
[10 Mar 2007|07:01pm] |
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music |
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Marilyn Manson- King Kill 33 |
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hi there, I just joined the group and wanted to say hello...
Gotta tell ya, I just love dead malls... there's a sense of tranquility about the place, a wonderful twilight-zone feel to them, like everything just simply disappeared and you're the last person left on earth, that and a certain sadness about them, like ghosts of a place that was once crowded and popular and mighty, now a empty shell/shadow of their former glory
but anyway, today I walked around the indian springs mall in Kansas City Ks, and took pictures... enjoy!
( here are some pictures )</lj-cut
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| Newbie with three sets of pictures |
[28 Feb 2007|10:31pm] |
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Hello, I'm new to LiveJournal; I joined because of this community. If anyone's interested, I've got three galleries of dead mall photos that I just uploaded. They can be seen here: http://pics.livejournal.com/tenpoundhammer/gallery/000086g0
The galleries are of three dead malls in the state of Michigan. One is still standing but boarded up; one has been demalled (it was only PARTIALLY demalled when I took the photos), and one is still open, despite an almost total lack of tenants.
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| Riverside Mall, Utica, NY |
[19 Feb 2007|12:54am] |
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mood |
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999 -- Homicide |
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When I was a child, my parents owned land in the Adirondacks, about 25 miles north of Utica. The dilapidated summer house on that property had little in the way of creature comforts -- no heating or air conditioning, no plumbing, and no phone line. It did, however, have lots of creatures: mice, deerflies, and a neverending parade of mosquitoes. Considering we spent one weekend a month there on average and at least a week in the summer, it often did not take long for the living conditions to lose their rustic charm or for minor emergencies to strike, and we found ourselves in Utica a lot. Several of those trips took us to a mall that dances on the vague outskirts of my memory. I remember it had a Montgomery Ward because my dad had to go to the auto center when a porcupine made sweet love to one of his truck tires. I remember it had a Baskin-Robbins because it was the middle of summer. Other than that, I don't remember much: it was Typical Generic '70s Mall, USA, and as a New Jerseyan used to Leviathans like Willowbrook Mall, I was unimpressed.
Labelscar's recent Albany case study and the many DeadMalls.com features about the malls of upstate New York piqued my curiosity about the state of that mall in Utica. Having not heard anything about a dead mall in Utica, I assumed that Sangertown Square, which has none of the stores I remember but seems to be thriving, was the only game in town. After all, Utica is not a large city nor a prosperous one, and the economically depressed environs to its north and east are hardly an urban planner's delight. (Case in point: our summer house with its his-and-hers outhouses was the year-round home of the family who owned the property before us.) But anyone who follows mall history knows that overmalling is rampant in upstate New York, and Utica is apparently no exception. The mall of my memories was not, in fact, Sangertown. It was Riverside Mall, and it is no longer.
I write this post because there was buried treasure within the confines of the Googling expedition that led me back to The Big Box Center Formerly Known as Riverside Mall. That treasure comes in the form of pictures taken after the mall was closed for good. While I don't remember much about this mall, and while I recall it as much darker and earth-toned, the pictures nonetheless tied those memories together and filled me with the same sense of sad nostalgia we all feel when these iconic and often beloved institutions get pummeled with the death star of planned obsolescence.
On the subject of Utica dead malls, I figured I'd throw out a question for the masses. At some point before my parents sold that property in 1985, an outlet mall called Charlestown opened in a renovated factory or mill building within the city of Utica itself. (Riverside was just outside the city, near the auditorium and Thruway, if I recall correctly.) I can't find anything about it online, and I assume that means it flopped quickly and is long gone. Can anyone verify that?
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| Ahead of the curve. |
[29 Jan 2007|03:49pm] |
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Buck-O-Nine - Pass The Dutchie |
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While I'm at it, here is a Lexington Herald-Leader article about Turfland Mall, written 2 weeks after I made this post.
I find it amusing that the mall's owner insists it's 80 to 85 percent occupied. Maybe in terms of gross leasable area, it is, thanks to the anchors and outlots. In terms of empty storefronts, it's more like 80 to 85 percent unoccupied, and my pictures stand as solid proof. Despite the fact that it was Christmas Eve, this mall has fallen on such hard times that there were no temporary seasonal stores to speak of (although there were still banners hung over labelscars for others), and the few permanent holdouts we saw looked like they were merely waiting for their leases to expire.
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| Randall Park Mall, North Randall, OH |
[20 Jan 2007|05:47pm] |
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Anti-Flag - The Project for a New American Century |
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( Randall Park Mall )
Randall Park Mall is a half-dead mall in the Cleveland suburb of North Randall. I was there attempting to get some photos today, but got cut off by a particularly rude security guard. All I managed to get were a few photos of corridors in the live end of the mall. I'll post them if you people would like me to, just comment saying so.
Here's the story:
( Mall haet camera. )
This of course brings to mind a few questions: Is their any legislature anywhere that protects photographer's rights within a publicly-accessible private location? Is their anything I could've done to at least been able to finish my shopping (remember that I didn't know I was doing anything supposedly "wrong" until I was stopped, and I was immediately asked to leave without her even allowing me to explain myself.)? Why would the mall be concerned with picture-taking in the first place?
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| Dead malls in Kentucky and Indiana (post 4 of 4) |
[29 Dec 2006|01:06pm] |
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O. M. D. - 88 Seconds In Greensboro |
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River Falls Mall, Lewis and Clark Parkway, Clarksville, IN
The fourth and final dead mall stop during my weeklong jaunt to Kentucky took me across the Ohio River into Indiana. According to this Wikipedia article, River Falls Mall was built in 1991. Despite grandiose plans that included an indoor amusement park, it never really got off the ground. This is hardly surprising. River Falls is directly across Lewis and Clark from Green Tree Mall, a smallish, outdated, and thoroughly middle-of-the-road mall that has also struggled in recent years but seems to be doing okay now. I am under the assumption that these malls were intentionally built close to one another in an attempt to entice shoppers from Louisville. But for whatever reason, area malls seem to come in pairs, and these two couldn't even try to compete with the retail might of super-regionals Oxmoor Center and Mall St. Matthews. Weighing in at a combined size of 2 million square feet, Oxmoor and Mall St. Matthews are situated adjacent to one another on Louisville's wealthy east side and draw customers from several counties. With the 923,762-sf Jefferson Mall serving as a solid regional draw for the city's middle-class south side, there's no reason for Louisville shoppers to cross the river, and southeastern Indiana just doesn't have the economic base to support the lofty retail goals embodied in this mall's development.
River Falls is in the middle of a demalling transition that may work in its favor. While the Wal-Mart has since moved across Lewis and Clark, as has a nearby Target (which is still labelscarred), much of the mall has been replaced by a Dick's Sporting Goods, a Bass Pro Shop, and a boat store. Why these three stores were put adjacent to one another is anyone's guess, as their merchandise overlap is not insignificant, but the parking lot was full. The mall signs simply say "River Falls," but the now-vacant Dillard's store still stands as a testament to this mall's past.
For these pictures, I handed off my camera to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) revspook7, who did all the legwork of scouting out area malls. In addition to being quite the eager driver, navigator, and partner in crime, he proved to be a much steadier shot than me, especially without a flash and in frigid, windy weather.
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| Dead malls in Kentucky and Indiana (post 3 of 4) |
[28 Dec 2006|04:41pm] |
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Electric Six - I'm The Bomb |
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Bashford Manor Mall, Bardstown Road, Louisville, KY
Bashford Manor was demalled and demolished in favor of a Lowe's and a Wal-Mart Supercenter, but one of the original anchors remains. Since Ward's owned its store spaces instead of leasing them, which put many a monkey wrench in mall development plans nationwide and often assured that stores stayed behind the times compared to the malls that contained them, I assumed this was a Wards. However, it appears to have been a Dillard's. For whatever reason, both Lexington and Louisville seem littered with old Dillard's stores that bit the dust; the empty anchor in my Lexington Mall pics was a Dillard's, as was the subject of my next post. Judging by some of the Wal-Mart's design features, such as what appears to be a walled-in entrance and windows at the rear of the store, I'm guessing that the store enveloped at least some of what used to be the mall. If that is the case, it's kinda sad that Wal-Mart did such a slapdash job of repurposing the building.
Anyway, the Louisville Business Journal did a pretty extensive article about this mall 5 years ago. I'm assuming the renovation either didn't help the fortunes of the ailing mall or didn't happen at all. Sorry I don't have more information, but I was visiting the area and don't really know a lot of the backstory.
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| Dead malls in Kentucky and Indiana (post 2 of 4) |
[27 Dec 2006|05:05am] |
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Turfland Mall, Harrodsburg Road, Lexington, KY
We almost missed this mall. It is likely in the process of being demalled; in what looks like an attempt to keep up appearances, it has several outward-facing department stores, and the mall itself is somewhat obscured. Both the Dillard's and Dillard's Home stores face into the mall, and judging by its condition, it looks like it went downhill pretty quickly. What little background information I've been able to find is here, but even that is outdated.
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