I found a shiny object from Business Insider that gives another take on Vox on America’s dying malls as failed third spaces, a tale of the Retail Apocalypse — Reasons Why Malls Across The US Are Closing Down More Than Ever.
The American shopping mall is in a crisis. One of the largest malls in Pennsylvania, the Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills, sold for just $100. We explore the variety of reasons why malls cannot keep their stories afloat and are becoming vacant wastelands.
Hey, a mall that sold for $100? I’ve seen something about that, Dan Bell’s DEAD MALL SERIES : The $100 Mall : The Disaster of Pittsburgh Mills.
Bell provided some telling details about the mall and its sale. It was built in 2005, so it was already late to the party. No wonder it never filled up and eventually failed. Good luck to Wells Fargo getting its money back; they’ll need it.
Bell also showed a Payless store closing down. I’ll have to cover Payless in a future installment of this series. Fortunately, Retail Archeology has a video about it, which I’ll post when I write that episode.
I’ll have more next week on Business Insider on the retail apocalypse with an emphasis on stores instead of malls. Stay tuned.
Dan Bell mentioned Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees,” so I’m going to post a video of the song. Here is Ramin Djawadi’s cover from the “Westworld” Season 1 soundtrack.
I couldn’t resist referencing “Westworld” when Season 2 just finished airing.
Modified from Business Insider on dead malls in the Retail Apocalypse with assistance from Dan Bell and Radiohead at Crazy Eddie’s Motie News.
One Orange County (CA) mall is converting some of its dead space into apartments, apparently. We’ll see how that works out.
That might work in southern California, where housing is tight and walkable neighborhoods are at a premium. I’m not so sure that will work elsewhere, like here in metro Detroit. I’ve heard that proposed for Northland Mall, but that didn’t happen, as it has been demolished. Also, I think that Orange County Register page had malware on it when I clicked on it. Be careful.
Thanks for the heads up on the malware warning. That did not show up on my computer as an issue at the time of posting, and OCR was once the paper of record for Orange County, CA (although one I typically did not read on a regular basis back in the day). As usual, my motto is practice safe computing.