3.  And in Jacksonville too.

When I saw your item, this had just come out in a local paper, about a mall where I was once a retail store employee:

This mall was built after I left and my parents could never understand it, because Jacksonville even at its ritziest is not this type of town.  

4) Plus Austin:

Here’s another one. Highland Mall is now an Austin Community College campus.

This is the link to the architects’ page about it—it gives a good summary of how and why it was redone. Click on the link at the lower left—and scroll down too, to read about the sustainability modifications, which are cool.

Here’s the ACC page, so you can see what the transformed real estate looks like to students and visitors to the page.

5) And Seattle:

Seattle’s Northgate Mall opened in 1950 as an outdoor shopping mall. It was a cultural icon when I was growing up here. It was later enclosed to remain competitive with the newer malls—Bellevue Square and Southcenter. Even as light rail is finally being built with a stop at the mall, stores close.

There are plans for its future, which may already be known to you, but if not, here are some: this, this, this, this, this.

6) The big picture: Dead malls are a potential “land bank” for future cities. A reader who works in the urban-development business writes:

I want to highlight work being done internationally on the dying mall saga.

My firm has a segment of our practice called “Urban Places.” We are about making our built environments more inclusive, resilient, vibrant, healthy, and ecologically sound …

I know this sounds like a sales pitch. But it’s a core value I and my fellow colleagues believe in. The future is urban. Suburban spaces like malls are great land banks to create something new.

The reader recommends a fascinating report from the Urban Land Institute.

Thanks to all. Next up: further reports from Mississippi.

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3) Here is a story about a failing mall in Los Angeles being converted into a Google office space, and here is another feature about seven doomed malls from around the country that found new life.

4) A reader from Dubuque sends this Iowa-based report, about a man who fought the mid-century mall trend while it was under way:

Bob Zehentner was a small business owner back in the 1960s when my hometown of Dubuque started its “urban renewal” plans, by which they meant restructuring the Main Street of downtown into a pedestrian space.

At the same time, Kennedy Mall was being built out on the West side of the city, which was in the same direction as all of the new home building at the time.

Bob was a World War II veteran and saw service in North Africa and China Burma India. He started his business when he came back from the war because he wanted to encourage families and young people to engage in outdoor activities and sports. Really about as American a dream as the American Dream could be then.

He fought hard against the renewal plans, attending city council meetings, lobbying other local business owners, warning about the impending loss of historical buildings and the peril of killing the heart of the city’s center.  

Naturally Bob was concerned for his business but also those of his friends and neighbors. Then he watched as, one by one, the small businesses died off, until his was one of the few left. Older buildings fell into disrepair and many were torn down.

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It was a stroke of luck that the next generation, remembering the old downtown, saw the opportunity of restoring the older buildings to a new glory. It took this young blood years but they began to restore the downtown, starting with renovating older homes into B&Bs and residences, then the commercial buildings, and finally Main Street itself.

The nearby Warehouse District is now a thriving nighttime spot, a more positive expression of gentrification than many urban places can claim.

There’s no doubt that Main Street businesses would still have to face the onslaught of online retail like Amazon, eBay, and so on, but Bob was prescient about the vital importance of the city center.

Dubuque has enjoyed a resurgence as both a destination and a great place to raise a family, but one has to wonder how much was lost in the process of coming to our collective senses.

5) From another reader in the Midwest, with an idea of how to use today’s dead malls as the anchors for tomorrow’s revived urban areas:

By a quirk of chance last month, I happened to find myself in a JCPenney’s inside the Golf Mill Shopping Center in Niles, Illinois. I’m 35 years old, and shopping malls were very much part of the fabric of everyday life while growing up, but this visit was probably the first time in two decades I had set foot inside a JCPenney’s.

And as I wandered around the inside, it was impossible to miss the many closed storefronts. Most striking was the space in the mall’s map labelled “Former Sears”, which was in dead center of the map, where an anchor store should be; once upon a time, it seems that one could walk through the Sears to reach one side of the mall from the other. Now, all I see is a blocked off space, with what seemed to be hastily printed signs urging me to exit the mall and walk around the outside to access the rest of the stores on the other side of the Sears.

Similarly, it was hard to not see the demographics at the mall, which certainly skewed towards older guests, either in retirement or close to it.

I remember thinking back to Victor Gruen, the architect who pioneered what the contemporary shopping mall as we know it with the Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota in 1956. I had just saw a documentary snippet about him a bit earlier, and I was surprised how Gruen meant the suburban shopping mall as just one part of a holistic community center, with commercial, residential, and community components. This was not my experience with shopping malls in general, and it certainly wasn’t my experience at Golf Mill.

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But what if shopping malls don’t have to be this way? What if what we see nowadays as dying, decaying shopping centers can be re-framed to something closer to Gruen’s vision?

In the case of Golf Mill, what if the “Former Sears” anchor store could be converted into something like apartments and condos for retirees thinking of downsizing and moving to a more convenient and walkable area?

What if some of the closed-up store fronts could re-open with social amenities like senior centers, health services like physical therapists’ offices, and lifestyle amenities like full-service restaurants, theaters, and places of worship?

What if shopping centers today can be repurposed, from something that’s merely just a brick-and-mortar location for conducting commerce in an increasingly-losing battle against e-commerce, into a common physical and social space for generating community, intergenerational relationships, and cultural richness and stimulation?

I don’t know if Gruen’s more holistic vision of “the mall” is actually be viable in the real world. But as more and more malls fail and die out across the country, surely Gruen’s vision of the mall is no less viable than the crumbling reality of what we understand shopping malls to be today.

As it happens, we’ve covered Victor Gruen’s urban-design work in previous installments in this space. For instance, this from Fresno.  Thanks to these readers, and others, for telling me things I didn’t know, and suggesting new leads to pursue.

More from this series

I do know plenty of kids who loved the mall … When these were new in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, and downtowns were blighted, how did everyone feel about it?

By the ’90s, everyone was saddened by urban blight and tried to reverse it, and now we look at the box stores as something from a maligned recent past. But in 30 years, might the tide turn again, as folks re-prefer the convenience of easy parking?

I don’t honestly know—I don’t need to tell you the annoyances of overcrowded traffic and the charm and cultural presence of the downtown scenes, nor the conveniences of ample parking, or the ways that effective mass transit can copy the conveniences of cars and parking lots.

But I think of Detroit, with beautiful tree-lined streets filled with abandoned houses. It may have been unfortunate that they tore down the Hudson’s department store, and it is wonderful they’ve saved the train station and tragic they tore down Tiger Stadium. But those active, unlucky places, when they made their decisions—did it feel like progress?

Is the tragedy that I see in the loss of Tiger Stadium an evanescent feeling? Will future generations bemoan the fate of the Silverdome?

I can’t say about Detroit or the Silverdome, but from a D.C.-area perspective: I think most sports fans and area residents have celebrated the arrival of the modern new baseball park for the Nationals, not far from the Capitol, plus the downtown arena for the Capitals and Wizards.

No one will miss the cavernous, Silverdome-style FedEx Field outside town, whenever the Washington NFL team figures out where it should go next.

Update: A reader sent in a link to a report on the abandoned New World department store mall in Bangkok, which was subsequently flooded and used to raise fish. The reader writes:

You’re probably already aware of it [JF: I was not], but the photos of
Bangkok’s abandoned and flooded New World Mall, which until a few years ago was home to tens of thousands of koi, are strangely beautiful …

Courtesy of Reuters, here is a sample of the images the reader is talking about:

Fort Wayne is the second-largest city in Indiana, after Indianapolis. On the I-69 route along which Deb and I traveled (with our colleagues from New America-Indianapolis and Indiana Humanities), it’s about 40 miles south of Angola, and 120 miles north of Indianapolis. Demographically it is more diverse than its state: African-Americans make up about 15 percent of Fort Wayne’s population, versus under 10 percent for Indiana statewide (and well over 70 percent for Gary, bordering Chicago). Even within a state whose overall economy is manufacturing-based, Fort Wayne has exemplified the major-factory town.

And through Fort Wayne’s modern history, no major factory was more major than GE’s enormous Broadway works.

The first manufacturing facility on this site opened in 1883, as part of the then-revolutionary technology of electric lights and motors. By the beginning of World War I, GE had established its Fort Wayne Works there, and over the next fifty years it dominated the city’s economy and culture. At the peak of World War II production, some 20,000 people worked for General Electric. A post-War GE promotional booklet said that nearly 40 percent of the city’s workforce was on the GE payroll at the time. The booklet said of GE’s robust payroll, “These millions of dollars represent not only the earnings of General Electric employees in this locality—they are a vital force that helps make vigorous the life of this community.”

The campus covered 39 acres, with well over a million square feet of floor space in more than a dozen buildings. One of these buildings, #26, was the largest structure in all of Fort Wayne when it went up.

You already know what’s coming: fifty years of expansion were followed by fifty years of decline. The manufacturing payroll at the Fort Wayne plant went from nearly 12,000 at the end of World War II, to 7,000 in the early 1970s, to 2,000 in the late 1990s, to no one now.

For years, what had been the heart of the city sat, rusted, and fell apart. It wasn’t bulldozed or torn down. But the floors buckled, and the skylights fell in. The interior walls grew mottled with mold, and the exterior ones attracted graffiti. The surrounding neighborhood, that had grown up with the factory, went down with it. Cities are more than physical structures, but we heard several times how the fate of the Fort Wayne Works unavoidably seemed to symbolize travails for the whole town.

That is where a $400+ million project called Electric Works comes in.

On a raw, blustery day in March, I put on the requisite hard hat, safety glasses, yellow vest, and similar gear for a tour of the abandoned GE plant, now re-christened Electric Works. Crystal Vann Wallstrom, who came from San Francisco and has become Managing Director of Innovation for the Electric Works project, toured me (carefully) across the uneven floors and up the crumbly stairs and around the project’s construction crews. With me on the tour was Adam Thies, a city-planning specialist who has worked, among other places, in Angola, Indiana (but who has no official connection with Electric Works).

What she they pointed out to me was, in one sense, very much like structural-renewal projects I’d seen or heard about elsewhere: Vast old work spaces, their original economic purpose gone, being prepared for a new life meeting new needs. You can read the details about the Electric Works ambitions here. In brief, the new campus is intended to have residential lofts; creative office space; medical research labs; a primary-care health facility (in a medically underserved neighborhood); restaurants and a huge new farmer’s market area (in a “food desert” part of town); and more. It aims to have hotel and residential facilities, the restored 1926 gymnasium and 12-lane bowling alley, a climbing gym plus “adventure park,” and … other features you can read about on their site.

Jeff Kingsbury, of the RTM Ventures firm that is the lead private financier of the site, emphasized that it was explicitly drawn from models that have proven successful in other mid-sized industrial towns. “We’ve seen this strategy happening all around the country,” he told me, in a phone call. “You’ve got these mixed-use walkable places that are designed to connect and attract people, and foster innovation. People are aware that the old suburban research-park model no longer makes sense. You want to make your talent want to stay in town, because there are cool and enjoyable things to do.”

I realize that talk of “fostering innovation” and “connecting people” inevitably sounds like platitudes; but Kingsbury gave illustrations, which I’ve seen around the country too, of such an approach paying off. “In terms of having a big, old legacy industrial campus, and trying to repurpose it, what’s happened in Durham is probably most similar.”

If these and other factors make the Electric Works ambition recognizable from other (successful) projects in other mid-sized towns, what makes it distinctive? Again with the “show your homework” caution that these are first impressions, subject to later revision, here are four that struck me.

1. The Hoosierness of  it all. When I walked in the front door of the main Electric Works office building, I felt as if I were on a set for the old movie Hoosiers. It was a classic old indoor basketball court built in the 1920s, with ranks of folding seats on both sides. It is preserved from the days when GE company teams would play there. A swirly GE logo is painted on the center of the hardwood floor.
   
   “You might have heard that Indiana is basketball-crazy,” said Adam Thies—just before he took off his suit jacket, stepped to around the three-point line, and took a jump shot, which swished in. “Nice one!” I said. “My jump shot is just average,” he replied, aw-shucks style (and also implying: just average—for someone from Indiana.) Later that day I heard a related “fact” that, as it is backed up by Wikipedia, I’ve decided is too good to scrutinize further: of the 10 biggest high school gyms in the United States, for watching basketball, nine are in Indiana. The Fort Wayne Works definitely had a sense of place.
   
   In the same headquarters building is a 1950s-look classic bowling alley, that appears to have been the scene of an alien abduction. Unlaced bowling shoes and score pads sit on locker-room benches, pins and bowling gloves are on the counter. It is as if the GE bowling team vanished all at once, or if someone took the Bowling Alone hypothesis super-literally.

2. The scale of it all, both physically and conceptually. A million square feet of office space looks even bigger than it sounds. When industrial buildings are full of giant metal-working machines and forklift trucks, you can lose sight of their scale. When I was reporting in China, I often wished I had a way to allow readers to see the extent of the factories, the staff dormitories, the shipping docks. Fort Wayne is working on a larger canvas than I had imagined before looking at this site.

3. The complexity and care of civic engagement. The funding of this project is an epitome of “public-private partnership”—a phrase that, as I’ve noted before, is seen in Washington as a euphemism for “payoffs” or ‘log-rolling,” but at the local level appears to be a key ingredient in getting things done. Some of the money is private investment; some is municipal bonds; some is federal and state tax incentives; some comes from a community foundation; some comes from elsewhere. I’m deliberately not giving the numbers because they’re complex, and if you want a precise breakdown, you can go here or here (click on “How is this project being financed?”)
   
   The surprise to me was evidence provided by Electric Works on the breadth of community support—across race, and income level—for the idea of spending public money to revive this site. Last year the polling firm Campos did a study of local attitudes toward this expensive new project. The resulting Journal-Gazette story is here, and the full report is downloadable as a PDF here.
   
   Among the findings were 84 percent of respondents agreeing with the statement, “Electric Works is a good example of the old saying that sometimes you have to take a small risk to secure a big return.” Some 81 percent said they agreed with, “Electric Works will be successful in making Fort Wayne and Allen County a better place to live, just like other public-private partnership investments in our community have.” By the same 81 percent, respondents agreed that “Fort Wayne and Allen County are moving in the right direction. The Electric Works development just moves us farther along the right path.”
   
   “The emotional weight that the industrial complex has on this community can’t be overstated,” Josh Parker, of RTM Ventures, told Claire Ballentine of Bloomberg just this month. “It’s not just what we’re doing on our site, but what that brings to the larger area.”
   
   The project has its critics and controversies (as described in the Journal-Gazette here), and it has not yet nailed down all its funding. But leaf through the poll and compare its results with anything you have heard about national-level politics recently.  

4. “I was a dweller.” Crystal Vann Wallstrom had been working and living in San Francisco for 15 years before she moved to Fort Wayne, where her husband had gotten a job offer.
   
   “Frankly, I was a petrified to move here—I mean, to Fort Wayne, from California,” she told me. “But we have loved it, and being here has made us rethink our perceptions of ‘the Midwest.’” Vann Walstrom said that in San Francisco, she and her husband had been raising their two toddlers in a 325-square-foot rented studio apartment in the Mission district.
   
   “When house prices are in the seven figures, you reconsider your priorities,” she told me. She said that for the same cost as her studio in the Mission, she and her husband are raising their children in “a 2,600 square-foot house, in a historic neighborhood, on an acre of land, eight minutes from downtown. We are homeowners for the first time, in our 40s.”
   
   She made another point, too. “I realized that in San Francisco I was a ‘dweller.’ I was just living there. Now I feel as if I’m helping build a community.”

Will this all work, in the way the project’s backers promise and many local residents clearly hope? I don’t know. The point for now is the breadth, density, and boldness of experimentation, largely outside the national view.

Next stop: another site on I-69.