I was recently quoted in an Indianapolis Monthly article celebrating the 25th anniversary of downtown’s Circle Centre Mall. As anyone who has visited recently can attest, there’s not a great deal to celebrate at this point. I’ll concede that my last visit was in early 2017, shortly before the closure of Carson’s (at that point the only
After a few too many COVID-obsessed articles, it’s time to take a breather with a more time-tested topic that I hope will soon become salient in the blogosphere once more: off-line shopping, specifically in the form of malls. As I prep for articles more substantial, I think I’m at least somewhat overdue for a revisit
The previous half of this mega-blog post explored Forest Fair Village pictorially, showing what happens when an investment company is left wringing whatever remaining profit they can derive from an almost completely dead attraction. This mall—98% vacant yet also 98% open to the public—is hardly unique, even by Cincinnati standards, which, like most metros of
My dead mall postings have routinely become some of my most popular articles, and I still have quite a few great spectacles that I could share someday, stored away in my photo archives. (In some cases, the aging photos chronicle a mall in its sunset years that has since closed completely.) I often avoid dead
As I work on a longer, more photo-saturated post, I have to get a little snippet in because of some news that a reader recently sent me. The Cortana Mall (or the Mall at Cortana) in Baton Rouge recently closed. The only functional portion left is a Dillard’s Clearance Center, which, though physically connected to
The cultural standards for commerce continue to evolve across the nation, to the point that shopping is no longer a peripatetic pastime. It seems obvious by this point that malls are bearing the brunt of this cataclysm. People still shop, but they don’t go shopping. Sure, there are plenty of sterile strip malls or shopping
Long a means of securing seasonal tenants in shopping centers, the pop-up shop has only emerged as a standard bearer for retail nodes within the last five years or so—about the same time that economic forecasters began realizing how badly online shopping was undermining conventional bricks-and-mortar retail. And that’s how they work: they fill a
While this article treads across some familiar territory—dead and dying malls—it arrives through a different lens: the eyes of a friend and fellow devotee of interesting landscapes. I blogged many years ago about Sandusky—specifically an unusual Value City Furniture in the heart of downtown—but I spent very little time in the area that one would
Over the holidays I briefly visited my hometown of Indianapolis, and even more briefly made a stop to the Greenwood Park Mall, which was “my mall” growing up and a frequent subject of this blog in earlier years. Back then, I singled this mall out for its resilience, as other malls (in Indianapolis and across
I’ve taken a breather these last few days, after a series of particularly time-consuming posts in November, and it’s likely to continue a bit more, but I’ll provide some fodder with a teaser post like this one: of a mall that will remain unnamed (for the time being) but one that I’ve covered before. It
I was recently quoted in an Indianapolis Monthly article celebrating the 25th anniversary of downtown’s Circle Centre Mall. As anyone who has visited recently can attest, there’s not a great deal to celebrate at this
After a few too many COVID-obsessed articles, it’s time to take a breather with a more time-tested topic that I hope will soon become salient in the blogosphere once more: off-line shopping, specifically
The previous half of this mega-blog post explored Forest Fair Village pictorially, showing what happens when an investment company is left wringing whatever remaining profit they can derive from an almost completely dead
My dead mall postings have routinely become some of my most popular articles, and I still have quite a few great spectacles that I could share someday, stored away in my photo archives.
As I work on a longer, more photo-saturated post, I have to get a little snippet in because of some news that a reader recently sent me. The Cortana Mall (or the Mall
The cultural standards for commerce continue to evolve across the nation, to the point that shopping is no longer a peripatetic pastime. It seems obvious by this point that malls are bearing the
Long a means of securing seasonal tenants in shopping centers, the pop-up shop has only emerged as a standard bearer for retail nodes within the last five years or so—about the same time
While this article treads across some familiar territory—dead and dying malls—it arrives through a different lens: the eyes of a friend and fellow devotee of interesting landscapes. I blogged many years ago about
Over the holidays I briefly visited my hometown of Indianapolis, and even more briefly made a stop to the Greenwood Park Mall, which was “my mall” growing up and a frequent subject of
I’ve taken a breather these last few days, after a series of particularly time-consuming posts in November, and it’s likely to continue a bit more, but I’ll provide some fodder with a teaser
