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
As a follow-up from my City Journal article last week on the end of retail (and especially malls), neighboring broadcaster WBAL-Baltimore (1090 AM/101.5 FM) asked me to do a brief clip on the future of malls for the Bryan Nehman show earlier this morning. Nehman’s program runs on WBAL from 5a to 9a each weekday, and my
My latest came out just in time for Black Friday, on Manhattan Institute’s City Journal: a world without malls. It’s my most recent rumination on the bleak future of retail in 2018–an industry that looks increasingly likely experience a collapse with no other precedent than era when the suburban shopping mall replaced the American town center as the place
My lasted post just went up at Urban Indy. It focuses on the announced closure of the Sears at Castleton Square Mall, the largest mall in the Indianapolis metro, second largest mall in the state, and, together with all the outparcel space, probably the largest retail/commercial hub in the state. This leaves only one Sears
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
As a follow-up from my City Journal article last week on the end of retail (and especially malls), neighboring broadcaster WBAL-Baltimore (1090 AM/101.5 FM) asked me to do a brief clip on the future of
My latest came out just in time for Black Friday, on Manhattan Institute’s City Journal: a world without malls. It’s my most recent rumination on the bleak future of retail in 2018–an industry that
My lasted post just went up at Urban Indy. It focuses on the announced closure of the Sears at Castleton Square Mall, the largest mall in the Indianapolis metro, second largest mall in