Pair visits dead, dying malls

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ^ | Friday, May 10, 2002 | Teresa F. Lindeman

[Clemenza]

Rouse operates Bayside Marketplace in Miami.

Ah! One of the best places to watch hot Latin chix in South Florida.

Sunset Place (on US 1 by U of Miami) is even better for South American eye candy, although it also attracts rude, rowdy 14 year olds as well. A key to its success is the fact that it has the only Virgin Mega Store in Florida. It lacks a department store anchor, is outdoors, yet is still successful.

[Lazamataz]

Hey! Congratulations in advance, Laz! Where's the honeymoon going to be? Mall of America?

Megan Bay, St. Thomas. We are getting married there too.

Or are you going someplace where you can buy steenking cheap imports direct? ;^)

I prefer products built with geniune Chinese Slave Labor! :o)

[Clemenza]

What happened to Pompano Square Mall to bring it to near death?

The old folks who used to go there are dying off and the younger people in Pompano and Deerfield seem to prefer driving up to Boca to go to town center. The big box retailers also took a lot of business away. The same phenomenons have affected the Coral Square Mall nearby.

[SoothingDave]

Greengate is going to be renovated as a Magport.

I think this is what the absentee landowner is banking on. He certainly hasn't done anything to maintain the place, and he once told everyone to get out, then backtracked and is begging for retailers to come.

If the Magport project goes to Baltimore, I suspect the entire mall will be demolished. Sad, because it was one of the first malls ever built and in my childhood they always had the best Christmas displays.

SD

[PJ-Comix]

The Hollywood Greyhound Dog Track Flea Market is also rapidly dying. Very few vendors set up shop outside there this year and from what I hear, there will be fewer yet this June when the vendors move indoors for the summer. And yet a friend of mine is planning to rent space there this summer in the delusional belief that the Greyhound Flea Market will somehow miraculously experience a turnaround. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the owner of the Festival Flea Market is planning to open a Hollywood Marketplace Flea Market nearby at the corner of Hollywood and State Road 7, thus destroying what little business is left at the Greyhound Flea Market.

[rochester_veteran]

Northgate Plaza. Dewey Avenue, Rochester NY. Thriving in the 70's, struggling in the 80's, wheezing in the 90's, dead today.

That happened to Westgate Plaza in Gates (NY) as well. I really liked Westgate before it died out because it wasn't huge.

Now the Walmart has replaced it and there's also the new Perkins across the street. It revitalized the whole area

rochester_veteran

[Steve0113]

I just decided how big our house should be.

That's just under 15 acres. I want to see pics of it when it's done. ;)

Congratulations on getting married. Despite some of the comments on this forum, it really is a better life.

[PJ-Comix]

You should get married at the Ft. Lauderdale Swap Shop. A couple of Swap Shop employees got married there years ago and pics of their wedding made the pages of the National Enquirer. Get married there and Preston Henn will provide you with a free honeymoon suite at the Margate Flea Market Motel which he also owns. (A little very inside South Florida flea market humor there).

[general_re]

Yep. It's pretty much all symptomatic of overmalling in the first place, and a declining city in the second. Like you said, Thruway and Seneca are gone entirely. Main Place...well, retail of any sort hasn't worked down there since about 1957, as far as I can tell. You'd think I'd remember Apple Tree Mall (A/K/A "Appletree Business Park" these days), if for no other reason than because I occasionally head over there to pay my gas bill ;)

Might as well toss in McKinley and Lockport while we're at it, but I'll never understand the NF malls. Rainbow had a great location in a completely dead city, and Summit Park is just in the middle of nowhere, for crying out loud.

[Clemenza]

Urban and suburban Upstate New York is a depressing place in general. While the rest of the "rust belt" has largely recovered, much of New York from Poukeepsie north is filled with abandoned factories and retail centers.

[Willie Green]

Megan Bay, St. Thomas. We are getting married there too.

Nice!

I prefer products built with geniune Chinese Slave Labor! :o)

Well, as a consolation, you will be touring the last vestiges of U.S. slavery.
The U.S. Virgin Islands are small enough that they usually slip my mind when the topic arises.
But IMHO, they should be lumped in with Puerto Rico if the issue of statehood is ever resolved.

[Wolfie]

The Monroeville Mall may not be a dead mall, but it is the "Dawn of the Dead" mall.

[PJ-Comix]

A few years ago the lowlife boyfriend of a lowlife woman killed her daughter. Then the woman made a trip to the Swap Shop and after walking around there for awhile suddenly started screaming that her daughter had been kidnapped. The trouble was that the lowlife woman was too stupid to realize that the Swap Shop is the VERY WORST place in Florida to fake a kidnapping since every square inch of the place is covered by video cameras. All they did is watch the woman on video from the moment she cried about her daughter being missing and then traced her movements backwards in a timeline to see that she entered the Swap Shop alone. I was actually at the Swap Shop on the day this woman faked the kidnapping story.

[E Rocc]

The mall of my youth (Green Acres-Valley Stream, New York) didn't die, so much as get taken over by thugs from the ghettos of Queens and Brooklyn. The better retailers moved out and the discounters moved in. Its a shame, as I really liked going there as a kid.

When I was in high school Randall Park Mall (the biggest in the world at the time) opened about a mile away from Southgate, which was supposedly the biggest shopping center anywhere. Southgate went into a spiral, but is still hanging on, while Randall really hit the skids largely due to similar thugs.

Ironically, one of the better malls in the Cleveland area today is Tower City, smack in the middle of downtown under Terminal Tower (once the tallest building in the world outside NYC). Nice scenery, especially at lunchtime in the summers. >:)

It is a great site. Oddly fascinating.

-Eric

[Marc Poor]

The area should be presented as a case study to liberal professors everywhere. There was an artical in the local paper last week that Buffalo-Niagara Falls is the most unionized area in the country in terms of percentage of the workplace organized. We lead the country in taxation (when you combine property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes and gasoline taxes). We are notorious for regulating business, and the liberal politicians who govern the area haven't been able to think outside their district boundaries for generations. It is liberal policy heaven, and it has been a disaster.

[E Rocc]

Apparently, Pittsburgh is on the border of the area where Mr. Pibb soda can be found as well as a market for Cherokee Red soda.

Cherikee Red (that's how its spelled) is the best red pop there is. It's easy to find in the Cleveland area.

Surge, on the other hand.... >:(

-Eric

[cgbg]

I think the url http://www.deadcities.com is still available. Such a site could show graphic images of what happens after forty years of the liberals' "war on poverty" and trillions of dollars of federal funds. The majority of our Eastern and Midwestern cities are a monument to human folly.

[Marc Poor]

Yeah I know, it's spelled "article"

[Willie Green]

I think this is what the absentee landowner is banking on. He certainly hasn't done anything to maintain the place, and he once told everyone to get out, then backtracked and is begging for retailers to come.

Yeah, I can recall posting a few articles about that over the years. Apparently the venue for the local gun show gets batted back and forth between the old Greengate and Monroeville Malls. Same old battle between squawking liberals and merchants who appreciate the revenues generated by law-abiding citizens.

[Willie Green]

The Monroeville Mall may not be a dead mall, but it is the "Dawn of the Dead" mall.

I understand that one is under consideration as a Magport as well,
although there are other Monroeville locations in serious contention.