It was great news, then, to see this article in the New York Times earlier this week, which says that that malls are crashing and burning across the country, just like everything else (#RP2012). It's even better to hear that American's are getting frustrated with the overwhelmingly evil world of mall shopping and are turning to smaller stores and street shopping. And it's even better to hear that crazy people like Vicky Poole, director of Cleveland's Galleria at Erieview are turning mall spaces into urban gardens. I haven't heard of anything more awesome in years. Here's an excerpt:
Designers in Buffalo have proposed stripping down a mall to its foundation and reinventing it as housing, while an aspiring architect in Detroit has proposed turning a mall’s parking lot there into a community farm. Columbus, Ohio, arguing that it was too expensive to maintain an empty mall on prime real estate, dismantled its City Center mall and replaced it with a park.
Even at many malls that continue to thrive, developers are redesigning them as town squares — adding elements like dog parks and putting greens, creating street grids that go through the malls, and restoring natural elements like creeks that were originally paved over.
“Basically they’re building the downtowns that the suburbs never had,” along with reworking abandoned urban malls for nonshopping uses, said Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor at the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The efforts reflect a shift in how Americans want to shop today: rather than going to big, overwhelming malls, many prefer places where stores can be entered from the street, featuring restaurants, entertainment and other Main Street mainstays. Also, as commuters in urban areas shift to public transportation, the giant parking lots are no longer needed.
Building a new chapter in American society on the charred remains of the temples of its last evil empire! Restoring paved-over creeks to the middle of malls? This is like the post-apocalypse, but awesome!
The future may be economic collapse, but with creative people like Vicky Poole, that future looks bright.
Fight on!
-Ben "The Best" Tuthill
Malls have lead to the destruction of American cities and probably are, "the worst thing to ever happen to the world," but I think the article blamed the failure of malls on the rise of online shopping. I do think that gardens and parks are better uses for the huge land that malls take up, but is the internet really where we want the furute of shopping to occur? At least malls were able to provide community landmarks and meeting places while encouraging at least limited human interaction. The internet is used to avade local taxes, take jobs away from local teens in search of a first job, and makes people insular, sedintary, and lazy (at least there a lot of walking once inside a big mall). So I don't really know, this Dylan "Pickles" is in a true pickle.
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