December 02, 2012 | Dead Malls, Wisconsin | Posted by Prange Way

Well, hey.  Remember me?  It’s been a while, I know.  But I’m back, with a new story.

Stevens Point, Wisconsin, is a city of 26,000 located in the center of the state.  Its major exports are college graduates from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, one of 13 public four-year Universities in the state, and beer from Point Brewery, which I’m partial to.  A decent-sized paper mill and a few Insurance companies round out the economy here, among other businesses and services.

And, of course, the Stevens Point area once had a mall.  Heck, there were even two in the area.  Now they have none.  Zero. Zilch. Nada. The big goose egg.

The Stevens Point area’s first mall was located in suburban Plover, a smaller city located just south of Stevens Point, and it opened in 1984.  I missed seeing this one, but the interweb seems to indicate it was very small and later became part of Rainbow Falls Water Park, which itself ultimately closed in the early 2000s.  The mall was apparently demolished in 2003.  It also seemed to have two names: Manufacturers Outlet Mall and Plover Mall.  Anyone know anything about it?  Any photos?  All I could find were some back issues of a local paper with a few advertisements mentioning stores in the mall.

Even before Plover Mall (or whatever it was called) appeared on the scene, a national mall developer (sources indicate Melvin Simon and Associates) had been interested in building a large-scale mall on the edge of Stevens Point, located near the interchange of US 10 and US 51 (later I-39).  This proposal, introduced several years earlier in the late 1970s, was continually blocked by locals and ultimately lost steam as the years progressed.   A few years later, a different developer came up with a different proposal – to build a regional mall in the middle of downtown Stevens Point.  Several blocks of downtown Stevens Point would need to be razed for this development, but the developer marketed this under the careful guise of “urban renewal” because downtown Stevens Point was flagging, as were many cities’ downtowns nationwide.  This proposal won the backing of locals because it meant their downtown, which had lost its luster in recent years, would once again be the vibrant, retail-dominant center they had known in the early and mid 20th century.  Groundbreaking for this downtown mall, named CenterPoint Mall, took place in September 1984, and the mall’s grand opening took place in October 1985.

Anchored by two department stores, JCPenney and Green Bay-based ShopKo, with space for a third anchor, CenterPoint Mall opened with space for 60 smaller stores under one enclosed roof.  The 220,000 square foot mall was never very successful, despite ample parking in the middle of downtown and only a few blocks from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, a campus with over 10,000 students.  The mall never filled to capacity, nor attracted the quality of stores present in larger regional malls such as Wausau Center, located just 30 minutes north of Stevens Point in Wausau.

Its decor was pretty standard for the mid-80s, with terrazzo-tiled floors, wood and brick layered storefronts, lengthy skylights, and many plants and trees poking out from sidewalk-style grates as well as from blocky wooden planters.  At night, the mall really lit up with marquee-style rows of lighting along the skylights, giving its interior a dramatic, lively appearance.  I sort of liked it, even though it was more than half dead for most of its existence.  The layout of the mall was a simple dumbbell with a somewhat narrow main walkway.  Pretty standard stuff for a city this size.

CenterPoint Mall was part of a larger trend and planning convention for urban renewal in cities across the country.  The logic for the convention came from the fact that suburban-style malls had been enjoying incredible success in suburbs and the peripheries of cities, at the expense of downtowns, which had been the vibrant focal point of cities since their inception.  Stores were rapidly leaving downtowns for these malls nationwide, and downtowns across the country were becoming outmoded derelict ghost towns.  Beginning in the 1960s, and through at least the mid-1980s, developers had success convincing cities to tear up their aging, decrepit downtowns to put in typical regional malls.  Many of these, especially in smaller cities, even had the same large, free parking lots shoppers enjoyed in the suburbs.  Cities were quick to give up space to these developments, unfortunately tearing down many historic landmarks in the process.  Ah, the prospect of progress, to make something old new again.

Examples of developments like these took place in Rochester, NY (Midtown Plaza), Salem, OR (Salem Center), White Plains, NY (several malls), Santa Maria, CA (Town Center), Milwaukee, WI (Grand Avenue Mall), Columbus, OH (City Center), and some even closer to Stevens Point in Oshkosh (Park Plaza Mall), Appleton (Avenue Mall), Wisconsin Rapids (Rapids Mall), and Wausau (Wausau Center).  The list obviously goes on, and there are many more examples nationwide. The majority of these developments have struggled through the 1990s into the present, and many have been repurposed, are struggling, or have scaled back considerably.  Interestingly, Wausau Center is an exception, having enjoyed success and helping to create a more vibrant downtown in the process.

The dire implications of many of these developments result from improper positioning, pitting suburban interests against downtown constraints.  The suburban model of retail cannot easily be superimposed on its predecessor (and arguably, its replacement as of late), the downtown.  First, by the time many downtowns were repurposed to house traditional enclosed malls, there was already a sort of competition on the periphery of these cities.  In Stevens Point’s case, several suburban-style retail clusters had already popped up on the north, east, and south sides of the city.  The synergy of collective business, strip malls, and big box stores in these clusters helped them thrive, whereas there was no extra room downtown for these types of stores.  While the mall had free parking, the rest of downtown was still constrained by on-street parking, and by tearing up several blocks of downtown to put in the mall there was even less of a reason to shop at the more traditional streetfront downtown stores.

This leads to the next point – ripping up a downtown grid to put in a huge mall is simply poor planning style.  Several through-streets were truncated at the mall, creating a loss of flow through downtown.  Areas directly north of the mall were suddenly completely cut off from downtown by the several block long development.

As the years went on, Pointers chose to shop at the businesses in the peripheral retail districts, or in nearby Wausau or Appleton rather than their own mall.  As such, the mall was never fully occupied.  More importantly, it was thus never able to attract the kind of destination stores to get people in the doors.  There was never an American Eagle, Victoria’s Secret, Pottery Barn, or the like.

In the late 1990s, a small apparel-oriented department store, Stage, opened as CenterPoint Mall’s third anchor, on the north-facing side in the center.  Unfortunately, Stage was short-lived, and closed after only two years, in 2000.  In 2003, Dunham’s Sports opened in this space, but they too only lasted a few years, moving to the US 10 strip on the east side for a bigger store.

Not long after, the mall began its long, slow spiral into oblivion.  A visit in 2010 yielded a total of five stores open.  In May of that year, JCPenney decided to call it quits and close their store, putting 39 folks out of work.  That same year, the Central Wisconsin Children’s Museum departed as well.  You know your mall is dead when a museum leaves…

Meanwhile, the mall had been in foreclosure, and the remaining handful of tenants began to trickle out.  In May 2011, the city of Stevens Point declared the mall blighted and condemned it.  This outraged Valley Bank of Iowa, who owned the mall in receivership, and they unsuccessfully sued the city to win back the mall.  The city then scored a $750,000 federal block grant to redevelop the mall, and in March 2012, the doors to the mall were permanently closed to the public.  ShopKo is the only store to remain, as its building is technically owned and operated as a separate entity.

I happened to stop by CenterPoint Mall one hot day in June 2012, and took the second set of photos that day.  I was actually unaware the mall was closed to the public, as ShopKo was open and the entrance next to ShopKo was propped open with some activity.  A maintenance man was doing something near the entrance, and a couple girls walked into the mall ahead of me, so I thought nothing of the fact that I shouldn’t have been there.  This changed, however, when I saw that the many fig trees planted in the mall’s main walkway had lost most of their leaves onto the floor, creating a crunchy carpet of green and brown.  I was able to walk the entire length of the mall unquestioned, as the two girls who walked in ahead of me went into a dead store that appeared to be some makeshift community center or charity or something.  They hung out in the store talking and giggling, and I walked the length of the mall full of dead trees.  It was a strange, eerie moment.  I actually only discovered the mall was supposed to be shut when I got to the other end and saw notices on another set of entry doors that said the mall was permanently closed that March.  Whoops.

In all, it was a satisfying but bittersweet visit.  I got a chance to say goodbye to a mall I’d visited several times, and one I was always perplexed by.  Demolition of CenterPoint Marketplace began in August 2012, and today most of the mall is history.  Mid-State Technical College will move into a former portion of the mall in 2013, and ShopKo is open for business as usual.  Third Street was extended through part of the former mall as it had been before the mall opened, almost exactly 27 years ago.  What’s old is now new again, and as downtowns across the nation are experiencing a resurgence, Americans want denser, more urban developments and the organic well-designed community gathering space of a traditional downtown.

Elsewhere on the web:

• Flickr set of the mall from Andrew T. with useful commentary, from 2010
• A look back at CenterPoint Mall history, with many early photos, from the Stevens Point Journal

Photos from March 2001:

Photos from June 2012:

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August 22, 2012 | Uncategorized | Posted by Caldor

It shouldn’t be any surprise that we idolize Victor Gruen at Labelscar. It’s not just because, 60 years ago, he invented the form of shopping center that is the primary focus of this blog (though that’s a big part of it) but also for a few more reasons. One is that he had the same appreciation for the form of the mall that we do, and that he similarly didn’t see them just as places of commerce. Somewhat surprisingly, both of Labelscar’s co-authors are a) men and b) not big shoppers, overall. We don’t write about malls because we’re obsessed with fashion and consumerism, so much as that we write about them because of fond memories of their function as exciting community meeting places when we were younger, growing up in fairly dull suburbia. Gruen’s creations were some of the only places in our world that brought together the masses, creating a blur of 1980s stone-washed denim jeans, gurgling penny fountains, Reebok Pumps, NKOTB cassingles, and women wearing sequin-studded dresses and sporting heavily-teased up-dos (replace with your own cultural reference points if you’re older or younger; you’ll undoubtedly have equally-vivid memories). In other words, the random mass of humanity, all partaking of junky consumer culture, yes, but it was still a place that young, old, rich, poor, all races, etc., all sort of collided into one place. Victor Gruen created the mall a few decades earlier specifically for people like us: he was an Austrian Jew who moved to the US during World War II and felt that the strip-based style of development at the time was lacking in community and soul. Malls were his way of creating hubs to serve as gathering spaces that would feel like European town centers, complete with civic amenities, artwork, fountains, and more.

Unfortunately, malls were also supposed to serve as hubs for transit and mixed-uses with residential, office, healthcare, and other services all available in one pedestrian-friendly place. Sadly for Gruen, much of his original vision was sacrificed by developers in favor of the profitable all-retail-surrounded-by-parking formula, and Gruen died a somewhat bitter man who was ashamed at how his creation was so misunderstood. He came to be seen as the anti-Jane Jacobs (she who is the mother of new urbanism) but both had the same belief in the value and power of cities, they just both had dramatically different opinions about how to get there. Jacobs believed in walkability and the organic growth of neighborhoods via smaller lot sizes–an opinion I agree with, as do many–whereas Gruen felt that large-scale redevelopment could modernize cities and stop the flow of the middle class to the suburbs with a higher standard of living or simply provide a sense of place to new areas that lacked any history. Although Gruen’s urban redevelopment projects, such as the West End in Boston, saw very mixed success and even destroyed the kinds of places Jacobs sought to defend, they also served their purpose for a time. (Yours truly even lives in a 1970s-planned neighborhood within the city of San Francisco that was plotted out based on a very Gruen-esque ideology, and although it’s a very nice place to live it is lacking in the kind of character most people associate with my city).

Ultimately, the fact that Gruen had so many of the right ideas–and that they were so much more well-intentioned than anyone familiar with a “mall” would assume–is part of what makes him such a fascinating character. This documentary goes into some of the history of the man’s life and creations, and although it’s long (about an hour!) it’s worth a viewing for anyone who is interested in the history of malls and the man who invented them.

(Thanks for the heads-up, Eric)

Watch Full Screen

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August 22, 2012 | Uncategorized | Posted by Caldor

In real life, the Lone Pine Mall from Back to the Future is the Puente Hills Mall in City of Industry, California

Do you read the Onion’s AV Club? If you don’t, you might not be aware that it’s “Mall Week” over there, with a slew of posts all about malls and pop culture. Today, they had a post that very well could’ve appeared here at Labelscar on the beautiful artificiality of American malls:

Yet what appeals most to me about the design and execution of malls is that there remain kinks that can never be wholly smoothed out—especially once the facilities start to age. The plastic plants gather dust. The public’s interest in dipped candles and video arcades wanes. Retail spaces open up, and are often re-filled with much less care than in the original plan. My fondest memories of the malls of my youth are the stores that seemed out of place: the weird little collectibles outlets or quasi head shops that worked their way into the mall community and then hung in.

Go check it out, and then read the rest of the Mall Week articles, including a run-down of pivotal movie scenes happening in malls or an analysis of how malls in movies double as time machines.

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August 12, 2012 | New Jersey | Posted by Caldor

The nation is littered with places where two malls sprung up right next to each other — the post that sat at the top of the Labelscar homepage for *cough* uhh *cough* four months, the one right in front of this one, is an example — and in only rare case are both dominant. In general, one is the good one, and the other is the also-ran, making occasional strides towards being a legitimate peer by snagging a hot new anchor or having a more up-to-date renovation. The Moorestown Mall, which lives in the shadow of the amazing Cherry Hill Mall in New Jersey, is one of these also-ran malls.

Moorestown Mall was opened in 1963 by PREIT, just 3 miles east of the Cherry Hill Mall on state route 38 in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia. A large, sprawling one-level enclosed center, the original anchor stores in the Moorestown Mall were Wanamaker’s, Gimbel’s, Woolworths, and Sears. For obvious reasons, only Sears remains today, and the mall has had somewhat of a revolving door of anchors throughout the years:

• Gimbels became Stern’s in 1986, after owner Brown & Williamson sold off the chain. Stern’s remained at the mall for a short four years before leaving. The store was converted to “Ports of the World,” a new concept by Boscov’s ownership to covertly enter the Philadelphia market without anybody noticing (for some reason?). This silly experiment lasted very little time, and the store was converted to Boscov’s not long later.
• Woolworth lasted in the mall in their junior-anchor space until their demise; the space later became a Vans Skate Park (one of the many attempts to draw more crowds to the mall with a destinational retailer) before failing and being turned into a Foot Locker and ultimately a Black Diamond Mountain Sports.
• Wanamaker’s was absorbed into the Hecht’s nameplate in 1995, and the Hecht’s was ultimately converted to a Strawbridge’s (since this is the Philadelphia region, after all, so Hecht’s was somewhat of an anomaly here). This store was later torn down to make room for a new Strawbridge’s store and was converted to Macy’s in 2006.

I am sorry to say that the Moorestown Mall has always been the ugly stepsister in our family of local malls. Built in 1963 and only a few short miles from the Cherry Hill Mall, our mall has always suffered in comparison. When we moved to town in the early ’90s, the mall was a post-fire ghost town. There were rainy, wintry days when the “wooden playground” was not an option. I figured out pretty quickly that the mall was a great place to let the boys run. There was so little foot traffic that I could just let them rip and watch them as they ran towards Macy’s.

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April 20, 2012 | Minnesota | Posted by Prange Way

The Galleria is a 417,000 square-foot, mostly single-level upscale enclosed shopping mall in Edina, Minnesota, an upscale suburb of Minneapolis.  Anchored by Gabbert’s furniture, Crate and Barrel, Barnes and Noble, and a Westin Hotel, The Galleria is an upscale complement to a super-regional mall, Southdale Center, which is located across the street.

In 1976, twenty years after Southdale was developed by famous mall-mastermind Victor Gruen, Gabbert’s furniture opened a store across 69th Street from Southdale’s south entrance.  That same year, construction began on a row of shops to complement Gabbert’s.  Eventually, these shops became the enclosed mall that stands today.

The Galleria is unique, not only because it sits less than 300 feet from one of the country’s first shopping malls, but also because it has a relatively narrow, long corridor and an eclectic mix of upscale shops and restaurants.  The Galleria is what I’d call an “upscale mom mall” – it caters to the well-to-do 35-54 female set fairly well, with stores like Pendleton, L’Occitane, J. Jill, Coach, Chico’s, along with upscale salons and stationery stores.  There are many Volvos, Range Rovers, and German luxury cars in the parking structure here, which is located beneath the mall’s main level along with a handful of additional stores.  This makes sense, considering Edina, Eden Prairie, and environs are some of the more upscale suburbs in the Twin Cities area.

In 2006, The Galleria embarked on a small expansion, adding a Westin Hotel to the east end of the mall and a large Crate & Barrel store to the front of the mall, next to Gabbert’s.

The Galleria continues to be a successful, upscale ancillary to Southdale, even in spite of stark competition from other Minneapolis-area retail centers, such as Eden Prairie Center and the Mall of America.  However, The Galleria’s upscale and specialty-store niche will continue to work in its favor, even despite having no traditional anchors.

We’d like to know more about the history of The Galleria.  Has it always been enclosed, and was it built in a modular style?  We’d also like to see more cohesion between The Galleria and Southdale.  It seems they can co-exist, so why not tie them together more?  Southdale’s row of restaurants and south entrance line up nicely with the Galleria’s north entrance by Gabbert’s, separated by only 300 feet and across 69th street.  It would be really neat if they were skywalked, or at least had a dedicated and obvious pedestrian connection that was well-signed and marketed throughout both centers.  I believe both centers would benefit from the complementarity, despite being separately owned.

This Best Buy sign is actually not part of The Galleria.  It’s across the street and currently Best Buy’s oldest operating store, but not for long as it’s one of the 50 stores Best Buy is closing due to their recent financial woes. I thought it was neat though, because it’s an earlier pre-pricetag version of Best Buy’s logo.

I took these pictures of The Galleria back in April 2010.

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