Self-proclaimed “The Best Town on Earth”, Madisonville is a small city of approximately 20,000 people located in the middle of western Kentucky.  Economically, the city has remained prosperous in the post-coal mining period thanks to a highway infrastructure which criss-crosses the city.  In fact, the new I-69 corridor linking Canada to Mexico will pass right by Madisonville within a few years, solidifying the manufacturing industry here for the time being.

In part due to Madisonville’s importance as a manufacturing and transportation hub and also due to its relative isolation from larger cities, Madisonville is a retailing center for it and the immediate region surrounding.  The closest larger city is Evansville, Indiana which is 50 miles north and the closest large metropolitan area is Nashville, Tennessee which is 100 miles southeast.  A large strip featuring a mall and many big box retailers and strip malls exists near the interchange of KY 70/85 and Pennyrile Parkway (Future I-69), just east of downtown.

Parkway Plaza Mall, which opened in 1980, is a small one-level enclosed mall anchored by Goody’s Family Clothing, Peebles, and Dawahares, a Kentucky-based family apparel retailer.  There is also an 8-screen Capitol Theatre in the mall, and the mall’s enclosed space is a mere 230,000 square feet.  The mall is owned and managed by local Ershig Properties, based in nearby Henderson, who indicate on their website they renovated the mall in 2002. 

We visited Parkway Plaza Mall in May 2001, and were surprised to find how substantial it was given the relatively small population of the trade area.  However, this can be explained by two factors.  First, a small mall building boom took place during the late 1970s and early 1980s, placing enclosed malls of this size in smaller cities and suburbs (as ancillaries to larger centers) throughout the country, such as Beaver Dam Mall in Wisconsin.  Second, and the reason why Parkway Plaza has largely succeeded where others such as Beaver Dam have failed is that the mall fills in an important gap.  As mentioned above, the nearest regional mall is 50 miles to the north in Evansville, and the nearest metropolitan area with larger offerings is Nashville which is 100 miles away, so shoppers appreciate and use this local offering.

Check out the 80s decor of Parkway Plaza, featuring wood paneling, curving mirrors, and carpeting throughout the mall.  If you have any information or anecdotal accounts of Parkway Plaza, or know anything about the 2002 renovation, feel free to chime in with some comments.    

There’s some big retail news today:

CompUSA, which has long been struggling against rivals Best Buy and Circuit City, and who seem to have lost the geek market to more specialty chains like MicroCenter, will be closing 126 stores, more than half of their remaining store fleet, throughout the country. They’ll be pulling out of many major markets, including Dallas and Boston, entirely.

The inevitable has occurred: Federated Department Stores is no more. No, they’re not closing, but they’ve decided to abandon the increasingly-esoteric company name in favor of rebranding the entire chain as Macy’s Group, Inc. The article also notes that Macy’s same-store sales are up, but that they continue to disappoint at former May-branded stores.

As mentioned previously in our North Park Mall posting, the Chicagoland area was spotted with small, enclosed neighborhood malls built during the late 1970s and early 1980s during a trend in this type of retailing.  In around 1979 or 1980, St. Charles Mall opened on the west side of St. Charles near the intersection of IL 38 and Randall Road, about 40 miles west of downtown Chicago.  Anchored by now-defunct Joseph Speiss & Company, an Elgin-based department store which went out of business entirely in 1996, and K-Mart, St. Charles Mall also had a main enclosed hallway of stores connecting the two anchors and shorter side hallways leading out to the main entrances along IL 38. 

1991 ushered in the death blow for St. Charles Mall, as a much larger mall opened across town on the east side of St. Charles.  Charlestowne Mall, anchored by JCPenney, Marshalls, Carson Pirie Scott, and Kohls, quickly became the dominant mall for suburban and exurban areas in the Fox River Valley in western DuPage and eastern Kane counties and beyond.  With two levels and one million square feet, Charlestowne debuted outside of St. Charles Mall’s league and immediately drew shoppers away from it.  At the same time, Joseph Spiess declared bankruptcy in 1991, unable to compete with the more modern and popular emerging chains by then; the entire chain folded in 1996.  By 1995, St. Charles Mall gave up and shuttered completely, yielding to the emerging presence of Charlestowne Mall and the box retail/strip mall boom along Randall Road to the north and south of it.

By 2000, we discovered St. Charles Mall randomly while exploring the Chicago area and were surprised it had been abandoned for 5 years despite the fact it was in the middle of the most prime emerging retail strip in the western suburbs.  Today, Randall Road is a major retail strip and thoroughfare all the way from Crystal Lake in the north to North Aurora in the south, with many millions of square feet of strip malls and big box, including 3 trendy ‘lifestyle’ centers.  Nearly all of this strip is less than 10 years old, and much if it is even newer.  The blighted St. Charles Mall shell was an eyesore amid this booming success and finally it met the wrecking ball in 2002.  Today, the site of St. Charles Mall is an empty field despite promises of turning it into an auto mall. 

In a rather funny twist of irony, one of these ‘lifestyle’ centers, Geneva Commons, opened practically across the street from the site of St. Charles Mall in 2003.  Featuring stores such as Anthropologie, J. Jill, Williams-Sonoma and Crate & Barrel, which typically locate in enclosed super-regional malls, Geneva Commons is an uncreative, aesthetic failure of a place.  The stores are organized mostly in a linear pattern - like a strip mall - and fronted by a giant parking lot, with a cluster of smaller service-oriented merchants and chain restaurants near the main entrance.  The rear of the center behind the strip mall is completely disused, and it is entirely unfriendly to pedestrians who would want to walk around.  But why would they, considering there is no communal focus or public gathering space whatsoever.  Developers, there’s nothing new about this type of suburban development.  The only difference between it and the 1950s-era strip malls are the names of the stores.  Stop trying to rebrand the decades-old concept of the strip mall into anything more than it is - a boring row of stores and a giant parking lot.  Since its debut in 2003, Geneva Commons has been stealing thunder from enclosed malls like Charlestowne, and possibly even other malls like Stratford Square and Fox Valley Center which are further afield.    

I took these pictures in July 2001, after about 6 years of the mall being abandoned.  Since the mall was only open for about 15 years and successful for only about 10, I’d guess all the decor is original. I wish I would’ve gone in the door that was open for whatever reason and gotten more interior pics.  Also check out the old Spiess logo visible at the rear of the mall; it’s the only one I’ve ever seen.  In addition, go see the demolition pictures posted by Mike Mustard in 2002.  

The following 3 images are vintage photos taken by John Gallo in the early 1980s, probably not long after the mall opened.

Anyone who’s been paying attention–and that likely includes most of the regular readers of this here blog–knows that malls aren’t actually in trouble. Sure, a good many individual malls are in trouble, and far more are closing than opening. But the species itself isn’t troubled; it’s just that why people go to malls has changed.

With our busy schedules and long American workweeks, big box centers make sense. You can swing in, grab what you need, and get home. The functional enclosed mall serves less and less purpose for this reason, but anyone who’s traipsed around to see a lot of malls all over the country (and we’re certainly guilty as charged) will agree that the top-tier malls, the biggest and most dominant centers in every area, are doing better than ever. Why is this? The really large centers are actually shopping destinations on their own, and Americans still love to shop.

That’s why I feel the need to give some kudos to the current, in-progress renovation and repositioning of the Colonie Center, the older of the two mega-malls serving the Capital Region of New York. The larger and more dominant Crossgates Mall, which opened in 1984 just a mile or so away, draws people from over 60 miles in every direction. In the time since, Colonie Center has soldiered on with a different set of tenants, but new owners Feldman Mall Properties have decided to aggressively re-position and retenant the aging center. Here’s the deal:

Colonie Center opened in 1966 as the first enclosed mall in the Albany area, with a strategic location between Albany, Troy, and Schenectady, right near the intersection of I-87 and I-90, and along US-5. Sears and Macy’s were initial anchor stores. For twenty years, the mall was the dominant center in the region, pulling shoppers from all over east-central New York. Even the 1984 opening of Crossgates Mall didn’t seem to dent its success. Colonie Center’s management was proactive during most of the center’s existence, and in 1992 expanded the mall substantially, adding a Steinbach department store in the center of the mall and expanding the length of the main concourse to the north along Wolf Road. At this time, Macy’s moved to the 300,000 square-foot, grand brick facade store (their old one was swallowed up by mall space) that they still occupy today. Steinbach closed in 1995, but was replaced by Boscov’s. Macy’s, Boscov’s, and Sears remain as the 1.2 million-square-foot mall’s three primary anchor tenants today, and they were joined in the late 1990s/early 200s by Christmas Tree Shops and Steve & Barry’s University Sportswear, respectively.

In 2005, the mall was sold to Feldman Mall Properties, and they are attempting to rebrand the mall–which had clearly been suffering at least some amount due to Crossgates–as an entertainment-oriented destination. The front of the mall is abuzz with construction activity, which will add a large, tall Regal Cinemas to be cantilevered over the mall as well as Barnes & Noble and L.L. Bean as new anchor stores, while also bringing new restaurants. The plan? According to the placards placed in the mall, they want Colonie Center to be “Downtown Albany” (a bit presumptuous, but I support the concept); a place to gather, browse, eat, drink, and be entertained. The interior of the mall, which was in good shape to begin with, was given yet another facelift that dressed the mall in an Adirondack theme, complete with working fireplaces, television lounges, and living room style arrangements. I’ve seen much of this at other malls, but it was more well done here.

Most importantly, Feldman seems to “get it:” They understand that the malls of the future will be places people want to spend leisure time, not places targeted towards the convenience-oriented consumer. Plenty of people will still want to get out of the house, to be able to have dinner and browse stores and see a movie. Tenants like Barnes & Noble and L.L. Bean–lifestyle brands that offer leisure products people actually enjoy pawing at and browsing–will thrive in this arrangement. Similarly, mid-sized metropolitan areas like Albany–cities that are substantially-sized but which lack the in-town shopping or entertainment offerings of larger cities–will likely embrace changes like the one underway at Colonie Center.

Here are the placards detailing Feldman’s plans for Colonie Center:

In addition, one of Colonie Center’s new tenants as a result of its repositioning is a men’s formalwear shop called Spector’s, that I include a picture of due to their store’s blatant nod towards mid-century retail design. Could it foretell a trend?

Since 1983, the South Street Seaport has been one of the country’s most famous “festival marketplace” style shopping malls. Built as part of a craze to introduce suburban style shopping hubs in the center of cities, festival marketplaces were designed to try and stop the loss of shoppers to the suburbs and revitalize struggling cities by building a retail critical mass within cities. Unlike most malls, they tended to be designed specifically with tourists and suburbanites in mind, presenting a somewhat sanitized, self-contained version of city life designed to allay fears of crime and blight that were associated with major cities in the ’70s and ’80s.

Major cities like New York and Boston (whose Faneuil Hall Marketplace probably stands as the country’s most successful development of this kind) didn’t experience this loss of shoppers and tourists as acutely as many mid-sized cities, but developments like South Street helped keep the shoppers coming, and carried parts of America’s big cities through their most troubled days a few decades back. By and large, the Festival Marketplace craze wasn’t terribly successful, but South Street Seaport stood as one of its most prominent success stories into the 2000s.

Unfortunately, it seems as though South Street–which is still a bustling center today–may have outlived its usefulness. Retail Traffic Court alerted us to this story, which announces that General Growth Properties, the management company in charge of the center, plans to raze the center in favor of a tall building and ferry landing, leaving the remainder of the pier as open space. I believe the inland (and older) portions of the development are designated as historic, so they’re likely not going anywhere. The 24-year-old shopping mall, however, may soon be history.