http://www.labelscar.com News and Views of Malls, Shopping Centers, and Retail Chains Past and Present Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:58:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Recently I've been following coverage of some pretty extensive renovations taking place at Lincoln Mall, a long-beleagured super-regional mall in south suburban Chicagoland.  Initially I was excited at the prospect of even a modicum of success here, especially considering I've never seen the mall even close to its potential.  I ... http://www.labelscar.com/illinois/lincoln-mall-matteson Here's something kind of authentically Texan: a shopping mall that's home to "the world's largest pair of cowboy boots," a 40' sculpture outside of Saks Fifth Avenue. Pretty wild! San Antonio, Texas is a large and sprawling metropolitan area of just over two million people in south-central Texas, and is home ... http://www.labelscar.com/texas/north-star-mall We thought we'd switch it up a bit with the mall postings and fire off a whole bunch of them at once, in an urban setting: downtown Chicago. The following six malls are the largest and most cohesive retail centers in downtown Chicago, which we're defining as extending beyond the Loop and including the ... http://www.labelscar.com/illinois/the-malls-of-downtown-chicago [caption id="attachment_6734" align="aligncenter" width="580" caption="Santa Rosa's Coddingtown Mall, early 1960s"][/caption] Coddingtown Mall, in the Sonoma County city of Santa Rosa, is one of the largest and oldest malls north of San Francisco along the California coast. Unfortunately it seems to be a bit troubled nowadays, but historic mall geeks may find ... http://www.labelscar.com/california/coddingtown-mall One of the most disturbing retail trends over the past few years has been the virtual disappearance of old-line department stores. Even if shopping trends aren't exactly favoring them anymore (and I would argue that there's not all that many people in the under 30 set who shop at Macy's ... http://www.labelscar.com/uncategorized/well-be-the-future-of-retail-blog-for-a-minute This has popped up in a few places already, but Dwell and Inhabitat have been sponsoring this series called "Reburbia" that's targeted at coming up with ideas to "fix" America's broken suburban landscapes. It's pretty neat, because the finalists are full of really kooky sanctimonious ideas like "suburban people need AIRSHIPS ... http://www.labelscar.com/uncategorized/reburbia-sanctimonious-cankles This is really neat. You can vote on your favorite one. http://www.labelscar.com/uncategorized/modernist-gas-stations Arrowhead Towne Center is the only regional mall for a large region of over 1 million shoppers in sprawling northwest Maricopa County, comprising parts of Phoenix, Glendale, Sun City, Surprise, and Goodyear.  Its market area is not only large, but economically and ethnically diverse as well, drawing both from extremely upscale, ... http://www.labelscar.com/arizona/arrowhead-towne-center Part of the reason Labelscar exists is because tons of enclosed shopping malls have been turned inside out to plazas or lifestyle centers in the last decade, but we've actually talked fairly little about the results of these transformations, in part because our focus has been on preserving bits from ... http://www.labelscar.com/california/huntington-beach-mall Utica, New York is a city along the historic Erie Canal corridor in upstate New York, between Albany and Syracuse. Utica's population exploded during the Industrial Revolution and the first half of the 20th century as a manufacturing center for Textiles (and later radios) and a shipping center for coal. ... http://www.labelscar.com/new-york/sangertown-square