http://www.malways.com/jsp/02_store_1f.jsp

One odd thing about the first few years of Gwinnett Place: Instead of a single large food court, there were 4 smaller courts throughout the mall with 2 or 3 tenants each. When the new wing with the Mervyn’s and food court opened, the smaller courts were eliminated, though the part with the McDonald’s stuck around.

Whoa, that’s pretty strong to compare it to Regency in Augusta. The only Atlanta-area malls I theoretically see are on the way to being completely dead(a la Regency) are Shannon(formerly Shannon Southpark), and probably Northlake. I’m not sure how the latter still survives, considering all the competition that mall gets from Stonecrest, North DeKalb, and other area malls.

If anything, this mall kinda reminds me of Golf Mill(in Chicago’s north suburbs) in a way. Has probably one of the more diverse clienteles than your average mall attracts, and though I’m not the most familiar with the surrounding area around Gwinnett Place, it seems like it has a slightly greater amount of nearby retail, than Golf Mill does. Diverse clientele doesn’t necessary mean a mall necessarily is on its way to being dead, but can mean it’ll attract non-traditional stores that many malls having a greater percentage of white shoppers don’t have, such as the M Marketplace.

Loved seeing the old-school Chick-Fil-A logo, and wished the Sears experimented with their 1940s logo more, especially on their exterior. I still stand by my statement that I made on Labelscar 1-2 years ago wishing that they had expanded the use of their old logo more, rather than only experimenting with using this logo at Gwinnett Place.

http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2009/05/03/asian.html

This was our primary mall when I was growing up until North Point opened. The only closer malls were Roswell Mall and Lakeshore Mall and they both sucked hard. Even back in the 80’s. It was naturally-lit in the daytime and at night is fairly dark by today’s standards. It has kind of a twilight look to it at night. Back in the day, it had three bookstores (B Dalton, Walden, and Coles), two toy stores (Kay Bee and Circus World), an awesome food court, and a decent arcade originally called Atari Adventure and then renamed to Space Port. There is now a toilet standing in near-as-I-can-tell the exact spot I used to play Double Dragon thanks to the Parisian remodel. It’s far from dead but has certainly already seen its best days.

There was an awesome fountain in the center court that was later replaced with the eye-shaped one. The fountain was squared off and a stairwell nearby had a sort of small river of water running down alongside it into the fountain. If you look at 3rd column, 6th picture down, that river started where the escalator is now but the stair well was oriented differently than the current escalator.

This mall is located just north of a rather large Asian community that stretches south for almost all the way into downtown Atlanta. I think the M will do just fine here. And speaking of M, I thought Macys kept the wrong store. I liked the old 3 story pink Macys more than the mirrored Richs spot.

More interesting to me than the Sears signage is the remnants of a proper Kay Bee (NOT KB) toy store off to the left in that pic. It left years ago. And something I mentioned in the Sears-specific post, Gwinnett Place has still done nothing to the exterior Sears signage. It’s still the 90’s all-caps version on the outside.

The mall is far from dead but it has its fair share of odd tenants like a rent-to-own store next to the Penny’s (as of last time I visited about a year ago). It also doesn’t help that the immediate mall area is scattered with ghost of shopping past like a Service Merchandise-turned-bar and a former-Borders-turned-some-Asian-shop. The thriving bits of retail are mostly across on the other side of Pleasant Hill on Venture Drive. And the county has done everything humanly possible to discourage you from actually crossing Pleasant Hill.

I drive by Gwinnett Place often but rarely go there anymore. I spend more time at Discover Mills and Mall of Georgia.

Someone mentioned Atlanta’s lack of dead malls and my first thought was of Roswell Mall. Roswell Mall was already a dead mall in the 80’s. It was anchored by K-Mart and Uptons (what a winning combo…). There was a Richway-turned-Target attached that didn’t connect to the main mall. It had an entire wing closed for at least a decade after the theater moved downstairs. It has since been converted to something I’m not even sure I can describe. It still has a few retails shops, had a satellite college campus last I checked, and has an arcade/go-kart/mini-golf/bar/comedy club/movie theater inside. Maybe Atlanta was just ahead of the game when it comes to dead malls.