Farrell’s was a great restaurant and they have been making a comeback on the west coast.

Paramus Park had an excellent food court and their food court led to Garden State Plaza’s lower level food court getting built. I still miss the waterfall to this day!

I haven’t been to PP in a while and I assume the expansion project has been put on hold?

Palisades will definitely need a cosmetic renovation. The factory look is tiring and the carpeting on the 1st floor conflicts with the rest of the decor. All the Paramus malls had cosmetic renovations or expansions and as a result, it has contributed to attracting more stores and getting more people to the mall.

I agree, Palisades could be struggling after Xanadu opens and they would be wise to prepare for it.

Your Palisades vs Paramus arguement is backwards. The better stores are beginning to leave Palisades. I maybe comparing apples to oranges here, I noticed as soon as Burlington coat factory opened places like Legal Sea Foods & other stores at that price point closed. Also As a result the demographics in the mall changed from upper middle income people who drove from Westchester & points east of the Tappan Zee Bridge to a more local middle class population.

Those upper income shoppers transissioned to Stamford, White Plains or Garden state plaza/ Paramus Park/ Shops @ Riverside.

Once Xanadu openeds the Palisades will need to transform it self because they wont survive in that nitch that worked a decade ago.

I can guarantee If Restoration Hardware & Cheesecake Factory close, this mall would be dead quickly because there’s nothing that seperates it self from other local malls Beyond BJ’s & Home Depot.

It’s harder to find parking in GSP than Palisades on a Saturday, even though, Palisades is the bigger mall. You get sales tax on clothing in Palisades. NJ has no clothing sales tax.

I find it interesting that this mall seems to cater more towards the northern Bergen County population as opposed to the southern Bergen County population. As most North Jersey people know, Bergen County is perceived as having fairly clear cut socioeconomic lines along geography. Those towns south of Paramus, and in particular Route 4, are mostly middle and working class. Those north of it are mostly upper middle class and wealthy, including extremely affluent places like Alpine, Woodcliff Lake, and Upper Saddle River. This is more marked in the western than the eastern part of the county. Part of this seems to be that the western part of the county (Hackensack and west) hasn’t received as much immigration as the eastern half, where wealth is clustered along the Hudson River. For example, there’s a very pronounced difference between the middle and working class areas of Elmwood Park and Fairlawn along Route 4 and south, and the ritzier areas of Glen Rock and Ridgewood to the north. In the eastern half, middle-income areas (Bergenfield, Dumont, New Milford, River Edge) run north of Route 4, north of very wealthy areas like Englewood Cliffs and upper middle class places like Tenafly. So, it’s more complex than it’s perceived…but there is a very real difference between the southern areas, which are mostly working and middle class Italian, Polish, and German-Irish with a fairly strong Hispanic and Jewish component in southwest Bergen County (these are tied also more to Passaic and Essex counties) and heavily Asian, Russian, and Hispanic in southeastern Bergen County near the bridge, and the posh northern areas, which tend to become wealthier the further north you go. Part of this is an extension of the “Gold Coast”, and is tied more to Hudson County development trends. The northern part of Bergen County is one of North Jersey’s biggest uninterrupted affluent areas, and one of it’s biggest uninterrupted purely suburban, and overwhelmingly residential, areas. The southern and central portions are more commercial and industrial. On either side, the household income of towns rises with each one as you go further north (say, middle and working-class Elmwood Park, to middle-income Fairlawn, to upper middle-class Glen Rock, to upper middle-class and rich Ridgewood in the west, or working-class western Englewood, to middle-class Bergenfield, to more firmly middle-class Dumont, to upper middle-class Haworth and Harrington Park in the east.) So, it’s both a perceived and real difference. As this relates to Paramus Park Mall, I think that both Paramus Park Mall and Riverside Square cater more to the northern crowd…which is why I always found it bizarre that Riverside Square is located in Hackensack. They both also cater to the older crowd and seem less diverse, whereas Garden State Plaza is really New Jersey’s preeminent “teen mall”, seems to get a HUGE chunk of people from southern and central Bergen County, as well as Essex, Hudson, and Passaic counties, and so gets a very diverse and younger population.

Bergen County is bizarre in North Jersey in lacking any older cities of the same size as Elizabeth, Paterson, Newark, or Jersey City. It’s also almost entirely and very densely developed, and is more tied to the economy of New York City, together with Hudson County, than areas further west. This makes it an ideal environment to study nearly “pure suburbia” on a grand scale. So, I’m wondering how the financial industry downturn will affect places like Paramus Park Mall, which cater to a northern Bergen County crowd that HEAVILY works in New York City’s financial industry. These areas were heavily affected, for example, by deaths from 9/11. It’s alot of tiny towns reliant on affluent homeowners. Bergen County, while growing slowly, isn’t growing quickly, and its retail faces increasingly stiff competition from developments further west, south (Xanadu), and north (the Palisades Center in Rockland County.) So, will Paramus be in trouble?

I guess when you are in bankruptcy this is what happens.

The good news is there were only five empty stores in the entire mall wich is about 4%. However those empty spaces were smaller retail locations, making the square footage factor less of an issue.