Now I am aching to go to Santaland on the 5th floor of The Globe, pick up lunch with my Grandmother at The Charl-Mont restaurant and check out the books in the book department, which was conveniently located next to the candy counter!
Also, it makes me ponder just what the series of mysterious “ding, ding, ding”s you would hear from time to time on the sales floor.

I can picture the gold-colored backs with the big script “G” in Globe and the smaller print underneath “A Division of John Wanamaker”. Yet another classic store long gone.

Awesome memories! Thanks!

Basically the idea of the ’strip center / plaza’ has come full circle. People have embraced them again. There’s some plaza-type malls built back in the 1950s-early 1960s that were on the brink of being completely vacant by the late 1990s, and now thanks to new businesses opening up in them….along with new anchors razing and rebuilding old anchor spaces, they’re realizing a revival.

Also strip centers and so-called ‘lifestyle centers’ only look rather ‘fake’ with their storefront design due to new codes that cities have put down…..basically a mall can’t look like a ‘mall’ anymore….the exteriors have to have (sometimes) very specific design elements, or else the project is rejected by the city.

While I’m no fan of big box and strip retail developments, they do look more asthetically pleasing than the strip malls of old, which had a uniform design and looked rather ‘cheap’. I give them that much.

Mall design has been pretty uninspired from the beginning. By the mid-60s, major developers like DeBartolo were building very standardized malls. They might have a fountain and atrium in the middle, but basically, the rest of the mall was nothing special. The much loved Victor Gruen type malls were the exceptions, not the rule. The 1950s plazas that malls replaced were equally (if not more) uninspired, with a few exceptions.

As malls have died, it’s become evident what white elephants they are, in terms of redevelopment. It’s expensive to turn them into anything else and the mom & pops don’t do as well as they would in a place where someone can see them and park in front of them. Lifestyle centers are much more flexible in their construction and layout; a failing lifestyle center can more easily be changed into something else (e.g., an office park) and space can be reconfigured at less expense than with a mall. Demolishing a couple small buildings for a new big one is much easier than messing around with mall space. Plus, the management doesn’t have the expense of heating/cooling/maintaining interior common areas. The lifestyle center model can be used with upscale and very oridnary stores. The one near my old Atlanta neighborhood has very middle of the road anchors (Kroger, Target, B&N, Lowe’s) and a very run of the mill selection of stores. From a an investment standpoint, the lifestyle center makes more sense. At some point, the market will get saturated, but it may have more legs than the mall. There are still well-functioning 1950s shopping centers that have managed to successfully evolve over time, as long as they had decent demographics and location–that is essentially the lifestyle center prototype.