Reviving dead malls

The New Urbanism looks to defunct malls as possible sites for infill development Most cities have at least one “ghost” mall, a once-thriving enclosed mall turned boarded-up eyesore. It may have have been brought down by a bigger and flashier mall nearby. In a business where novelty is paramount, the mall may simply have languished because it was out of date. Exactly how many malls are dead or dying is difficult to assess (see sidebar), but for new urbanists they represent an exciting new opportunity to revitalize the postwar suburban landscape. The transformation of an existing mall site is attractive for several reasons. “Many of these properties are extremely well located, commercially speaking, in the middle of what are now very dense areas,” says Mark Falcone of Continuum Partners in Denver, who is a point man on the mall redevelopment issue for the Congress for the New Urbanism. “There generally tends to be a willingness to accept substantial density on those sites, so densification is not as controversial as it would be on a greenfield site. And generally the mall is an important asset in the community, so you have a lot of support from the city government to help turn this thing around, which right now is what is required,” Falcone says. Furthermore, essential infrastructure is already in place and the buildings are typically of light-weight construction, making them easy to restructure or demolish. Mall sites may also help facilitate more infill development. “One of the biggest problems is access to large, easily assembled sites in the interior of cities,” Falcone says. The fact that malls are often under single ownership also makes the sites easier to acquire and redevelop. Retrofitting Eastgate New urbanist planners have approached mall revitalization in two ways, either by changing and enhancing existing buildings while incorporating them into a neighborhood plan, or by demolishing the entire mall and starting from scratch. Eastgate Mall, located in Brainard, eight miles from downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee, is the most prominent example of the former approach. Built in the 1950s, the 900,000 square-foot mall fell on hard times in the 1990s when a more modern mall went up six miles away. Windward Properties LLC, the mall’s owner, had planned to turn it into an office park, but after listening to residents’ thoughts on what the mall should look like, the company decided to transform the mall into the town center that Brainard lacked. A charrette led by Dover Kohl & Partners of Miami resulted in a multi-phased plan under which the mall first got a facelift that divided the blank facade into two tiers. Offices now occupy half of the mall, and new skylights and windows on both floors have created a bright and worker-friendly environment, says Windward’s Rick Wood. The first of several town squares has been created in the parking lot adjacent to the mall entrance, and the square currently has two buildings lining it, with two more about to begin construction. The two-story buildings will house offices, retail and two restaurants. The city gave Windward $250,000 to develop the square, which has now been deeded back to the city as a civic park, Wood says. Future phases of the plan call for the mall to be gradually demolished and replaced by dense multi-story buildings on a street grid that connects to the surrounding neighborhoods. Eastgate’s occupancy rate hovered around 20 percent in 1997, Wood says, but by December 1999 85 to 90 percent of the space has been leased. AT&T, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and several other companies have taken office space in Eastgate, bringing 3,000-4,000 workers with them. “The presence of these workers makes it much easier for us to attract restaurants and retail tenants,” Wood says. A vision for Syracuse Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. recently conceived a similar plan for a mall retrofit at a charrette held to create a regional plan for Syracuse, New York, and the surrounding Onondaga County. During the public presentation of the plan, Andres Duany noted that Syracuse had six or seven dying malls and suggested that they were all well located to become town centers. The model plan for one of these, Lafayette Mall, envisioned that some of the buildings could initially be occupied by a youth center or information processing businesses. Sections of the mall could then be gradually demolished to make way for a town square and a network of streets. An underground drainage could could be uncovered and changed into a river walk. Linking the town center to a nearby medical complex and building apartments for senior citizens would further enhance the site. Not only enclosed malls are suitable for this kind of transformation. Mashpee Commons in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, proves that the rear of a strip mall can become the starting point of a mixed-use development. Starting over The simpler option for redevelopment is, of course, to demolish the mall. This was the approach taken at The Crossings, a transit-oriented development in Mountain View, California, designed by Peter Calthorpe. In this case, the new neighborhood includes hardly any retail activity, but it successfully recasts an auto-oriented site as a pedestrian-friendly community. A true integration of residential and commercial uses can be found in Mizner Park in Boca Raton, Florida, the most prominent and successful redevelopment of a suburban mall. In Winter Park, another Florida community, the owners of a troubled 1964 mall slated it for demolition and hired a suburban developer, the Don Casto Organization, to build a new open-air shopping center. Don Martin, the director of planning for Winter Park, characterizes the developer’s proposal as “another asteroid in a field of parking” and turned it down. Instead, he assembled a team consisting of staff planners, Dover Kohl & Partners, Glatting Jackson, and retail planner Robert Gibbs, who created a plan for a mixed-use center for the mature neighborhoods that surround the site. With the support of his commission, Martin persuaded Don Casto to adopt this ambitious plan. Except for one department store, the mall was torn down, and the first phase of commercial development is now well under way. The active tenants include a Borders bookstore, two restaurants, an Albertson’s supermarket, and a multiplex theater. Martin acknowledges that the architecture still has a “fake Disney quality” but expects that aging and patina “will make it more of a real place.” The supermarket’s orientation away from the street is another drawback, but Albertson’s refused to change its formula for design and number of parking spaces. “It came to the point that we either had to say no to major tenants or we had to make accommodations,” Martin says. The creation of a street grid has been more successful, Martin says. The main east-west street running through the site has a terminating vista in the marquee of the Regal movie theater, and the buildings lining the street effectively block a full view of the huge, 22-screen structure. An opportunity to get residential units into the project earlier than expected came recently when the remaining department store did not renew its lease. This building will now be converted to apartments on two floors above retail. New urbanist mall conversions still take a backseat to conventional facelifts and upgrades, but Falcone says ideas and plans are beginning to proliferate. “If this works, and you start to see more mall redevelopments, then I think you’ll see it extrapolated to under-performing industrial properties, for example. Over time we may get more creative about finding different mechanisms to put these kinds of properties into higher and better use.”