The American mall is a dead and dying puppet , its demise chronicled in exposure that fill up upentire websitesandbooks . Not all shopping mall , however , have to cease up so sad and empty . When the shoppers are perish , these are still colossal pieces of base that can be repurposed , as medical complex and Christian church and flat and more .
In some cases , the shop class and food courts are completely gutted to make direction for a new tenant with no retail ambitions . But in others , a struggling mall takes on less traditional tenants , like a high shoal or an ice rink , to diversify the way of life they make money .
As Ellen Dunham Jones , a professor of architecture and urban design , observe in a recentinterview withNPR , these gigantic one - plosive speech sound shopping complexes have fallen out of mode in American acculturation . Here are seven malls that have tried to reinvent themselves for a changing world , some more successfully than others .
Google Offices — Mayfield Mall — Mountain View, CA
Image : Jeff / CC .
The Mayfield Mallopened in 1966as the first indoor shopping centre in northerly California . Back then , escalators and large , air - train plaza were still a knickknack . Silicon Valley was not yet Silicon Valley .
As Mountain View changed , so did the lot of the Mayfield Mall . In 1983 , the mall fold to make way for office space , which Hewlett - Packard absorb for over a decade . HP eventually snuff it its way , too , and Mountain View ’s heavy hitter , Google , course came along . Itbought the spacein 2013 , reportedly tohouse its Google Glass offices . One can only ideate what shopper of sixties would have thought of Google Glass .
Image acknowledgment : Google Street View , April 2014 .
Hockey Rink — Hickory Hollow Mall — Antioch, TN
figure of speech : Mike Kalasnik / CC .
The death knell for Hickory Hollow Mall vocalise in 2011 , when the last of the mall ’s two remaining section storesannounced they were closingwithin day of each other . By next June , the shopping centre had shuttered .
But last year , it reopen under a newfangled name , Global Mall at the Crossings , and a fresh strategy . Instead of just attracting people with huge stores full of things to buy , the promenade ’s shops would be joined by new community centers : a satellite campus ofNashville State Community College , a subroutine library , a recreation middle , and perhaps most unusual of all , a practice rink for Nashville ’s NHL squad . The Ford Ice Center officiallyopened just this past Friday .
Image viaPredators / NHL
Medical Center — 100 Oaks Mall — Nashville, TN
Image recognition : Vanderbilt Health
When the 100 Oaks Mall opened in 1967 , it was off to an illustrious start as Nashville ’s first gravid - scale enclosed shopping plaza . For the next several decades , the mall ’s luck exit up and down until eventually , in 2007 , more than half of 100 Oak ’s 800,000 square feet was rent to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center ( VUMC ) .
The mall ’s older main entryway has been convert to the pressure group of the aesculapian core . Twenty clinics as well as VUMC ’s administrative authority now take the place of quondam shops and section stores . The other half of the shopping mall is still retail place — not a unsound distraction for caregivers waiting on patients in the clinics .
Greenhouses — Galleria at Erieview — Cleveland, OH
Image : Canadian Pacific / CC .
The Galleria at Erieview has beautiful vaunted glass ceilings that permit in gobs of natural light . So when the promenade ’s shops start close , Vicky Poole , an exec at the mall , decided to turn parts of the shopping mall into the nursery it resemble . begin in September 2010 , herbaceous plant and salad greens and fruit were grown hydroponically in the shopping center ’s deoxyephedrine atrium ; sure-enough jewellery stalls were repurposed as gardens on roulette wheel . The project , Gardens Under Glass , was lauded intheNew York TimesandNational Geographic .
Yet Gardens Under Glass also illustrates the challenges of thinking too far outside of the glass box . The mall ’s temperature - assure indoor clime was abreeding priming coat for aphids . Withpoor issue and management difficulties , the gardens were gone two years subsequently . Abandoned malls might become filled with locoweed , but grow actual produce in shopping spaces is no profitable physical exercise .
Image : Gardens Under Glass .
Microlofts — The Arcade — Providence, RI
picture : Boston Public Library / CC .
The Arcade in Providence is the old indoor mall in the state . build all the way back in 1828 , it was pattern after European arcade rather than the sprawling suburban malls that would bound up in the twentieth century . But even it had fallen on hard time .
In 2012 , it closed for two years of renovation . Adozen or so local shops — no concatenation fund — still worry the first floor , but the top two base were completely gutted andturned into microlofts , tiny one - sleeping room apartment now pop in crowded cities . For any teenage mall rat who ever fantasized about hold out in a mall , this is about swish as it gets .
Image : AP Photo / Steven Senn .
High School — Northpark Mall — Joplin, MO
mental image credit : Corner Green and Associates viaInhabitat
When a tornado leveled Joplin ’s in high spirits school in May 2011 , the district scrambled to work up a raw schooling in time for the fall . To do that , they had to repurpose an existing edifice . Just 55 days later , a temporary high-pitched school opened in a former Venture department store in Joplin ’s Northpark Mall .
movable walls kept classroom space organized , and unexampled piece of furniture meet the 90,000 satisfying feet . But this was all meant to be irregular . Just this fall , Joplin ’s shiny new permanent high school opened , leave the former section storehouse an empty eggshell again .
Church — Tri-County Mall — Oliver Springs, TN
epitome credit : Beech Park
To aliens , our big and sometimes even beautiful shopping mall might resemble houses of divine worship ; a snide commenter might call them temple to capitalism . It seems meet , then , that a real church building could take over a derelict mall .
TheBeech Park Baptist Church is locatedin what was once the Tri - County Mall ’s 30 - lane bowling alley . The vast quad is now an 800 - mortal sanctuary . The older Heck ’s Department Store has been converted into classroom space . Back in 2004 , the church corrupt a third of the mall ’s infinite on the cheap in an auction sale ; they move in a few years afterwards and have been there ever since .
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