Dead malls

[dmaze]

Why are there so many dead malls in the Boston area? Maybe not so many, but there's the Assembly Square mall in Somerville, and the Mystic Mall in Chelsea. (I can think of 4 living malls north of Boston and at or inside 128, so this is a third of the local mallage.) Both of them would seem to have fairly good road access (to 93 and 1, respectively), traditional mall layout, and so forth. I guess I'm not really clear what makes a mall "work", but it seems like if a mall exists and has stores and people go there, then it would be sort of self-perpetuating...

(And what do mall-addicted folk in nearby Boston do for their mallage? The Galleria seems kind of generally inconvenient, and everything else is comparatively far out. I guess the scale here is just different from California; we used to drive 10 miles to the "good" mall all the time, so expecting people in Somerville to drive to Burlington isn't actually that unreasonable.)

Comments

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

I think that mall just die unless a lot of effort is put into them. Like near where I lived in pittsburgh I've seen the life cycle of the three malls there, they start to die and then someone does something to make them come back and then they start to die again. I saw one of them get built and see it wax an wane.

I think the arsenel mall gets some traffic. I've also been the square one mall, which isn't THAT far out. Copley/pru center is good for the upscale mall experience.

I think part of it is that malls are a suburban thing, and we aren't in the suburbs.

I think that the competion between strip malls, malls and mega stores is also a cyclic thing. It's seems to be the year of the strip mall.

[dmaze]

Hmm, that's true, I forgot about the Arsenal Mall (no impressions of it at all) and the Prudential complex. And I guess things like Downtown Crossing have the mall nature, to some extent.

The strip mall thing is unfortunate, though. The Target complex in Everett crosses big-box stores with a strip mall. Having to drive across the parking lot to go from one store to another is...blech. It does seem to be plenty popular, though.

[76trombones.livejournal.com]

Sprawl?