Beginning of the End of an era?

[W. Gray]

The first mall serving the automobile era customer was the Country Club Plaza built in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1923. It is still going strong.

The wife and I went shopping at a new mall in Aurora, Colorado, today called The Southlands. Aurora is right next door to where we live in Centennial.

This newly opened shopping place is not a modern mall in the ordinary sense. Just like the Country Club Plaza, stores are not enclosed with a roof covering the entire facility. All stores are situated on city blocks with each street, except one, being an extension of an existing city street. There are street signs and traffic lights on each corner. Stores are side-by-side with common walls and each faces street traffic. Angled parking without meters is along each street in front of each store. There are also strategically placed parking lots. The whole mall area resembles an old time downtown shopping district. Outlying big box buildings, such as Wal-Mart, do have their own parking lots.

The mall area occupies several square blocks and is in the extreme southeast area of Aurora, which is larger than Wichita in land area but 50,000 or so smaller in population. Aurora, like Howard, has never had a Main Street with that name. It is comical to me to see the several block long main drag through this new mall called Main Street.

When it was built, the developers indicated this was the future wave of mall building. In Centennial, a covered mall with Sears and Macy's as the anchors has been torn down and a new "downtown street mall" is taking its place.

[Diane Amberg]

   Yep, what's old is new.

[Wilma]

That's the way I remember shopping in Wichita in the 40s and 50s.  Still can in some towns in Kansas.

[kdfrawg]

I just listened to a debate about what to do about shopping in Kansas City. The panel generally agreed that the life of a modern retail complex is usually 7-12 years, then it starts to degrade. Nobody asked why that hadn't happened to the Plaza, or for that matter, downtown Lawrence. The answer is, because the modern idea of the mall pretty much sucks wind.

[W. Gray]

Cinderella City Mall in our neighboring Englewood, Colorado, was billed in 1983 as the largest shopping mall between Denver and Chicago. It actually had four giant malls connected with walkways. It took a good while to traverse the whole area. A basement area had "backstreets" that had customers falling all over themselves to get into some of the boutique shops. Less than ten years later, it was gone. The area was razed and the city of Englewood now has its municipal offices on the site.

Aurora, Colorado, has a Buckingham Square Mall that was a major shopping center up until about ten years ago. It now sits empty with the city threatening to condemn the entire site. Another major mall in Aurora has undergone two $100 million dollar renovations in the past 20 years but I do not think it will last much longer.

The multi-million dollar Blue Ridge Mall in Kansas City was built in 1959 as an upscale outdoor mall. A few years later, management decided that in order to compete it had to have a common roof and then heat. More millions were pumped into it. Today, there is no mall and that entire area is now occupied by Wal-Mart and a few other big box stores.