Are malls yesterday's news?

The Twin Cities are littered with malls. Off the top of my head I can think of Rosedale, Southdale, Ridgedale, Brookdale, Burnsville Center, Mall of America, Eden Prairie Center and a whole host of lesser malls including Knollwood, Northtown Mall and newer outdoor retail complexes like those in Maple Grove and Coon Rapids. Of course there are even worse attempts at shopping malls in the Twin Cities like the former Priordale in Prior Lake which has been redeveloped nicely as a strip mall and a still delapidated but somehow alive Shakopee Town Square. Hell, most every suburb probably has something billed as a mall somewhere in the city and chances are that it is hurting.

Even in Minnesota, the trend seems to be to take it outside. A forced sense of urbanism with outdoor sidewalks and barely navigable streets is what is currently cool. It's supposed to be the rebirth of the downtown but I know better. To me it's still a shopping center because we've been trained to think what downtowns are. They feature a lack of parking but these new "downtowns" have sprawling parking lots much like the malls of old. But these new lifestyle centers, as developers call them, work. It makes sense because they seem to have damn near every name in retail one could think of.

The one in Coon Rapids is particularly troubling to me. It spans multiple blocks and while I avoided entering its tangle of so-called streets, it was a madhouse of spending - even late on a Thursday afternoon. I'm not familiar with that area of the Twin Cities but I'm betting that its construction left more than a few vacant storefronts elsewhere in town.

And if you think this is just a metro problem you are dead wrong. Back in my old hometown, good ole' drug-ridden, illegal immigrant-filled Austin, MN, the mall which at one time I'm told was actually prosperous now contains two anchor stores and probably less than a dozen smaller stores. I remember at one time the freeway-facing signage advertised over 60 stores but I don't ever remember seeing it full. Even its "food court" - containing only two restaurants - sucks. It, too, fell victim to big box development and lifestyle centers but on a smaller scale. With a K-Mart built across the street in the 1990s and a Target built across the highway later that same decade, the nails were positioned, all somebony needed to do was pound them in to the coffin.

Then came a Super Walmart a couple years ago. Even from nearly 100 miles away I could hear the pounding of those nails. The coffin was closed and it took K-Mart with it this year. Last year they lost a Cash Wise Foods grocery store. A Rainbow Foods store, circa late 1990s So, much like Brookdale Center and other now-doomed malls, hundreds of thousands of square feet of retail space stand vacant. Grass slowly growing through the cracking pavement as a couple vehicles sit parked marked for sale by the owners.

So maybe the American love affair with malls is done. They had a nice fifty year run. And maybe it's finally been realized that we, as a country, are simply over-retailed. Redundant businesses are shuttered all the time - take note of Snyders Drug Stores - they are gone but CVS is building in every other city now. Maybe its all cyclical and these malls will again be bustling in ten years as someone thinks up a new use. Or maybe the owners, failing to look forward, will end up with millions of square feet of once viable retail space on the auction block as cities deal with massive, neglected eyesores on prominent highways for all travelers to see. What to do, what to do?

Join in a discussion of the recent foreclosure sale of Brookdale Center and read up on Brookdale's checkered past.

While you're at it, check out the photos of Minnesota at MinnPics.

A malling experience

As I was reading this recommended City pages article in which the writer spent a mind-numbing and sanity-testing week in Bloomington, Minnesota's Mall of America I began to ponder some serious questions.

My first question popped into my head as I read the writer's details of his sixth day in the mall where uber-punk retailer Hot Topic was mentioned. I have to wonder, because I have been known to peruse their offerings from time to time while simultaneously mocking everyone working and shopping there, at what age it becomes viewed as creepy to shop, er, walk into a Hot Topic store. Seriously, how old is too old to venture through the door, um entry of a Hot Topic store? I still have a punch card in my bill fold from there and am hellbent on finishing it off before I hit that magical cutoff age. I wonder this because earlier this week pharmacy tech guy's wife invited us to celebrate his 30th birthday later this month. Seriously, I am feeling old.

My second question paraded through the wasteland that is my mind as I wrote about my first question. Early on in the aforementioned Mall of America article, the writer met up with one of the mall's most ubiquitous shoppers who confessed to spending about $2,000 each week. She seemed shocked to know that the annual total crossed the $100,000 barrier. Apparently this trophy wife who had her sugar daddy wrapped around her pinky finger didn't major in mathematics. How, though, does someone who is an admitted shopping addict spend more in a week shopping than I earn in two weeks?

While the article was funny, it raised some important items to think about. For instance, what exactly are the Vietnamese women sculpting your fingernails and toenails laughing at? Call me paranoid but if they are laughing at how poorly cared for my nails are, I have every right to laugh at their silly little Michael Jackson-esque paper surgical-style masks.

Now for the real questions... what's the longest you have spent in a mall? What the most you spent in one signle mall trip? Have you ever been to the Mall of America? (Yes, I have been there but despite my proximity less than a dozen times.)