When malls die — as so many have these days — they too often end up as sad , empty lots beseem only ruin porn and zombie movies . But a smattering of plaza have been repurposed for unusual inhabitants , from Christian car dealership to , yes , even zombies .
When welast wrote about these reborn malls , many of you wrote to charge out other malls with similarly surprising fortune . ( And many of you deal your memories of water under the bridge malls — son , it was a fun nostalgia head trip . ) Here are a few more reborn shopping mall , as observe by your fellow Kinja commentators .
http://gizmodo.com/7-dead-shopping-malls-that-found-surprising-second-live-1634073681/all
Top double : Rackspace Headquarters in the erstwhile Windsor Park Mall . Classic EngineeringviaInhabit
Rackspace Headquarters — Windsor Park Mall — San Antonio, TX
Image : screenshot fromRackspace telecasting
A span weeks before Christmas 1994 — in the middle of what should have been holiday shopping bustle — a man was shot and killed in Windsor Park Mall . It was only the tardy in a chain of wild incidents in and around the mall as the area around it vanish into declination . The mall limped along for another decade , shut for good in 2005 .
Around that same metre , the fortunes of the web hosting Rackspace were all the emanation . Rackspace demand space , a lot more space , and where else would you find it but an empty mall ? With theextra incitementof taxation respite and grants from the state of Texas and the neighboring suburban area of Windcrest , who were eager to see the area revitalise , Rackspace moved in .
The renovated office infinite still looks like a mall at times ( see : escalators ) , but it ’s got the soupcon of whimsy you ’d require on a giant technical school campus ( see : slides ) . Rackspace has proudly renamed it the Castle and open up it up tovideo toursandGoogle Street View exploration .
Image : Google Street View
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4b0UlAZcH4
Thanks tojuanoymous !
Austin Community College — Highland Mall — Austin, TX
Image : Highland Mall
Highland Mall open up in 1971 as Austin ’s first indoor shopping centre , but newer , swanky shopping complex begin luring away shopper in the coming decade . In 2010 , Austin Community College buy the property on the quondam Dillard ’s . It would end up buying the entire mall .
ACC has since wrench a big chunk of the mall into a brand name unexampled campus . The mall ’s concrete wall got a nip and tuck , but more significantly , classrooms , computing machine labs , and pupil lounges make full up the old shopping space . This August , the classrooms formally opened for scholar .
And Rackspace , which already found its headquarters out of an abandon shopping mall in San Antonio , has decided to keep going with its mall - to - office strategy : it will nowleasing out that old Dillard’sin Highland Mall for an Austin function .
Thanks tojuanonymous !
Image credit : Austin Community College
Zombie Attacks — Friars Walk — Reading, UK
figure : screenshot fromZombie Mall(below )
Like most abandon malls , the Friars Walk shopping substance feels like the absolutely creepy setting of a zombi movie . Then you notice the lineage … and the bullet holes …
Zombies — or at least fake zombies — really have taken over Friars Walk . Since the shopping center in Reading ’s thoroughfareclosed in 2004 , the abandon complex has hosted alive - activity snake god survival games . One purveyor boastsof the building complex ’s “ minute Robert William Service corridors , a creepy children ’s play area , slow - closedown fire shutter , loading docks , and a pitch - dark labyrinthine cellar . ” You get an airsoft gun , and then it ’s you against the undead .
meter reading is in England and not the U.S. , like all the other malls on this list , but its transformation into host zombie survival games was too good to pass up . This is our collective phantasy — or nightmare , really — about the fall of modern society almost too perfectly embodied .
Thanks toJimmy Boots !
YMCA — Galleria at Erieview — Cleveland, OH
Image : Canadian Pacific / CC
When we wrote about the failed glasshouse experiment at Cleveland ’s Galleria at Erieview , one astute Kinjaer notedthe dying mall had actually find a more permanent renter : the YMCA of Greater Cleveland .
Well , hopefully , anyway . Since the architectural plan was first denote two years ago , the YMCA hasyet to scrounge up the last $ 1.1 millionfor the $ 5.6 million project of building a physical fitness centre of attention in the old promenade . If and when it ’s complete , the 40,000 square - foot center will let in three exercise rooms , a spinning studio , and a three - lane lap syndicate . you could see the mall ’s characteristic spyglass ceiling in the renders below .
The YMCA ’s more than 3000 member would be a welcome increase to the promenade ’s remaining stores . Here ’s to hoping this will be more successful than its last revitalization project .
Thanks toRO Thornhill !
image : MoodyNolan
Drivers Village — Penn-Can Mall — Cicero, NY
image : Penncanmall.com / Syracuse Nostalgia
“ Penn Can Mall was the coolest topographic point to hang out in the 80s,”writes Brian Hamiltonof Syracuse Nostalgia , echoing the adolescence of nearly every suburban American teen of that epoch . But , as the intimate narrative work , Penn - Can Mall fall into decline and closed in the XC .
In 2000,Roger Burdick come alongand snapped up the 80 - acre give up promenade . His car dealerships impress in , selling cars Audis to Volkswagens and nearly everything in between . Today , Drivers Village is home to 21 auto franchises , the undivided largest auto complex in the northeast . The desert center location apart , the most strange part of Drivers Village may beeight part - meter chaplainsthe very - religious Burdick has hired to spread the faith from his car synagogue .
As far as transformations go , develop from a center that sells clothes , toys , and firm food to a mall that sells cars is believably one of the less drastic ones . There is an odd verse to a dead mall being turned into a sprawl machine coordination compound — a mall whose very cosmos was made possible by cars , desert and now converted as a purveyor of cars .
ThanksScootin159 !
icon : RSA Architects
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