Quote of the Day (Melissa Rauch, on Malls and ‘The Jersey Girl in Me’)

“The funny thing is, I have zero sense of direction. I’m terrible with maps. But drop me in a mall anywhere, and the Jersey girl in me is activated. I can find the food court, I can find an exit, I can find the Claire’s boutique, I can find the Wetzel’s Pretzels in no time.”—American comic actress Melissa Rauch quoted by Kathryn Shattuck, “That’s Melissa Rauch Crying One Seat Over,” The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2025

The image accompanying this post, of Melissa Rauch at the PaleyFest 2013 for The Big Bang Theory, was taken Mar. 13, 2013, by Dominic D.

Photo of the Day: Fountain, Shops at Riverside, Hackensack NJ

One of the most vivid memories of my youth in Bergen County, NJ, was the recently opened Paramus Park Mall. It wasn’t just the food court—an innovative feature of malls in the 1970s—but its fountain.

I knew I wasn’t the only one fascinated by it—shoppers not only thronged around the waterfall and accompanying vegetation, but pitched pennies into it.

That feature would soon be copied in enclosed malls across the U.S. But as many of these retail emporiums have transformed into open-air structures or even non-retail uses and maintenance became more expensive, they became less common. (Though it remains enclosed, even Paramus Park removed its waterfall a couple of decades ago, evoking considerable nostalgic mourning among area residents.)

One place where you can still see a fountain, albeit in modified form, is The Shops at Riverside, a few miles south of Paramus Park. While walking through the mall’s corridors yesterday, I heard the familiar sound of my youth, and snapped this picture.

As I discovered, what I heard didn’t come from a waterfall but more like a whirlpool. Water is pumped through an open cavity, which comes back to a lower basin before falling down a sloping surface.

(See Colum Marsh’s July 2018 tribute in Canada’s National Post on why mall fountains represent “a community oasis,” with “the tonic quality of a city park: welcoming and restorative.”)

Quote of the Day (Kate King, on the Transformation of a Landmark Mall)

"[M]all giant Simon Property Group is spearheading a $400 million spending spree to make Southdale Center in suburban Minneapolis much more than just shopping….The Southdale overhaul reflects big shifts in how Americans are going to the mall—once an iconic place to hang out for hours and buy everything from soap to suits.”—Kate King, “A $400 Million Bet Says This Is the Mall of the Future,” The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 9-10, 2024

In a former job that required me to research and monitor the shopping center industry, I used to groan whenever I read Wall Street Journal articles about malls. So myopic was this coverage that I often doubted whether the newspaper deserved its onetime self-proclaimed image as “the daily diary of the American dream.”

As the Journal was at the top of the journalism “food chain,” influencing what stories would get covered elsewhere, an unseemly delight appeared to take hold in many instances at other metro dailies about the “death of the mall” and “the retail apocalypse.” 

I also doubt that many reporters asked if the death of malls exceeded, for instance, the death of newspapers—let alone how these publications’ advertising departments would replace the pages formerly paid for by department stores that might have vacated malls.

Certainly, large, enclosed centers were undergoing a transition that could be jarring at times. But my beef with the Journal was that, more often than not, its diagnosis of malls’ problems was simplistic.

Somehow, it usually boiled down to one factor, constantly overshadowing anything else: malls were getting clobbered by the Internet.

Then, when COVID-19 came along, the refrain changed: Nobody will ever go to malls again! Everybody’s going to sit home and order everything on their computers or smartphones.

Few if any of these articles acknowledged other reasons why malls were undergoing a sea change, such as a far more competitive physical retail environment that often featured freestanding big-box stores like Wal-Mart; the middle class that had once sustained mall department store anchors now withering, especially after the 2007-09 global financial crisis; and a long-term shift in consumer spending from goods to services.

In this regard, I read Kate King’s article on Southdale Center this weekend with measured satisfaction. 

None of the trends I mentioned were cited to explain why the “new amenities” included in Southdale (luxury apartments, an extended-stay hotel, restaurant space, fitness centers) were expected to boost the performance of this historically important mall (generally regarded as the first enclosed, climate-controlled, department-store anchored center in the country).

(BTW, this “new amenities” “trend” is not that new; malls have been experimenting with them for a decade, maybe more.)

But at least this time, a Wall Street Journal reporter managed to get through an entire article about malls without using the words “Internet” or “online sales.” There was no consideration of how correct doomsayers were about the return of people to malls, but at least there did seem to be an implicit admission that this was happening.

At some point, Ms. King or another Journal writer might ask to what extent “omnichannel retailing” (i.e., engaging consumers in multiple physical and digital touchpoints) is changing the function of malls in the post-pandemic environment; how successful other malls have been in changing their properties to a more mixed-use environment with some combination of office, hotel, apartment, and other spaces to complement retail; and why, while some malls are indeed declining or even dying, others continue to flourish.

But thankfully, readers can now better sense that malls aren’t “dead” but are changing into a type of marketplace originally envisioned by Southdale’s influential architect, Victor Gruen: a communal gathering place much like those he knew from his youth in Europe.

This Day in Business History (James Rouse, Mall Pioneer and Urban Advocate, Dies)

Apr. 8, 1996—James W. Rouse, a developer who experimented with food uses, emerging tenants and community-based design to transform how Americans shopped and lived, died at age 81 of Lou Gehrig’s disease in Columbia, MD, a city he had helped bring into being.

Starting the company he would lead for four decades as a small mortgage banking concern in 1939, Rouse returned from WWII service to broaden his operations to include single-family dwellings, then apartment complexes and open-air (originally called “strip”) shopping centers, and finally, with Harundale Mall, enclosed, climate-controlled regional centers.

Part of that first postwar generation of mall developers, he differentiated himself from most because of his intense civic activism, particularly in evangelizing against suburban sprawl and for urban spaces born of a centralized operating vision.

Among other honors, Rouse made the cover of Time in 1981 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. How many others who influenced urban planning could make a similar claim?

Film fans might recognize Rouse for a piece of trivia: as the grandfather of actor Edward Norton. But his impact on modern life was significant. Particularly in a commercial real estate industry centered on the present, it is worthwhile to recall how his methods might help shopping centers deal with their current substantial challenges.

Lessons to be drawn from these methods are simple:

*Try something out first on a small scale, locally;

*Figure out why this experiment worked or didn’t;

*See how that experiment might be adapted to other unique settings; and

*The private sector can  produce projects for the public good.

Rouse thought long and hard not just about how to lure people to malls but also how to bring them together in small groups once they got there. A great example was Paramus Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.

It’s hard to convey to later generations who grew up with malls the impact of this project when it opened in 1974. Start with its food court, which allowed families weary from shopping to pause, recharge over a meal, and extend their stay, perhaps visiting more stores where they might spend more money.

That innovation was the product of trial and error at another Rouse mall, Plymouth Meeting Mall in Pennsylvania. According to an Edmund Mander article in the May 2004 issue of Shopping Centers Today, that attempt at open food areas failed because it was “deemed too small and insufficiently varied.”

Those mistakes were fixed in the New Jersey project. And locating the food upstairs meant that shoppers would have to notice a whole new set of stores on this second level.

Moreover, these shoppers also gazed raptly at what appeared on either side of the escalator—live trees and terraced gardens—and the sound of the piece de resistance, a waterfall that provided a natural acoustic backdrop to what was actually an artificial indoor setting.

The features of Paramus Park were widely incorporated in malls from coast to coast. Food courts particularly became a teen hangout, reaching a cultural apotheosis of sorts in the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont Hall, whose characters worked and congregated there, in effect treating it as an adult-free zone.

As with Paramus Park, Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston resulted from improvisation. When it opened in August 1976, only half its tenants had been signed and an even smaller number—one-quarter—of its stalls were occupied.

What could have been a ruinous first impression for shoppers was obscured by numerous carts featuring unusual merchandise. The merchants behind these carts might have been reluctant to sign long-term leases but were more willing to try short-term rental agreements.

These pushcarts—incubators of the small businesses Rouse desired in his project—formed the foundation of temporary tenant (or, as they were later called, specialty leasing) programs at malls.

The distinction of Faneuil Hall didn’t stop there. It is regarded as the first of the “festival marketplaces” that would soon be built around the country—European-style retail emporiums built in urban areas (often near waterways) and catering to tourists. Rouse would import the concept to Baltimore (Harborplace), New York City (South Street Seaport), Norfolk (Waterside), and Miami (Bayside Marketplace).

Like Victor Gruen, the architect of Southdale, America’s first enclosed, climate-controlled mall, Rouse quickly became concerned by what he saw as the problems emanating from the new commercial behemoths following in its wake, noting:

"Our cities grow by sheer chance--by accident….A farm is sold and begins raising houses instead of potatoes--then another farm. Forests are cut; valleys are filled; streams are buried in storm sewers....Thus, bits and pieces of a city are splattered across the landscape. By this irrational process, non-communities are born--formless places without order, beauty or reason, places with no visible respect for people or the land. Thousands of small, separate decisions made with little or no relationship to one another, nor to their composite impact, produce a major decision about the future of our cities and our civilization--a decision we have come to label 'suburban sprawl.' What nonsense this is! What reckless, irresponsible dissipation of nature's endowment and of man's hope for dignity, beauty, growth!”

Though blunt about this increasing reality, Rouse was also ultimately optimistic about what could be done to counteract it, as seen in the title of the October 1967 speech in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from which this quote is taken: “Cities That Work for Man–Victory Ahead.”

Just as the specialty leasing program at Faneuil Hall served as a kind of laboratory for new retail concepts, Columbia, MD became a petri dish for Rouse’s ideas on urban revitalization. Opened the summer before his San Juan address, it represented his attempt, as noted in Jimmy Stamp’s 2014 Smithsonian Magazine article on Rouse, to create “a culturally diverse, integrated city where kids walked to school and the office was just a quick bus ride away.”

By the early 1990s, many developers recognized that malls were becoming increasingly homogeneous. Much of that had to do with how quickly the industry adopted Rouse’s innovations.

But Rouse was so restlessly intelligent—so able to improvise a solution to a problem—that I suspect that, had he continued to stay active in retail real estate instead of stepping down as CEO of The Rouse Company in 1984, he would have come up with more ideas that would have broken the increasingly cookie-cutter mold into which malls had settled.

Since the 1950s, The Rouse Company had been publicly traded, and for that reason its founder often told employees, “We're for sale every day."

But two years after his death, when the company formed a real estate investment trust (REIT), it opened itself up to the competitive pressures that hastened consolidation of ownership among the nation’s regional and superregional malls around the millennium. It ended up being sold in 2004 to Chicago-based General Growth Properties (which itself would be acquired by Brookfield Property Partners 14 years later).

No matter how malls emerge from the crisis hastened by the current pandemic and recession, they will undoubtedly move away from the commodity-centric markets of the postwar development boom to James Rouse’s vision of thriving civic anchors filled with enticing food fare, entertaining, experiential spaces and community institutions such as libraries, post offices, fountains, and churches. They will embody his simple, consistent message: avoid sterility and promote vitality.

Commentary: Curbside Pickup—A Light on the Retail Landscape

After so much negative news about the impact of COVID-19 on stores, the front page of this past Sunday’s New York Times was a welcome sight with its examination of the rise of curbside pickup.

Granted, it took seven months after stores began to implement this measure in response to fears of the pandemic before the Gray Lady gave this topic the treatment it deserved, and there wasn’t anything to know about the phenomenon now that couldn’t be learned then. But better late than never.

None of the contradicts my point two weeks ago that the loss of many more physical stores continues to be a live possibility with potential for grave damage, both to the retail real estate industry and to their communities nationwide.

But, because of its visibility, the Times article will shine a spotlight on a subject that other reporters on smaller papers will want to examine for the implications for business in their cities and towns.

In one sense, Ann-Marie Alcantara’s July Wall Street Journal piece deserves credit for getting there first. But it was oddly silent on one crucial aspect that Sapna Maheshwari and Michael Corkery highlighted in the Times: how curbside pickup mitigates the dilemma of “the last mile,” the expensive final step in delivering merchandise to the customer.

As I read these two articles, several questions that came to mind that I hope will be addressed soon by general-interest reporters rather than those who write for more narrow retail-focused publications:

* What merchandise is best suited to take advantage of additional consumer impulse buying at the point of pickup?

*How will parking spaces be allocated in the future to allow for easier customer pickup of goods?

*If more space is allotted on the sidewalk for pickup, will this materially affect store interior space?

*If less space is devoted to retail interiors, what will malls do with their vacant square footage, and how will this affect tenant mix?

*To what extent will leases be modified to account for merchandise bought online but picked up at physical locations?

Unlike, say, drive-in theaters, which have enjoyed a minor revival since this spring, curbside pickup will likely remain an enduring feature of the retail landscape even once COVID-19 fades as a threat. It is a natural development of technological changes that have come into their own after considerable tinkering over the last 20 years, as companies evolved from multi-channel retail (enabling customers to purchase wherever they shop, but with the physical and digital elements functioning as separate “silos”) to omni-channel retail (seamless integration into a “phygital” experience for the consumer).

I wish that the Times and Journal reporters had canvassed more industry practitioners on ways to upgrade the customer experience with curbside pickup. In this regard, Brian Donnelly, marketing director at LivePerson, offered some suggestions, in a blog post for “Retail Customer Experience,” on how retailer can avoid leaving customers “confused in their parking lots, struggling to engage associates to fulfill their orders” (for example, providing “an automated way to initiate the fulfillment that doesn't rely on the consistent availability of a store associate”).

Though retailers are understandably focused right now on merely surviving a projected “second wave” of COVID-19 as the weather turns colder, make no mistake: they are already looking carefully at their initial experiments with curbside pickup as a fulfillment option. They will strive to build on their successes and minimize their weaknesses with a measure largely adopted out of grim necessity but now constituting a narrow but shining path into an unknown future.

Photo of the Day: Providence Place Mall, Providence, RI

A little over a month ago, I visited Providence Place Mall, an urban mall in the capital of Rhode Island. It is quite the destination, for visitors as much as for locals. The night after my visit to the mall, some of the performers on the “Last Comic Standing” tour stop at the nearby “Vets” Auditorium mentioned their brief walk around this retail property.

Quote of the Day (Jonathan V. Last, on Malls)

“Some of you cosmopolitans are probably horrified, but the mall is a New Jersey child's birthright, like horses for kids in Wyoming and cornfields in Iowa.”—Jonathan V. Last, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” The Weekly Standard, April 27, 2009