Via the Indy Star:
Lafayette Square Mall management hopes plans to spruce up the mall’s exterior and improve security will help bring back customers and businesses.
“We’re working to re-create the mall as a family-friendly shopping mall,” said Phil Thornton, mall manager, who noted that another of his challenges is to fill space caused by the closure of Macy’s, Sears and Steve & Barry’s stores.
“We’ve experienced tough times like everybody else. We really think it will bring in new tenants,” he said.
I actually went to Lafayette “Scare” Mall on Monday night and I have to say that it has went downhill fast. Back in the mid-late 1990’s it was renovated and pretty nice, but since then it has quickly went back to how it was before.
I don’t have the time to adequately go into all of the reasons that this may have happened, but in my opinion the blame cannot be placed solely on mall management even though they have clearly been grasping at straws to fill the vacant spaces. (An old jewelery store filled with cell-phone cases & “bling”? A kiosk full of Kung-fu movies being sold at $12 a pop? Really? Come on guys. And that’s only what I saw in walking less than half of the mall.)
The tenants would also have to take some blame (yes, even the big names like Macy’s) due to their merchandise selection (they clearly didn’t properly evaluate their customer base). Finding any clothes there for adults beyond athletic attire has been difficult at best for quite some time and I’ve had to head to the suburbs to have any luck.
And in my opinion the city has really dropped the ball in the entire Lafayette Square Corridor, which is probably the biggest issue at hand. There are numerous vacant spots. Some get filled for a time, but not with anything you’d consider an “anchor”. And when they do get big name stores to commit, they are given tax incentives to build new buildings. While I don’t have an issue with new stores coming in (we want that), it seems silly to continuously build new shopping strips which are nice for a while until the tenants clear out for new construction or go out of business (K-Mart, Phar-more, Media Play, Hobby Lobby, Cub Foods, Galyan’s, Value City, Office Depot, Toys R Us, Venture, Waccamaw, Sears, Macy’s, Michael’s, etc.).
I don’t claim to believe that there’s a quick, easy & inexpensive fix, but something has to be done if we don’t want the entire area to be ran down.
But I do honestly think that if the right people were willing and able to invest in the community, we could create something unique that fuels the area, including being a small business incubator. And we could build on that top of the already existing smorgasbord of ethnic cuisine options we have, which by nature is small business. Who’s in?
