Large Shopping Malls Still Thriving In Your Part Of The Country ??

No & yes. There remain ironclad flagship malls like Eaton Centre & Yorkdale, though many suburban malls have either shut &/or downsized for condo repurposing. There are other malls I know which have chopped their number of stores, only to invite high ticket retailers to invade.
That's malls though - there's no middle class malls anymore.

The higher end ones are doing fine. The mid-level ones are looking pretty sad. Not too many vacancies. But the junk retailers that sell cheap crafts, fake hair extensions and airbrushed t-shirts have moved into the storefronts that used to be actual stores.

We have about 5 or 6 "dead malls" which are totally fascinating. I like to look up dead malls online. And, old pictures of the malls from the 1960's and 1970's during their heyday. Back when the malls had postcards of the mall itself you could buy - like you were at a travel destination. Looking at some of those postcards from malls I used to go to as a kid is pretty neat. Or finding some really overdone 1970's pop art inspired mall.

We have one mall in my area which got a pretty horrible makeover in the 1990's. They just made it modernized - which I don't mind the very clinical modernist look, when it's done right. But in this case, the place had warm textured floors, cool orange, brown and yellow sculptures, and nice wooden rails. All replaced with stark white floor tiles, which are an acoustic nightmare - the entire place sounds like treble ringing in your ears. The sculptures are replaced with mirrored nonsense, there was a grand staircase in the center that was removed, and the wooden railings replaced with glass and chrome. And the sad part is, there are absolutely no photos of the mall before the 1990's renovation that I can find online.

This mall below is still in existence, and still looks exactly like the 1970's and 1980's pics below. Those dark brown walls around the fountains and seating were some type of manufactured sedimentary stone slabs. I can still remember from back as kid as to how the texture felt when the water from the fountain would make the retaining walls slightly wet on the outside. And those wooden railings had the smoothest texture, and I think they are all still there. It was a cool mall because it didn't have any symmetry to it. The catwalks just kind of meandered around. In some spots it was a 2 story mall, then in the center it was 3 stories. But in the 3 story part, the middle level kind of just showed up in between the 2 main levels. And it had a monorail you could get on in the center of the mall, which would take you outside and about 1/2 mile over the parking lot and drop you off at a 5 star hotel. Which the hotel was very classy. But the interior of that monorail was what sticks out in my mind. The seating was an off-white fiberglass, like a big Eames shell chair. There were vinyl cushions, one cushion you sat on and a back cushion. Orange and yellow - alternating with one having orange for the seat and yellow for the back, then the next was yellow for the seat and orange for the back. As far as I know, the monorail track is removed and the monorails are inside the mall structure still. The place is up for sale, and if I could procure a row or two of the seating - that would be amazing. I'd remodel my basement around it!





















I think as a kid I wanted this job! That's the closest to being a Death Star Commander I could imagine.