Capital Street in Charleston (Junior: work, businesses, suburban)

[jimdc58]

Capital Street in Charleston, lined with trees as it is, and with a nice bookstore and some independent restaurants seems like a very nice area. However, I have read that the mall has decimated it. On my recent visit there were a few empty buildings, but it still seemed to be doing okay. Is it headed down the drain?

[Big_Al]

still doing OK, don't worry.

[atlantagreg30127]

Originally Posted by jimdc58

Capital Street in Charleston, lined with trees as it is, and with a nice bookstore and some independent restaurants seems like a very nice area. However, I have read that the mall has decimated it. On my recent visit there were a few empty buildings, but it still seemed to be doing okay. Is it headed down the drain?

Jim,

The mall (Town Center Charleston) opened in 1983 back when I was a Junior in High School up there. Yes, at that time, it did pretty much destroy the street. That was over 20 years ago, and from what I hear, it has bounced back over the years, though many of the businesses are law offices and such, with a few restaurants, etc.

The guys who did the mall had a good idea in theory. Back then was the "mall heaven" era where malls were being built left and right. Downtowns all over the U.S. were being hurt by suburban malls. The theory then, was that if you built a mall in downtown Charleston, that people would be forced to do downtown to go to the mall. This way, downtown wouldn't dry up since you had to go downtown anyway, so you should go to the mall, then walk around downtown and do that, too. Well, it didn't work out that way.

They opened the mall. Then, many of the businesses on Capital Street (and a few on Quarrier) closed up, and moved INTO the mall. Others simply shut down. They built a parking garage for the mall. So, people drove downtown, BUT, then parked in the garage, went to the mall, did their thing, back to the garage, and poof - drove away. Downtown dried up. Eventually stuff started coming back, but from what I hear it took a good while and today still isn't as lively as it was back when I was a teen "pre-mall".

Charleston really isn't large enough to have supported a 180 store mall downtown with a parking garage. I think if they had wanted to have a mall in a city that size that people would visit as well as preserve the downtown area, they should have had an enclosed mini-mall with no more than 35-50 shops with an anchor store, and had a more traditional parking lot (non enclosed). That way people would park downtown, be downtown, and walk to other downtown destinations as well as into the smaller mall. Well anyway, that's the way *I* would have planned it. As it is now it's an oversized enclosed space with an enclosed parking space connected directly to it, so it is it's own little mini-city and people aren't swayed to leave it to wonder around the actual downtown area much.