Old City Center renderings (Pittsburgh: neighborhoods, tenants, shops)

[stevo6]

Originally Posted by nuwaver88

I don't know. Ground breaking was "imminent" on a few occasions. It had been planned for a few years and had a lot of momentum and had passed the conceptual stage by far. As it stands, the Mellon Financial Service Center that straddles Ross probably has almost as much square footage as both of those tweny-eight story office buildings at 650,000 square feet. Those towers are pretty narrow. There was big hole in the ground on this site for over a decade. Some may remember how it was boarded up throughout the 1990s until the park was built and Mellon broke ground earlier in the millenium.

I suppose there was no realistic demand for that much development at the time, until Mellon stepped up to the plate.
You're right about the square footage of the MCSC- 650K without the garage. Those lower levels that span 6th are about 86K each- thats about 1/2 the total new square footage. 28 stories at a modest area of say 16K sq. ft. per floor would total a little over 450K. You would need about another 12 stories with the same footprint to reach 650K.

[vtPGH]

What a great find! While the towers would have been nice, I'm glad they didn't pull a Cleveland with the enclosed downtown mall, which would have surely flopped. I must say I got a kick out of the article on the opposite page about the upcoming closures on the Parkway West. With the exception of mentioning Three Rivers Stadium, you could probably cut and paste that blurb into tomorrow's paper and it would pass as completely accurate.

[ferraris]

Originally Posted by vtPGH

What a great find! While the towers would have been nice, I'm glad they didn't pull a Cleveland with the enclosed downtown mall, which would have surely flopped. I must say I got a kick out of the article on the opposite page about the upcoming closures on the Parkway West. With the exception of mentioning Three Rivers Stadium, you could probably cut and paste that blurb into tomorrow's paper and it would pass as completely accurate.

I'm a fan of miniature enclosed downtown malls, like Fifth Avenue Place. I think that you're right, though, a full scale enclosed mall downtown would probably fail.

[BrianTH]

Oxford Centre has a mini-mall too.

[Geeo]

I think we learned the lesson of the downtown enclosed mall concept. Especially from Cleveland and Columbus. They were all the rage for a while in the 80s and early 90s. Cleveland's Tower City is now composed of T-shirt shops and souvenir stores (they opened with Barneys and Calvin Klein), and Columbus City Center is completely shut down (opened with Jacobson's and Marshall Field and an attached Lazarus). You just can't replicate a suburban mall in the middle of a city. Some have worked, like Market East in Philadelphia, but it's connected to a huge transit station and the Center City population nearby is huge. But it's still basically a mid-level mall with K Mart and Burlington.

[BrianTH]

Ironically, the suburban/rural shopping mall was intended to simulate the experience of a walkable downtown shopping district, but with a more convenient location for the relevant market. That is part of what is so strange about attempts to build such malls in downtowns--why have the simulation when you can have the real thing?

And I honestly think on some level people sense that strangeness. Meanwhile, it isn't possible for downtown malls to compete on convenience of location, so they don't actually duplicate the real value of suburban/rural malls anyway.

[greg42]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

Ironically, the suburban/rural shopping mall was intended to simulate the experience of a walkable downtown shopping district, but with a more convenient location for the relevant market. That is part of what is so strange about attempts to build such malls in downtowns--why have the simulation when you can have the real thing?

I think what happened is that by the time such malls were being built in downtowns, the suburban ones were so popular that it was assumed that's what people wanted everywhere. And actually, in the 80s and into the 90s, maybe the 70s too, they were probably right, at least for a lot of people in a lot of places.

At this stage even in the suburbs they don't necessarily go straight for the enclosed mall anymore. Some of the enclosed malls still out there do just fine, while others no longer do. The peak of popularity the large indoor mall was likely in the late 80s or early 90s.

[caroline2]

Originally Posted by Geeo

I think we learned the lesson of the downtown enclosed mall concept. Especially from Cleveland and Columbus. They were all the rage for a while in the 80s and early 90s. Cleveland's Tower City is now composed of T-shirt shops and souvenir stores (they opened with Barneys and Calvin Klein), and Columbus City Center is completely shut down (opened with Jacobson's and Marshall Field and an attached Lazarus). You just can't replicate a suburban mall in the middle of a city.

I don't think this is an accurate diagnosis. Can't speak to Tower City (except for visiting a few times in its heyday and loving it), but the problem with City Center was hardly that a "suburban mall" or an enclosed mall couldn't work in the city. It remained wildly popular and high end for many, many years.

The problem was just the lack of good urban planning and the over-proliferation of other malls. They built Tuttle Crossing, they built Easton, they built Polaris, and as nice as CC was, people weren't willing to travel downtown anymore. Enclosed, open, larger, smaller whatever, it couldn't survive against an onslaught of inner-suburb super-shopping areas built in exactly the wealthy suburbs that CC drew its customers from.

[fleetiebelle]

I think we learned the lesson of the downtown enclosed mall concept. Especially from Cleveland and Columbus.

Even our own Station Square as a shopping center was a big flop. When I first moved to Pittsburgh there were some regular mall stores in there, like the Limited. Now it's postcard shops for tourists.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by caroline2

Enclosed, open, larger, smaller whatever, it couldn't survive against an onslaught of inner-suburb super-shopping areas built in exactly the wealthy suburbs that CC drew its customers from.

But that's the point--you can't beat suburban shopping malls at their own game. However, I don't think you can necessarily extrapolate from that point to the view that all downtown retail is hopeless--it just has to take a different form (in fact I was just reading about how Pittsburgh's Downtown retail vacancy rate has been declining recently).