Southdale Center was, and is, located in Richfield, Minnesota, a first-tier suburb on the South side of Minneapolis.

Back in ’56, Minneapolitans probably did think of Richfield as “outside Minneapolis”.

But for the past three decades or so, native Minneapolitans such as myself have just thought of the entire region as “the city” — it’s all contiguously urban, there’s no real sense of “outside” until you get out to the third tier suburbs.

But even as late as the late 1960′s, the area immediately south of Southdale was gravel pits and more gravel pits, where I played as a kid. I suppose a lot of that gravel went into the concrete with which so much of that urban sprawl was built.

Wasn’t there a link a month or so ago to a site featuring abandoned or dying malls across the US?

p.s. the link as given doesn’t take you to the dead mall essay. Sry.

Eastlake Square was redesigned into several purposes, and now houses a sorely-needed branch of the county library (in the old Montgomery Wards end) — a number of call centers, and a cluster of county offices. Instead of being the bombed-out cluster of small stores huddling together in a nearly-empty mall that attracted small-time thieves like bees to honey, it’s now a busy area once again. This one wasn’t very old — it was built in the early 1980s.

Tampa Bay Center was completely razed — it was late 70s or early 80s, too — when the mall up and died, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers bought the property, demolished the mall (which was rotting where it stood — it was musty and damp with water stains on the floor by the time it died) and built themselves a spiffy new training facility. Given the win and loss record for the last couple of seasons, they apparently need to keep training…

Floriland Mall, the first mall built in the city in the late 1950s, has been repurposed into city and county offices…it’s kind of nice to have all the services in one place — tax office, drivers’ licenses, clerk of court…a big building with plenty of space for everything…and lots of parking already there.

I know Florida doesn’t do a lot of things right…but on this one they seem to be doing reasonably well.

“Unfortunately, Gruen made the fatal mistake — fatal for an arm-waving futurist visionary, anyway — of living long enough to see American consumer culture embrace his idea with a vengeance. In a 1978 speech, he recalled visiting one of his old malls, where he swooned in horror at “the ugliness…of the land-wasting seas of parking” around it, and the soul-killing sprawl beyond.”

I’m surprised the article didn’t mention deadmalls.com, an excellent amateur repository of photographs and stories, documenting these structures, their histories, and their demises. It’s an interesting evening’s read, at the very least. Every building has a story (see Kipling, “The Palace”), but these buildings meant so much to so many people that there’s a depth of emotion invested in them that comes out in the stories at deadmalls.com and other websites dedicated to the dead malls.