The first, Summit Place Mall in
The few remaining open in-line stores that I saw contained a barber shop, an insurance agency, and a community theatre with an up-to-date schedule:
The only national retailers I saw were Kids Foot Locker and Deb, a discount fashion store targeting young women. What is remarkable about the Summit Place Mall—and what distinguishes it from the two struggling malls in Indianapolis—it that it still had, as of July 2009, three of its five anchor tenants:
Despite the fact that the mall is almost completely empty, these department stores have remained. (Kohl’s apparently only left in the spring of this year.) These are not third-tier or second-tier tenants, either: Macy’s, J.C. Penney, and Sears are all conventional department stores that typically inhabit perfectly desirable malls in middle-class areas. All three have direct access to the exterior parking lot (which is almost always the case), and though I saw few cars on the day of my visit, sales volume at these three stores is ostensibly good enough for them to remain open amidst otherwise catastrophic retail failure. The physical condition of the mall still appears strong. For example, this courtyard, though surrounded by vacant stores, remains competently if cheaply furnished:
It puzzles me how management would be able to continue operating this mall without hemorrhaging money, but a closer scrutiny reveals signs of cost-cutting: lighting is minimal except around active stores, the parking lot is pockmarked with holes and worn cement, and the moribund, 90s-era food court provides the only evidence of a security officer who admitted to me she had nothing to do:
But since malls usually earn little or no revenue from anchor stores while depending on the rent from in-line stores, how—and why—is this mall able to stay in business even this long? Unlike Lafayette and Washington Square in Indianapolis, the transformation of Summit Place Mall is inevitable, and apparently NAMCO Capital Group, the mall’s current owners, have asked the remaining in-line tenants to move to stores with exterior entrances, while the non-profits are vacating completely to make way for a major tenant retailer.
Whether or not the proposals of the mall’s general management come into fruition, it appears that these three major department stores are committed to their location. What about the existing socioeconomics of the area would explain why these tenants are not relocating or closing up shop altogether? My guess is that the source of the anomaly is the location within the broader metro area of
My suspicion is that the radical, almost violent juxtaposition of wealth and deprivation culminates in a place like Summit Place Mall, where mall traffic and sales volume estimates don’t allow any reasonable conclusions that coincide with national retail study models. Therefore, these department stores perform deceptively well in an area which the retail otherwise shows every indication of being in steep decline. In short, the current life cycle of Summit Place Mall can be explained accordingly: metro
I have even less of an idea of what to make of L’Enfant Plaza in
My visit may not fairly convey the real nature of this lifeless retail space, because the few visibly occupied shops were closed on the Sunday evening I was passing through. The preponderance of lunch places (the only notable chain is Au Bon Pain) suggests that the shopping place appeals to the lunchtime business crowd in the area only, a space flanked by such major federal government branches as Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Education. The density of office workers traveling through the area each day is formidable. More importantly, L’Enfant Plaza rests atop the convergence of four of the five principal subway lines running through
Clearly this is not the case, making this another deviation from the rules of good retail: location, location, location. By all estimates the location here should be terrific, but apparently most workers or subway commuters find alternatives when it comes to lunchtime shopping. It could be that the proximity of the Metro station almost makes it too easy to find shinier shopping plazas nearby; any similar shopping center in the Golden Triangle (the heart of DC’s central business district) offers a more eclectic variety in a setting that has been updated to meet contemporary standards of attractive retail. Daytime workers could hop on the subway and be at a much better location for shopping in just a few minutes. Thus, the problem at L’Enfant may derive from poor urban design choices in the 1970s era in which most of it seems to have been constructed: the area around L’Enfant Plaza is no more inviting at the street level than it is underground. The massing of these large institutional structures in southwest DC do not easily accommodate a recreational, white collar shopping/eating experience, since the roads are wide, distances between buildings are great, and a typical streetscape offers a monotony of office windows rather than expansive, retail-oriented fenestration. A facelift may be all it takes to revitalize L’Enfant Plaza as a shopping or lunchtime destination, but I suspect it would achieve little, because the built environment above these underground retail halls fails to harmonize with any of the flurry of activity that occurs below.
Summit Place and L’Enfant Plaza may challenge from the standards of mall decline put forth in earlier blog entries, but they reinforce the notion that retail is highly sensitive to seemingly infinitesimal shifts in people, structures, and the way the two engage with one another. Both spaces are screaming for redevelopment, but unless the person/place dichotomy shows the right level of calibration (or finds the right designer who can work to make them harmonize), they will continue to flounder in retail limbo.