A few months back, the Charlotte Observer ran a story about how Eastland Mall must go. Unfortunately, the Observer has this policy where all of their articles older than a week or so are no longer available online (are you telling me if the New York Times can no longer charge, the Observer can?). You can rarely even find a link to them on their own site, and when you can, they want to you to pay to get to them. It’s not that I have a problem with that or anything, it’s just that they make it so difficult to do – so I can’t link to it. That makes it a real pain.
Anyway, I finally went to read the article, and naturally couldn’t read it. So I had to dig around my own archives – which is to say, a pile of newspapers that I have sitting next to my desk – and found the article in order to give it a good read. It’s actually not bad. Being that I live only a couple of miles from Eastland Mall, it would probably be good for property values. I don’t know that it will happen anytime soon, but a man can dream, right?
First, you probably ought to look at the proposed layout of what will happen to the mall (or at least, the space where the mall once stood, if this actually happens). One issue I see is that there is no allowance for the transit center – this would be roughly in the front center of the proposed drawing. And I do realize that most sane people probably wouldn’t consider it a transit center in the conventional sense, but it’s there and it has no attachment to the current mall, so it probably should be used.
Next up are those two large brown patches on either end.
The left side is mostly unoccupied. There used to be a gas station and a grocery store (along with a couple of smaller stores) there. A Hollywood Video is, at least as of this writing, the only thing open in that patch. Because of this, it might make some amount of sense to start the project there, rather than leaving a wasteland.
The right side is home to another former grocery store, currently used by an indoor flea market, that may have already closed down. The store, much newer than the one on the left, could probably be re-purposed if this development takes off, so it’s probably not worth it to tear it down – it’s very likely that it would be of interest to someone after a bit of cleaning up (I don’t know if the flea market people have torn out the innards or not).
That leaves the center – the mall – and it isn’t doing well.
Belk closed after last year’s holiday sales, Dillard’s recently shut one level of the store to become an outlet on the other level, and JCPenney did something a couple years ago, before closing the store entirely. That leaves just Sears as an anchor (and half of Dillard’s), and a mix of stores throughout.
Recently, the Limited Brands stores (Bath and Body Works, Limited Too, Victoria’s Secret, perhaps something else) announced they were pulling out when their lease ran out and it seemed like half the mall shut down.
It’s not pretty.
Comparisons at the mall level frequently list Carolina Place, North Lake and South Park as competition to Eastland, but let’s be real. These days, the competition is more like a Wal-Mart Supercenter, and maybe more like a regular old Wal-Mart, as stores continue to close.
I can understand that Glimcher (a realty trust who currently owns the mall) doesn’t want to lose money (who does?), but their best move at this point might be to take what they have (a large chunk of property in a relatively under-valued section of the city), find some developers and run with it. The East Side of Charlotte isn’t popular but it may represent one heck of a bargain to the right investor. With Ikea coming to University City soon, it’s just another direction that’s going to take shopping away, and it’s already clear that the direction is moving as far away from Eastland as it can get.
What do you think? Do you actually shop at Eastland? Or would you rather see it become something a bit nicer than the near-wasteland that it is now?