“[The] garden court has all the evils of the village street and none of its charm”
— Frank Lloyd Wright
“Yeah, it was such a big deal, you could walk from Macy’s to JCpenney’s and you never had to go outside…”
— Woman remembering the mall
There was a time when malls were more popular than churches. People would dress up and get in the car and drive in from the suburbs to spend the day wandering among the tiled corridors of commerce. Consumerism was the holy spirit that moved through them and packs of adolescents unto teenagers, roamed the halls and rode the escalators and stretched out the cash in their pockets out to the last penny. Or fished some change out of the wishing fountains. There was no internet. There were no cell phones. See and be seen.
That could have been the motto of visionary Victor Gruen when, in 1954, he unleashed his three-story enclosed and escalatored, climate-controlled, shopping masterpiece upon the world, the 800,000 square feet of utilitarian consumerism in Edina, Michigan. America’s first covered mall.
His end game was to see schools and libraries and apartments and post offices and churches all be included under the same roof along with the atriums and escalators, fountains and mezzanines.
Gruen said he was providing a “much needed place and opportunity for participation in modern community life,” like the Greek Agora, the medieval marketplace or the town squares.
Surrounding the mall was a vast expanse of asphalt. 5,200 parking spaces. Utopia.
Hudson Valley Mall
In the Town of Ulster, when the Pyramid Management Group né Pyramid Companies broke ground on top of a wide ridge 200’ above sea level in 1981, the motivation was to develop the only enclosed mall between Albany and Poughkeepsie.
Set on prime real estate which around sunset affords some of the best views of the Catskills in the county, the developers left out the escalators and the atriums. They left out the mezzanines and the fountains. They went with an inexact cruciform layout, comprising 765,704 square feet of shopping potential, all on the ground floor. In the first years of its inception, anchored by Hess’s, JCPenney and Kmart, the Hudson Valley Mall was a success. By 1989 Sears Roebuck & Co. had added a department store to complete the cardinal cross of anchors and a food court too had sprung up.
Prior to 1995, according to a store roster from a year indeterminate, as many as 77 shops did business there, 10am to 9pm six days a week with shorter hours on Sunday.
Macy’s didn’t show up until 2006. By then, the Kmart had relocated, and its old space had been divided among Best Buy and Dick’s Sporting Goods. Target had beat them all, arriving in 2001.
Heady times. But then, like an enormous dirigible, internet shopping hove into view, interposing itself between the rays of the mercantile sun and the brick-and-mortar operations on the ground. Unacclimated to living in the shadow it cast, the malls below began to shiver in the darkness and die.
Demographics are destiny
In April of 2015, JCPenney closed. 67,000 square feet of retail shopping disappeared, putting 74 people out of work. In April 2016, Macy’s got out. 121,000 square feet freed up and 72 associates hit the bricks. In 2018, Sears went out for cigarettes and never came back.
In October 2020, Best Buy cut the apron strings.
Snapshots of abandonment: “No longer a robust shopping destination.” “Decline of the area’s retail landscape is to blame.” “We feel this is a necessary business decision”, “While it’s never an easy decision to close stores, especially due to the impact on our valued associates and customers…”,“Unfortunately, retail in this area … has been in decline for many years.” Just business, you understand.
Town of Ulster supervisor Jim Quigley had no choice but to agree.
“We have a fundamental problem with the economy in our community in that we do not have enough high-paying jobs that provide disposable income to support these retailers,” Quigley said. “I have been of the opinion for a long time that to have a successful retail economy, we need good jobs with disposable income that supports the retailers. We are not going to keep retailers in this economy.”
Quigley still bore a grudge against the IBM plant closure in 1995. He said it was responsible for decimating the local economy. He said the community had struggled unsuccessfully to reinvigorate itself ever since. But this is a dependably Quigley-esque point of view.
Out beyond the borders of the town he has supervised for 16 years, malls had been dying all across the United States. Closed IBM factories couldn’t be responsible for them all.
As part of a nationwide downsizing to improve profitability, JCPenney closed 38 stores in 2015.
When Macy’s left in 2016, CEO Terry J. Lundgren mentioned that 40 stores nationwide would be closed “in light of our disappointing 2015 sales and earnings performance.”
When Sears exited, it announced the shuttering of more than 100 stores across the country- part of that company’s “latest cost-cutting move”.
And for those national chains, the bleeding never has stopped.
Two years after they left, JC Penny’s was announcing the closure of 130–140 other stores and two distribution centers. When Sears left they still had 224 stores across these United States. Today they have 9. Macy’s still had 770 stores in 2016. Now it has 508. And in 2025 it’s been announced 66 more Macy’s will be closed.
The trend is obvious, it is insurmountable and it is national.
The halls of memory
Thad Cooper recalls the mall with nostalgia, comparing it to a shining city on a hill.
“A lot of things happened at that mall as a young person. It was where you located all of your hopes and dreams. That’s where the Pokémon was. There was a store that sold video game stuff, and you would just spend as long as your parents could possibly let you in there.”
When he got older he realized that he and all the teenagers hanging out there were poor. In the wake of the IBM closure, Kingston was “really not in good shape” when he was growing up, says Cooper. In spite of that, cheap fast food and the drive to see and be seen won out.
“I remember my dad’s friend, Joe Marchetti, who was a Kingston native, refused to set foot into the mall his whole life. He saw what the mall did and what the town of Ulster Commercial District did to the businesses in Uptown and Rondout. He regarded the mall and the entire commercial district on Ulster Avenue that was set up in the 70s or 60s as parasitic.He gave me a different view on all these things. Like, is all this convenience really aspirational? Or is it just sucking the lifeblood out of your community? Like, what are you losing by paying less for things? Or what are you losing by moving all of your social engagement to this low-tax, high-profit, high-corporate area? You know what I mean?”
The Exodus
In 2011, with credible foresight, the Pyramid Companies unloaded the mall to PCK Development. Five years later, when the anchors began to bow out and back away, PCK defaulted on a $52.5 million loan it had taken out from the U.S. National Bank Association. So USNBA took ownership of the mall and began the search for a new property owner.
Enter the Georgian, James M. Hull and his Hull Property Group. Based in Augusta, Hull specializes in land-lording malls – 28 of them at last count – located mostly in the Southeast. A photograph of the man available on the company’s webpage shows Hull grinning for all he’s worth, sporting a mini-checkered sports coat, a yellow tie and a toothy smile. His hair appears soft and easily mussed in the wind. Hull acquired the Hudson Valley Mall for $8.1 million, which was at the time estimated to be just about 12 percent of the property’s assessed value – $66 million. A real steal.
As of 2016, just before Hull took over at the Hudson Valley Mall, the Victoria’s Secret was still here. The Foot Locker and Kay Jewelers and LensCrafters were still here. And C&C Unisex Hair Design. Payless Shoesource and Gertrude Hawk. Signature Nails and Spa. Jules Vision Center. Hot Topic and Shoe Department. Zumiez. FYE. Old Navy. Jimmy Jazz.
No more.
Confronted with so many vacancies, Hull has exhibited a remarkably canny strategy. He laid down honest-to-god carpeting over the tiles, installed new lighting, and walled off entire corridors of vacant shop fronts with sheetrock. Hallways were plastered with murals depicting scenes of local beauty and community, towering over six feet tall to cover the vast emptiness: That time Princess Beatrix of Netherlands visited Kingston. That time mounted elephants from the Barnum and Bailey Circus marched down Wall Street. Photographs of the Rondout when all the beautiful, brick buildings on the east side of Broadway hadn’t been knocked down yet, and the trolley still ran down the middle of the street. Interspersed between mural and photograph, nonsensical, sentimental and pithy messages of hope and advice have been painted on the walls.
3,440 parking spaces
Walking in Hull’s reinvention, no music plays and the carpeted corridors are wide enough for three DPW trucks to drive down side by side. The tables and chairs of the food court are clean and empty but the defunct food businesses have a bombed out, dusty look. An unknown wag has written ‘Help Me’ in the layer of dust coating the glass cases in the China Wok. The Savonna’s has locked the doors leading to the kitchen and never returned.
There was nothing to do. Nothing to look at. No one there to see and be seen.
There were only the murals advertising the beauty of somewhere else, the photographs advertising a past gone forever, and the painted messages advertising nothing at all.
Nine businesses remain at the mall. Target, Dick’s, the NCG Cinema, a Muay Thai fighting club, a fitness operation, parkour instruction, a dentist, a hair salon and a medical care outpost.
Mall of the future
To anticipate what comes next in the life cycle of a dead mall, one could do worse than attend to the opinion of Michael Flight, founder of Concordia Realty Corporation. Founded in 1989, Flight says his firm’s raison d’etre is to provide shopping center leasing and development services to third-party owners.
To wit:
“Less dominant Regional Malls with weak anchor tenants may soon be extinct. Some of these malls will make great redevelopment opportunities because of the large parcel of land located near major intersections. Many malls will be converted to mixed-use as they remain excellent locations for residential and hotel developments. Some parts of these malls may end up as light industrial distribution centers to get e-commerce deliveries closer to consumers.”
Relating how his firm turned a profit from a dead mall, Flight offers an anecdote of how he “strategically” developed a movie theater in the rear parking lot, relocated a Walgreens out of the mall to a front pad, while all the while emptying the mall over 2.5 years.
“Once the mall was empty, we completed the demolition, prepared the building pad and sold the entire project to a Walmart developer for $5 million profit.”
If this isn’t what the Hull Property group is planning, the movie theater in the rear parking lot and the gradually emptying shops sure resemble it. Messages left for Hull’s director of marketing and company operations were not answered.
Down from a high of 2,500 malls in the 1980’s, only 700 remained in 2022. By 2032, it’s estimated less than 200 will remain in the United States.
Exit past the gift shop
“Seems like an obvious real estate grab,” says Ulster County resident and local musician Jimmy Ha.
“You’re basically just going through the motions of being plausibly deniably a mall, when really anyone who goes in there is struck emotionally, whether you live here or not. It’s vacuous, almost eerie. It’s like purgatory waiting to be torn down for a profit.”
Ha, who first came to the mall as a child, then chose to hang out there as an adolescent and teenager, and in the course of growing older brought his own child to the mall, confesses to an emotional connection.
“When I went to the mall every week or every other week or once a month, like that was the event of the whole week or month. It was like, you got to go out to eat, see your friends, hang out, you know, go to the arcade, the video game store. That Gamestop was in my blood.”
Ha recounts how, one midnight, he waited in line for an hour to purchase first-person shooter Call of Duty 4.
“They had an army recruiter at the door, so as you went through to get your game that you pre-ordered, they would try to recruit you for the real army while you were waiting to get your army simulator games.”
“Oh, yeah, and this might be tangential,” he added, “but speaking of guns.. who could forget the guy who shot up the Target. I know some people who were in there when it happened.”
In 2005, the day before Valentine’s Day, Robert Bonelli, age 24, entered the Best Buy with a knock-off AK-47. It was reported that the Glasco native wandered the store firing until his gun ran out of bullets. Gunfire and chaos, the mall shoppers fled for their lives. He was tackled when he ran out of bullets. No one was killed. A national guard recruiter was shot in the knee.
“Luckily the guy was just shooting, not trying to kill people,” Ha asserts. “But bullet holes were still visible days after it happened.”
Consume or be consumed
There still remains the poetry of the mall to untangle from itself.
In an essay examining the subject of malls published 45 years ago, Joan Didion wrote that malls were “toy garden cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes, profound equalizers, the perfect fusion of the profit motive and the egalitarian ideal.”
But she was commenting upon malls as a living phenomenon. The currently fused manifestation on the hill in the Town of Ulster is stone cold. A ghost mall. Didion also called them “air-conditioned monuments” and “pyramids to the boom years”, and these characterizations are more apt. Wandering through the Hudson Valley Mall last week was more like an exercise in archaeology.
Out in the parking lot, standing under the looming façade of the building where the Sears once was, the shadow of its lettering still remains visible on the exterior, in a darker shade of old adhesive.
Placed in its context, the building resembles nothing so much as a bone-white headstone in the expansive commercial graveyard on the hill that is the Hudson Valley Mall.
If it ever commanded any reverence, and it’s said that it did, it must have been in the ledger books of town assessors and the dreams of chambers of commerce presidents, for the taxes it could raise on the one hand, and for the jobs it created and the shopping-minded tourists it could attract on the other. For these characteristics, the mall must have lived in the imagination as a seductive mecca on a hill rather than being judged by its architectural deficiencies. Ugly, uninspired, unremarkable, built as cheaply as possible. No garden courts. No waterfalls. No piano. No grand gestures. Just a series of warehouses built next to each other for locals to wander through.
Now that the myth is dead, all that’s left is the corpse a-moldering. The architecture as banal as the black desert of asphalt poured at its feet. A sprawling relic awaiting transformation.
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