18 April 2008

Cincinnati Mills Empty

I had to go to the Cincinnati Mills Mall (former Forest Fair Mall) last week. I'm sure this is old news to many people, but the place was completely deserted on a weekday lunch hour. The food court below, which could seat hundreds, had less than a dozen people in it:
 


They also had a Starbucks in the center atrium, and the server there was reading a book. Actually most of the store clerks seemed to be reading books.

We have way too much retail space in this country.

In a related story, a homeless man is convicted in Akron for living in a vacant portion of a mall.

5 comments:

ThatDeborahGirl said...

I remember when that back blue wall also used to hold a few more restaurant stalls.

Forest Fair only gets big crowds on the weekends and if it weren't for the movie theaters, I think people would forget about it altogether which is a shame because it's a really nice mall.

CityKin said...

There are lots of blue walls (where tenants used to be) throughout the mall. I really don't see how they can revive it though. The area is over-saturated, and this mall in particular is too large.

Jimmy_James said...

I never understood why this was even built. Directly between the nearby Northgate and Tri-County Malls, this always seemed like the answer to a question that no one was asking.

Anonymous said...

As a newbie to Cincinnati, I'd say the malls here are pretty sad. This is coming from a former NJ native -- the mall capital of the U.S. (seriously -- the Paramus, NJ area near where we lived is the top retail zip code in the nation).

The only mall that sort of resembles what we had back home is the Kenwood Towne Centre -- but you could fit about 6 or more of those in Westfield's Garden State Plaza (Paramus, NJ).

We haven't lived in Cinti long enough to figure out why the malls here are empty and sad -- but the level of wealth back home is equal to the level of poverty here -- and people's priorities are different.

We've been to Northgate and Tri-County and most likely won't ever return (we're not big mall fans anyway). But I'd say Kenwood is tops, followed by the Florence Mall over in Kentucky.

If there was more "money" in the area, the malls would have plenty of customers. Back home in Bergen County, NJ we had "blue laws" -- very few retail stores could be open on Sundays (religious origin) -- which meant our large population of people with pockets full of money had only one weekend day to shop (Saturday). This made our already packed-to-the-brim malls even crazier. When Sunday rolled around, we'd hit nearby malls in other counties (or just over the NY state line in Rockland County) to get our "fix".

While I'm not sure the downtown mall is a good idea, it was a little less sad that Tri-County and Northgate the last time we visited (when we finally found it!)

Nick said...

Does anyone have a copy of the grand opening flyer for Forest Fair/Cincinnati Mills mall - also, did forest fair mall have a website?