Hello Everyone,
Live outdoor music at the Iowa City Ped Mall tomorrow/Friday evening from 5:00-7:30 PM. Featuring Cello, Voice, Looping, and more. Feel free to take a gander. It will be a bit dark and a bit chilly, so make sure to dress safely for the occasion. I hope to see you there, and if not, I wish you a preemptive Happy New Year.
with good grace,
The second floor of the mall is almost completely vacant. The food court is down to 2 Asian places and a Sbarro.
Ton of empty spots in the outdoor portion as well.
Whatโs strange is that Liberty is a pretty high income area. Itโs super close to Mason which obviously brings a lot of wealthy families down there to the mall.
Itโs a pretty active mall. So itโs strange I guess how the ownership group canโt sign off leases on those vacant spots.
Even Kenwood mall by comparison is doing much better tenant wise than Liberty. Liberty is owned by the same people that own the Easton Mall in Columbus and that mall is super successful and rarely has vacant tenants.
Very strange.
Why.
Someone explain.
It has become rampant with families and their kids on bikes.
It sucks.
My coworkers have been having some discussion of what it would be like if Main Ave were more like Pearl Street in Boulder or 16th st in Denver. What are your thoughts?
Platform(s): It was an arcade machine
Genre: 3D racing game. one of those ones where you got WAY too fast
Estimated year of release: 90s?
Graphics/art style: Standard for the time, nothing special
Notable characters: You were a car
Notable gameplay mechanics: You could run over hundreds of people in this mall and they'd make funny noises
Other details: It must've been a pretty common game, we found it at a pizza hut.
So 15 years ago when I was a young man working security, my supervisor pointed out the foot tunnel that leads under the Circle to Confed mall and was like "Don't ever go in there. I don't care who calls for help, what you hear, do not go in there or you will get jumped and I'm just going to say 'I told you so'."
Is that tunnel actually that dangerous? Is it still dangerous? I'm not really worried for myself, but my girlfriend takes the bus and might want to use that tunnel to get to the terminal at Confed and I'm wondering if it is safe for her.
Urban planners talk about redeveloping dead malls a lot so I figured this would be a case study on the subject. James Howard Kunstler has talked about attempting to recreate the street grid in dead malls and this is one real-world development that actually proposes to do just that.
First off, because all zoning is site-specific, and because there's also not a whole lot of zoning documents, etc that don't get the light of day which is a bit odd for this subreddit all of these screenshots were taken from the following City of Phoenix Planning and Zoning PUD submittal at
https://www.phoenix.gov/pddsite/Documents/PZ/Z-10-21n.pdf
PUDs in Phoenix are Planned Unit Developments where zoning attorneys basically get to write their own zoning ordinance for a specific parcel subject to committee and City Council approval.
The need for this PUD is clear. Chris-Town lost fully 1/3rd of its retail space with CostCo at 155,000 square feet and JC Penney at 100,000 square feet leaving. No existing zoning district standards have followed up with the large scale, site-specific redevelopment of parcels within Phoenix and PUDs have made needed redevelopment a possibility
When Phoenix was a small city back in the late 1950s, Chris-Town was your usual exurban mall at the fringes and to this day is the oldest of malls in the area that still has its interior corridors somewhat intact. In the 1980s and 1990s it fell apart like most of first-ring developments to projects on the ever-expanding suburbs and exburbs and needed redevelopment twice--both in 2003 and now 2021.
The document goes into a great detail about design considerations but most importantly discusses the evolving land uses from "planned shopping centers" to "village cores" to "transit-oriented development" to "walkable urban" which have never quite fit with the existing land uses at the Chris-Town site and created a perilous condition where lease conditions and existing buildings did not fit actual or proposed zoning. Site-specific zoning as an opposite to spot-zoning is necessary here.
I cannot speak to the above enough--it turns out you can't just zone your way into redevelopment without considering tenants and leases. To wit:
>In 2003, the City was about to adopt the Transit Oriented Development overlay (โTOD-1โ) regulations and start construction of the light rail system. However, the TOD-1 overlay was not compatible with the existing conditions at Christown. At that time, the mallโs previo
... keep reading on reddit โกhttps://preview.redd.it/vwp59u0sxv561.jpg?width=2443&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=80d0ee6348391c821ab14bd0c3a30f7e2138c65b
