5 More Dead Shopping Centres That Found Surprising Second Lives

5 More Dead Shopping Centres That Found Surprising Second Lives

When malls die — as so many have these days — they too often end up as sad, empty lots befitting only ruin porn and zombie movies. But a handful of shopping centres have been repurposed for unusual inhabitants, from Christian car dealerships to, yes, even zombies.

When we last wrote about these reborn shopping centres, many of you wrote to point out other shopping centres with similarly surprising fates. (And many of you shared your memories of bygone shopping centres — boy, it was a fun nostalgia trip.) Here are a few more reborn shopping centres, as noted by your fellow Kinja commentators.

Picture: Rackspace Headquarters in the old Windsor Park Mall. Classic Engineering via Inhabit


Rackspace Headquarters — Windsor Park Mall — San Antonio, TX

5 More Dead Shopping Centres That Found Surprising Second Lives

Picture: Rackspace video

A couple weeks before Christmas 1994 — in the middle of what should have been holiday shopping bustle — a man was shot and killed in Windsor Park Mall. It was only the latest in a string of violent incidents in and around the mall as the area around it fell into decline. The shopping centre limped along for another decade, shutting for good in 2005.

Around that same time, the fortunes of the web hosting Rackspace were all the rise. Rackspace needed space, a lot more space, and where else would you find it but an empty shopping centre? With the extra incitement of tax breaks and grants from the state of Texas and the neighbouring suburb of Windcrest, who were eager to see the area revitalised, Rackspace moved in.

The renovated office space still looks like a shopping centre at times (see: escalators), but it’s got the touch of whimsy you’d expect on a giant tech campus (see: slides). Rackspace has proudly renamed it the Castle and opened it up to video tours and Google Street View exploration.

5 More Dead Shopping Centres That Found Surprising Second Lives

Picture: Google Street View

Thanks to juanoymous!


Austin Community College — Highland Mall — Austin, TX

5 More Dead Shopping Centres That Found Surprising Second Lives

Picture: Highland Mall

Highland Mall opened in 1971 as Austin’s first indoor shopping centre, but newer, swankier shopping complexes began luring away shoppers in the coming decades. In 2010, Austin Community College bought the property on the old Dillard’s. It would end up buying the entire centre.

ACC has since turned a big chunk of the shopping centre into a brand new campus. The concrete walls got a facelift, but more importantly, classrooms, computer labs and student lounges filled up the old shopping space. This August, the classrooms officially opened for students.

And Rackspace, which already bases its headquarters out of an abandoned mall in San Antonio, has decided to keep going with its mall-to-office strategy: it will now leasing out that old Dillard’s in Highland Mall for an Austin office.

Thanks to juanonymous!

5 More Dead Shopping Centres That Found Surprising Second Lives

5 More Dead Shopping Centres That Found Surprising Second Lives

Picture: Austin Community College


Zombie Attacks — Friars Walk — Reading, UK

5 More Dead Shopping Centres That Found Surprising Second Lives

Picture: Zombie Mall

The Friars Walk shopping centre feels like the perfectly creepy setting of a zombie movie. Then you notice the blood… and the bullet holes…

Zombies — or at least fake zombies — really have taken over Friars Walk. Since the shopping centre in Reading’s thoroughfare closed in 2004, the abandoned complex has hosted live-action zombie survival games. One purveyor boasts of the complex’s “narrow service corridors, a creepy children’s play area, slow-closing fire shutters, loading docks, and a pitch-dark labyrinthine basement.” You get an airsoft gun, and then it’s you against the undead.

Reading is in England and not the US like all the other shopping centres on this list, but its transformation into hosting zombie survival games was too good to pass up. This is our collective fantasy — or nightmare, really — about the downfall of modern society almost too perfectly embodied.

Thanks to Jimmy Boots!


YMCA — Galleria at Erieview — Cleveland, OH

5 More Dead Shopping Centres That Found Surprising Second Lives

Picture: Canadian Pacific/CC

When we wrote about the failed greenhouse experiment at Cleveland’s Galleria at Erieview, one astute Kinjaer noted the dying shopping centre had actually found a more permanent tenant: the YMCA of Greater Cleveland.

Well, hopefully, anyway. Since the plan was first announced two years ago, the YMCA has yet to scrounge up the last $US1.1 million for the $US5.6 million project of building a fitness center in the old mall. If and when it’s completed, the 3700sqm centre will include three exercise rooms, a spinning studio and a three-lane lap pool. You can see the mall’s characteristic glass ceiling in the renders below.

The YMCA’s more than 3000 members would be a welcome addition to the shopping centre’s remaining stores. Here’s to hoping this will be more successful than its last revitalisation project.

5 More Dead Shopping Centres That Found Surprising Second Lives

5 More Dead Shopping Centres That Found Surprising Second Lives

Pictures: Moody Nolan


Drivers Village — Penn-Can Mall — Cicero, NY

5 More Dead Shopping Centres That Found Surprising Second Lives

Pictures: Penncanmall.com / Syracuse Nostalgia

“Penn Can Mall was the coolest place to hang out in the ’80s,” writes Brian Hamilton of Syracuse Nostalgia, echoing the adolescence of nearly every suburban American teenager of that era. But, as the familiar narrative goes, Penn-Can Mall fell into decline and closed in the ’90s.

In 2000, Roger Burdick came along and snapped up the 80-acre abandoned shopping centre. His car dealerships moved in, selling cars Audis to Volkswagens and nearly everything in between. Today, Drivers Village is home to 21 car franchises, the single largest auto complex in the northeast. The abandoned location aside, the most unusual part of Drivers Village may be eight part-time chaplains the very-religious Burdick has hired to spread the faith from his car temple.

As far as transformations go, evolving from a shopping centre that sells clothes, toys and fast food to a shopping centre that sells cars is probably one of the less drastic ones. There is an odd poetry to a dead shopping centre being turned into a sprawling car complex — a mall whose very existence was made possible by cars, abandoned and now reborn as a purveyor of cars.

Thanks Scootin159!

5 More Dead Shopping Centres That Found Surprising Second Lives

5 More Dead Shopping Centres That Found Surprising Second Lives

Pictures: RSA Architects


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