Shepard Mall is not a Mall anymore !!

[Prunepicker]

Prunepicker,
Wow, you must be a lot older than you look! Mr. Shepherd had six daughters
and two sons but the last daughter died in 1970 and she was old. She is the
one my wife was a private nurse for. Actually, I suspect the lady you are
referring to was a granddaughter.
C. T.

It must have been a grand daughter.

[Just the facts]

Question about Shepard mall, were there other factors to the mall dying besides Penn Square and did it close down and reopen a few years later as an office complex or what?

(sorry for being a bit ignorant)

It isn't just Shepard Mall. The era of the indoor shopping mall is over. All that is left do is watch the last ones die.

Victor Gruen Wanted to Make Our Suburbs More Urban. Instead, He Invented the Mall - Mark Byrnes - The Atlantic Cities

[traxx]

It isn't just Shepard Mall. The era of the indoor shopping mall is over. All that is left do is watch the last ones die.

Victor Gruen Wanted to Make Our Suburbs More Urban. Instead, He Invented the Mall - Mark Byrnes - The Atlantic Cities

That kinda reminds me of the cubicle and its inventor, Robert Probst. The cubicle ended up doing exactly the opposite of what he'd intended. FORTUNE: Trapped in cubicles - Mar. 22, 2006

[Just the facts]

Like so much of the modernist movement - it did the exact opposite of what they though it would.

[LandRunOkie]

I would expect it was more a combination of shelter from the weather and the lack of sidewalks than fear of the neighborhood.

Um.... lack of sidewalks will cause pedestrians to fear an area. Especially in a city such as this where driving culture is glorified and people aren't prosecuted for serious crimes against pedestrians. For instance at a cycling event at Lake Overholser this summer two people were hit and seriously injured on the same day by belligerent drivers. A cyclist and a pedestrian. No charges were filed.

[RatOmeter]

Never one to leave an ancient thread sleeping...

I grew up in Alfalfa county in the '70s, but my grandmother lived (still does, she's almost 105, but ailing now) around 34th and Villa. My mother grew up at that house and recalled when the Shepard Mall area was wooded and (I think) with a pond where she and her siblings would go to play and fish. Whenever my family would come to visit, I'd always wind up at Shepard Mall.

Once when I was a wee tyke, my older brother and his same-aged cousin were hanging out at the mall and someone was selling helium balloons. What happens when little kids get helium balloons? Naturally a bunch of them get let loose, usually by accident. My brother and cousin had enough money on them to buy one balloon, some string and scotch tape. They added their string, stuck a piece of folded over tape on the top of the balloon and retrieved a dozen or more balloons from the rafters. Some they gave back to the weepy owners and some they brought home. I was quite happy when they gave me one