My wife works at that Texas Road House and she has heard nothing of them moving. I am very skeptical of this considering they are booming.
My wife works at that Texas Road House and she has heard nothing of them moving. I am very skeptical of this considering they are booming.
This was posted by ODOT during the whole Pole road fight with Crossroads Mall. It is only the frontage road that is removed. The mall circulation road becomes the new frontage road or the "zombie sanctuary road" by the time ODOT gets around to building the new interchange. LOL I wonder if ODOT will go back to their original plans to close Pole road if there's no Mall left to complain? http://www.okladot.state.ok.us/meeti...i240aerial.pdf
Well i'm glad if they decided to keep the buildings, but they really did screw up the plans if that's the current one. In case ODOT missed it, the traffice from eastbound 240 to Northbound 35 backs up pretty bad too (not as bad as southbound 35, but the cross-merging lanes of the on/off ramp there is horrible. Maybe the fact that the clover is twice the size of the old one will help keep the amount of traffic that backs up there to a minimum though.
I can't imagine Home Depot being affected by even frontage road work though...that's just dumb on ODOT's part. There's plenty land there for a frontage and the highway and home depot. But I guess that's a mute point now anyway.
The Best Buy and the Tires Plus were the only stores that were going to have to be torn down because they are in the safety zone just like the former Ford Dealership. The Hotels and Texas Roadhouse will stay there.
With AMC not doing so well these days I predict the movie theater will likely close when Best Buy and Toys R Us leaves. That will likely lead to Texas Roadhouse relocating or closing. The hotels will likely stay they are visable from the Interstates. not to mention,people visiting patients at Southwest Medical Center and Oklahoma Heart Hospital most likely keep the hotels busy.
On a another note, I walked through Crossroads with the wife back at Christmas. The only stores with any real activity were Bath & Bodyworks and Champs. Champs had the more employees running around then anything else. They were likely there for loss prevention because only one other customer was in the store. The remaining stores were doing poorly. I seen more people playing on there phones than working.
It was kind of depressing. It felt more like a community center/flea market then a mall. The mall has rented out to various clubs and mom and pop vendors selling junk. The nicest place out there was the day spa which looked like somebody disected out of Penn Square and put it in there. I am willing to bet the owner of the place is kicking themselves because nobody was in there and the employees looked like they were dying for customer to come inside.
I am wondering how much longer they will hold out. I just cannot see them going the Heritage Park Mall route and keeping the mall open for mall walkers and a few stores until the rent proceeds fall short of the utility bills.
It's the dieing cow that just won't die. There really isn't any reason to keep the place open. Like oneforone said, it won't be long before the rent doesn't keep up with the utilities. Mom and Pop places never last in malls, and they are generally the #1 sign that a place is on its way out.
The only thing that bugs me about Crossroads closing is the building itself and some of the surrounding structures. Once it goes, you're going to see several of the surrounding businesses close and what are we going to be left with? A full 1/4 square of closed abandoned buildings. I wouldn't put any confidence in the hotels staying open either. There are plenty off of 240 just a mile down the road, or up in MWC that can support the Heart Hospital. But that place doesn't exactlly draw a lot of hotel stayers. Typically, you have 1 person stay in the room with the patient and then you have visitors. People don't tend to use hotels for stays like that because it just adds to the cost (and fast). And the number left over can't fill 2 hotels. I doubt their occupancy went up much when the place opened.
wonder howa flea market would do inside crossroads, kinda like a indoor traders village like they have in dallas and houston!
The internet is absolutely littered with stories like this:
http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune....ospect-in.html
You've kinda lost me on at least some of that logic. Neither Toys'R'Us nor BestBuy is dependent upon traffic from the theater. Also, I thought someone else had posted that the proposed Toys'R'Us in Moore fell through, so the movement/closure of the Crossroads location is no longer imminent (?). I do wonder how that AMC survives with the Warren in Moore not even five minutes south.
I could see how Roadhouse might be affected by the theater, but when I go there on the occasional Friday/Saturday evening or Sunday lunchtime, the place is packed and there is often a wait. Have a hard time thinking the theater is impacting it *that* much.
The mall, despite its rather sparse population, is still something like 1/3 occupied even in spite of the absence of anchors, so I don't think shuttering is imminent just yet...
If Old Paris Flea Market was to buy the whole mall, or at least an anchor, then BINGO. I'm positive that Old Paris will bring Crossroads back to life and it will be a benefit to them for having a much nicer place to shop. They can sell the entire current property to the evil school next door and move into Crossroads as an anchor.
Old Paris Flea Market is extremely high traffic. They can even open 7 days a week now by relocating to Crossroads. More business for them and when businesses see a traffic increase at the mall, they will move in. Then we may see a national retailer or two taking up other anchor spaces.
With all the other retail in the city, and some possibility of still more, it seems like one of the few ways to revitalize the current structure would be to allow cassino's to move into the anchor locations.
They ought to sell the whole thing to a tribe and turn the entire structure into a combo casino, hotel, restaurant mixed use complex.
Pretty sure a read a while back (a year or two ago) that the "evil school" was using eminent domain to secure that property (if I'm not mixing it up with something else). The anchor stores are for sale (along with the mall itself) in a recent Oklahoman article (where it listed some of the outlying properties that had been sold)
Yeah, another reason to hate that school. Its private property (with the stupid fences surrounding it) and they had no right to try the eminent domain crap. They tried, but failed. Old Paris and a bunch of people fought them, but Old Paris did give them a portion of the parking lot to get them to stop whining.
I think Old Paris should take the opportunity to make an offer to the evil school to sell the property and move into the old Dillard's building. The 3rd floor can be used for office space. It will be a major success as all that traffic will be going into the mall.
Thunder;
Thanks for the info, hadn't heard that. I thought Dillards was putting in a Clearance store in their space?
Sorry, I'd let the school have their way over a flea market, but anyway...
A casino would be a great venture there! With the amount of room there is inside, you could also put in a small amusement park like Mall of America (but on a smaller scale). Think about how much floor space there is if you were to knock down the walls of each store...it's a HUGE footprint....and the current walkways don't have to stay either. Plus turning something like Dillards into a hotel would be fairly easy. If you're worried about windows and utilities, just look at Sheppard mall to see how that can be done. Or just tear down one of the anchors and build a new hotel there on your own so it's attached to the casino. The building isn't in bad shape so there are so many possibilities...and the location isn't terrible either. It's just soooo big, it's hard to fill the thing.
Now the trouble you face with the casino....it's not tribal land. And, if I remember how the law works, it has to be tribal trust land for them to be able to open a casino on it. Meaning, they can't just buy up a plot of land somewhere and throw in a casino. Although I don't really understand how Remington Park is able to be a full casino then since it wasn't trust land, the tribe just bought the place in a business deal.
I'd really rather see Crossroads with closed doors than a flea market take over though. If they want to fill in an anchor with one, fine, go to the old Wards since Steve and Barry's put in all that laminate floor. At least it's already floored and has wide open flooring. But (hopefully) our market isn't so bad that we would support a market that large.
Something that I think would be interesting to think about would be a medical center. We're seeing smaller facilties going up like the new Integris Edmond and the St Anthony EOC and NW. Or maybe shove some of that aerospace work out there.
Or just blow the place up.
Honestly, I don't see Old Paris going anywhere. They will use that building until the day a tornado hits or the building falls apart. (after all it's at least or almost 50 years old).
Honestly, I think the best option for Crossroads is an Escape From New York Style prison. After all DOC could use the space.
The best thing would be a property tax paying entity that provided employment and what the public wants.
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