This guy and the Grotty Places guy should get together.

for "gently obsessive".

I actually came in here to say something about the prison in Boston that was turned into high priced condos a few years ago.

I like it better than the idea of some big empty building just mouldering away. There was a old mall in a town where I lived for awhile, the only reason it had hung on for so long after most of the businesses had gone kaput or left was because the anchor store at one end belonged to a regional clothing chain who had taken out a decades long lease on the space seemingly ages ago (or at least that was what I heard was the reason they stayed in for so long) and couldn't move out until it was up. It turned from a mall that even a few years before had been sort of busy to one of those places that eats stores souls and spits them out. Clothing stores and discount stores disappear to be replaced by bizarrely specific niche shops, that specialize only in knives, or maps, or pet cages and such, which then vanish to become empty spaces filled temporarily during the holiday season to sell Christmas cheese logs.

Then the clothing store finally pulled out and what scraggly businesses had remained; a tire shop, a new and used exercise equipment store, a few walk-in offices belonging to CPAs and low-rent lawyers, a tiny nail salon and a jewlery shop squeezed into a space located between two wide, empty storefronts, all struggled on.

Here in Columbus, OH, the powers that be just get tired of old malls sitting around showing their age, and level them and turn them into either parks or empty lots for sale. In the time I've lived here both the Northland Mall and the City Center Mall, both of which were huge, full, and had steady business, have been closed and torn down.

Incidentally, the Westland Mall, a mall that's literally falling apart, which is located in the hood, has been failing for decades, and is completely empty other than a Sears and a few oddball stores like the ones BHWW mentioned, remains standing and opened.

Well, that's because they built Easton, Tuttle and Polaris, which just sapped the life out of the older malls. And Westland still hosts gun shows, horrifyingly enough.

And there's still The Continent, which is just a pile of despair. Not to mention all the empty, rotting "shopping centers" south of Broad.

Our failed malls just become WalMarts. We're not very imaginitative.