Over the past century, the word “blight” has undergone a
curious expansion in its denotations.
It was originally a botanical term referring to a disease characterized
by discoloration, wilting, and eventual death of plant tissues. In contemporary parlance, however, I
suspect a far greater number of people use the term in combination with
“urban”—a metaphoric reassignment of the characteristics that organic plant
matter can suffer, only this time applied to non-organic human construction. So
urban blight appropriates characteristics of plant disease but in a
sociological form, in which the tissue of a city suffers dilapidation,
underutilization, or outright abandonment. In contemporary life, it’s hard to imagine and definition of
blight without at least some reference to urbanism; such is the case with
Merriam-Webster
and Dictionary.com
at least.
Anybody getting this far in the essay is probably well
familiar with urban blight, not just as a label for a certain condition but its
physical manifestations. But does
blight always have to affect urban settings or the inner city? In the last 25 years, a new type of
blight has emerged in America, affecting post-war, automobile oriented,
outer-city districts. It requires little
semantic stretching to call it suburban blight; I can think of no more
appropriate label, since it is characterized by the same disinvested conditions
that urban America experienced half a century ago. But does it ever look as bad? After all, we don’t typically associate a three-bedroom
house—with a big front yard and an attached garage—with decay or neglect.
While I’m sure there are plenty of other, more persuasive
examples, Kansas City offers the best visual evidence I have ever seen that
serious blight can afflict the suburbs in equal measure. The Bannister Mall area, about 12 miles
south of downtown KCMO but still within the city limits, was a flourishing retail
and residential corridor as recently as 1990, but it took a significant turn
for the worse later that decade. As
dead malls go, it’s a well-known one: websites like Labelscar
and Dead Malls
chronicle the one-million-square-foot mall’s downfall (first opened in 1980) in
great detail. Needless to say, it
follows similar patterns seen in metros across the country: a decline in the
desirability of the apartment complexes in the area forced many of them to
cater to a lower-income population.
This influx of Section 8 tenants, in turn, caused an uptick of crime in
the mall by the mid-1990s, scaring away shoppers. By 2000, the first of the major anchors closed; over the
next six years, the other three department stores followed suit. For a few of those years, the mall
managed to hang on with mom-and-pop in-line tenants. But these local businesses only chose to locate at the mall
because of significantly lower leasing rates, and by that point the mall was
already over 50% vacant. The
meager revenue proved insufficient to cover expenses for such a large
structure, and by spring of 2007, the Bannister Mall closed completely. Various developers floated proposals
for the site, the most lucrative of which was a sporting complex for the MSL
Kansas City Wizards, combined with office and retail. A Tax Increment Financing (TIF) proposal helped to generate
the funds to demolish the mall in early 2009, but the national economy had
soured enough by that point that nothing further has materialized.
The remainder of this essay explores the current conditions
of the area through an array of photos—not just the Bannister Mall, but also the
extensive regional shopping cluster that once surrounded it. It is a grim site to behold these days. Here’s what the Bannister Mall looks
like today:
And here’s a map of the area, in which the mall sat at the
northwest corner of Bannister Road and Hillcrest Road.
Sitting at Hillcrest Road and looking to the west, a
motorist will see nothing more than a vast, crumbling parking lot with a pile
of gravel as its centerpiece. And
it goes on:
And on and on:
Very little of this parking lot is accessible these days;
most has been barricaded.
The east side of Hillcrest Road doesn’t look any
better. Some might argue that it
looks worse: it includes several independently operated strip malls tethered to
big-box anchors, the vast majority of which are completely vacant.
Because the buildings are still standing but have suffered
from a decade of neglect, they enhance the feeling of desolation far more than
the vacant parking lot where Bannister Mall once stood.
Sometimes its possible to guess the previous tenant, based
on colors or architectural details associated with a certain brand. On the slightly zoomed-in photo below,
my suspicion is that the store on the left, with the big red block as an
entrance, used to be a Circuit City, which of course is now completely out of
business.
Incidentally, the strip mall above is in better condition
than most: as of the fall of 2012, it still had at least a few tenants:
Yes, it’s that old mainstay of struggling suburbia: the
notorious Burlington Coat Factory, known in many circles as “the Grim Reaper of
the retail world”. I’ve written about it on this blog before, because it’s no different in Indianapolis or Cleveland or Philadelphia or
Anchorage. Clearly the corporate
strategy is to locate in depressed big-box settings, which not only keeps its
expenses down but improves the stores’ accessibility to its target low- and
moderate-income demographics.
Burlington Coat Factory’s approach, however, has become so unsubtle that
many people immediately associate the retailer with poor parts of town. And since BCFs tend to survive long
after other middle-income retail tenants have fled the scene, situations like
the Bannister corridor in Kansas City only amplify the retailer’s potentially
undeserved seedy reputation. In
this particular strip mall, the only other surviving tenant was an urban-oriented apparel store whose name was unknown to me. The rest look like this:
According to the buzz online, the storefront next to the
Burlington Coat Factory used to be a Wal-Mart, but it, too, flew the coop. I’m not sure I believe this though;
nothing I could see suggested the appearance of a former Wal-Mart, though the
magnitude of this shopping node would have made it a smart location for the
world’s number one retailer back in its heyday. Here’s a distant shot of the strip mall, revealing the small
remaining trickle of lifeblood in the distance:
This stretch of Hillcrest Road also offers a number of
interesting outparcels, presumably used as restaurants at one time. All of them are vacant. The first outparcel that a driver will
see has a familiar look:
Tropical Palms Restaurant may be closed, but the distinctive
appearance of the building hints at its likely origins. I could be wrong, but the striped
awnings, the brickwork, and the trim all evoke an aged prototype of Applebee’s.
(Inter alia, the awnings have a
greater variety of stripes these days.)
It would make sense if this were an Applebee’s, since the restaurant
megachain has its headquarters in KCMO.
Other shuttered restaurants sit nearby.
Again, many of these outparcel structures have distinct
enough design features that a good pair of eyes (or anyone familiar with the
Kansas City chain restaurant scene in 1992) could discern what used to inhabit
them.
Apparently Luby’s Cafeteria once had locations in the Kansas
City metro; these days the small chain survives almost exclusively in Texas.
Only one of the outparcels suggested it hosted something
other than a restaurant:
Continuing north along Hillcrest Road as it approaches its
terminus at East 87th Street, the abandonment is most pronounced.
With an unusual combination of bold colors and a formidable
size, I cannot guess what tenants this big-box contained two decades ago,
though a Google Streetview
suggests, from a handful of cars in the parking lot, that was still marginally
occupied as recently as September of 2011. Across the street, an isolated big box shows traces of life,
evidenced by the few cars parked at the far-right margin of the photo.
But, upon making a u-turn and reverting southward along
Hillcrest, another strip mall on the west side of the street (the same side as
the former Bannister Mall) is so derelict that all entrances have been blocked
off.
I wouldn’t have dreamed of driving through regardless; the
potholes would have been murder on the tires. But I could still pull into the little alcove between the
access road and the barricades so I could snap a few more photos.
The labelscars left by old tenants revealed the following: a
nail salon, a tax preparer, a beauty parlor, a dry cleaner—in other words, the
shopping center was only attracting minor, lower-tier tenants before it closed
completely, just as was the case with Bannister Mall. What’s particularly interesting to me is that, even though
the privately-owned shopping plazas were uniformly derelict, the right-of-way
itself—city managed Hillcrest Road—was in surprisingly good condition, and it
was even undergoing some minor repairs while I was there that day.
Notice that the road is four-lane, with a median and copious
turn lanes. When the Bannister
Mall flourished, this was no doubt a bustling corridor, but these days a person
could crab-walk down the middle of the street with little threat of contact with
car. The only reason Hillcrest
Road was built for such an LOS was the retail it served.
After continuing southward to return to the Bannister Mall
site where Hillcrest intersects with Bannister Road, the sign for one other
prominent retail pokes up above the slope.
Yes, a Kmart still survives, even as its competitor,
Wal-Mart, fled the scene of the crime years ago. Such is the fate of this once mighty budget department
store. Kmart has persistently
failed to compete with Wal-Mart or Target, and it has only survived by clinging
to Wal-Mart’s discarded suburban fragments. In 2010, I blogged about how Kmart has resigned itself to locations that neither Target nor
Wal-Mart will touch; the dying old chain can only compete because there’s
nothing else around for miles.
Such is the case with Bannister Mall, and it doesn’t get much better at
other smaller retail nodes in southeast Kansas City: about a mile east on
Bannister Road, the Robandee Shopping Center is in nearly as sorry of a state. This portion of the Kansas City limits
declined at the same time as the now-prosperous suburb of Lee’s Summit (pop.
91,000 in 2010) skyrocketed.
Yes, Bannister Mall and its ensuing suburban blight is a
byproduct of white flight. Similar
life cycles first emerged all over America in the 1950s, leaving impoverished
urban inner cities in their wake.
Meanwhile, the earliest suburbs, preferred destinations of the emergent
post-war white middle class, are now routinely showing their age. All too often, their demographic
profile is similar to the inner cities, but with a determinedly auto-oriented
suburban appearance. For those of
my readers in Indianapolis, the 1990s trajectory at Bannister Mall eerily
parallels what happened in the Eagledale neighborhood and Lafayette Square Mall
over the last twenty years. (I
blogged about Lafayette Square in the same article where I explored Burlington Coat
Factory, which—surprise!—is a tenant at the aforementioned dying Indianapolis
mall.) In both Indy and KCMO, these auto-oriented districts fell within the
city limits and fed into their already declining public school districts. The housing in Indianapolis’ Eagledale
is almost identical to that in the Bannister Road corridor of Kansas City.
But the economic forecast of Lafayette Square and Eagledale
still seems nowhere as bleak as that of Bannister in Kansas City, at least to
me. Not only is Lafayette Square
Mall still hanging on (though hardly flourishing, with about 50% vacancy), the
sundry strip malls and big-boxes around it are surviving as well. None of them are thriving, and national
chains have largely fled Eagledale to the suburb of Avon, just as they migrated
to Lee’s Summit outside Kansas City.
But the Lafayette Square district has hosted a huge variety of immigrant
entrepreneurs, and now the area is known for its ethnic supermarkets,
taquerias, hookah cafes, and restaurants catering to a few dozen different non-American
cuisines. The city is teaming with
the Department of Public Works to re-brand the area as an international
marketplace. In addition, an
emergent artist community has taken advantage of the cheap rents and leased an
old Firestone outparcel near Lafayette Square, turning it into the Service Center for Contemporary Culture and Community: a performing arts space, library, community garden, and art gallery, taking
advantage of the area’s eclectic demographic mix. Eagledale in Indianapolis may no longer be a middle class
neighborhood, but it doesn’t look like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
The Bannister Mall site has stumped developers and city
officials over the years, since southeast Kansas City in general seems to be
evading any sort of organic re-invention.
I suspect that Kansas City, generally a prosperous metro area, has its
own immigrant-influenced equivalent to Lafayette Square/Eagledale in
Indianapolis, but the old Bannister Mall certainly isn’t it. This variant on socioeconomic blight
poses a wicked challenge. I’m not
holding my breath for the hipsters or the gays to colonize it, the way they are
in some of Kansas City’s formerly dying old walkable neighborhoods closer to
the central city. And the yuppies
won’t come in later to gentrify it either. The blight that afflicts Bannister and Hillcrest Roads has
yet to reveal a treatment.
5 comments:
I'm really interested in this series of posts... I am curious about cycles of reinvestment before the automobile came along. It seems like the auto decoupled outward expansion from population growth, but why didn't this happen with earlier transportation technologies? Has the business world so radically changed philosophies since 1930 that a throwaway building is now preferable to a long-lasting one?
I've yet to see good answers to these questions, but it seems suspicious to me that the car could so profoundly reshape our thought patterns after millennia of stability.
Thanks for the comments, ardecila. In response to your first question, I would imagine that much of the decentralization that seems to have transpired due to the automobile--as opposed to other means of transportation--is because it was the first privately owned vehicle that allowed individuals to travel great distances with ease. Bear in mind that automobiles existed at the dawn of the 20th century. But settlement patterns really didn't shift to automobile dominated until after World War II, at a point when the vast majority of households owned a vehicle. When automobiles were a recreational toy of the elite, as they were for the first two decades of the 20th century, urban settlements did little to accommodate them. My guess is that off-street parking lots were fairly rare up until the end of the Great Depression.
If you want more insight on the "throwaway" building, I recommend you look at my dialogue with reader on another recent article, about some suburban apartment buildings from the 1960s and 70s that are already decaying: http://dirtamericana.blogspot.com/2012/11/even-test-market-suburbs-get-caught-in.html
My guess is that neither our thought nor our settlement patterns were particularly stable over millennia. A 19th century settlement would look radical from the perspective of a 17th century inhabitant--the very notion of cities were an oddity for most of the world's population until the Industrial Revolution. People from those eras would just be using their frames of reference for judgment, as we use the automobile for our own.
I realize this is an old article, but I just stumbled upon it. I wanted to confirm that indeed there was a Walmart spinoff located in the building you described as "With an unusual combination of bold colors and a formidable size" that sported a red roof. It was a Hypermart, Walnart's attempt at a "Mall without Walls."
Cerner has now bought the site and is in the middle of constructing a massive new campus.
Thanks for the comments Christi. It doesn't matter that this is an old article--I still try to respond. I appreciate the updates on the Walmart out there...glad to hear someone is investing that part of KCMO. I guess Hypermarts really only peaked in metros close to Walmart's Bentonville HQ, like Kansas City. They definitely never had them in my hometown of Indianapolis.
This blog is also closed. I'll be transferring your comment to the new domain at dirtamericana.com. Check it out and feel free to respond there.
Post a Comment