Who knew that the City That Never Sleeps had a narcoleptic neighbor?

As I prepare for some upcoming significant changes to my blog, I provide a sort of “placeholder” article as make the final modifications, which I will soon publicize.  The placeholder motif extends to the content of this blog entry, where a window sign serves much the same purpose within its respective storefront.

It’s simply announcing a lunch special.  The restaurant itself?  As indicated at the top of the sign, it’s Bertucci’s, an Italian chain common in the northeastern US.  Though the restaurant’s target market is consistently suburban middle class, it seems as though Bertucci’s restaurants routinely occupy urban settings, in storefronts that directly face the street, rather than a sizable parking lot.  Such is the case with this location.

The sign itself isn’t really remarkable on its own terms.  The only thing that distinguishes it is a condition that these photographs could not begin to capture: the day of the week.  The advertisement for this lunch special is taking place on a Saturday morning, and it’s a good deal: good enough to suggest that this Bertucci’s is struggling to get people in the door on a quintessential weekend day without some real incentive.

Is there something wrong with this Bertucci’s?  Probably not, at least in terms of management and menu—after all, it’s a chain, and if chains lose their consistency for too long, they croak.  So why is this one deserted?  It might have something to do with its surroundings.

The translucent sheen of the contemporary buildings that flank this Bertucci’s comprises one of the busiest commercial centers in Jersey City, New Jersey—just a stone’s throw across the river from New York City.  The Garden State’s second largest city (just behind Newark), it’s also old, settled as a garrisoned Dutch village in the middle of the 17^th century. Yet you’d hardly be able to tell from looking at its coruscating skyscrapers in the Newport neighborhood, seen here in the photos, as well as Exchange Place, directly south of Newport along the waterfront.  It all looks like it could have been built last week.

But the focus for this blog is the larger Newport neighborhood.

Constructed across 600 acres on the old Erie Lackawanna Railway yards, Newport helped galvanize Jersey’s City’s resurgence after its 1986 groundbreaking.  Built as a master-planned, mixed-use community, the intent of its creator, Samuel J. LeFrak of The LeFrak Organization, was to intermingle high-rise residences with office, retail, and entertainment facilities.  The site capitalizes on its pivotal location, adjacent to the Holland Tunnel (with direct vehicular access to Manhattan), as well as I-78 and, not so far away, the New Jersey Turnpike. Newport is also easily accessible by the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, PATH, New Jersey Transit bus routes, and a ferry service across the Hudson River.

In other words, this is prime grade real estate.  And, by most metrics, it has transformed into a successful locus of commerce, while over a dozen apartment towers house the neighborhood’s approximately 15,000 residents.  By the 25^th anniversary of Newport’s establishment, the high density community also boasted a marina, waterfront parks (one with a beach), two hotels, schools,  and the Newport Centre Mall, a regional shopping center whose retail mix ostensibly caters to a broad and diverse socioeconomic base, spread across over 1.1 million square feet and three floors.  This Simon-managed mall also sits squarely within Jersey City’s Urban Enterprise Zone, thereby halving the sales tax rate on goods (only 3.5% instead of 7%) and waiving it altogether for clothing, which no doubt has helped cushion it from the steep decline so many malls across the country have faced.

But for all its amenities, Newport does not seem to have yet mastered the art of fostering a vibrant streetscape.

Sure, there are some people out.  And more people might have been impelled to stroll Washington Boulevard if it weren’t for the blustery conditions on an otherwise mild April morning.  But the fact remains that Newport has metamorphosed into a district with a high concentration of activity in an already active city (Jersey City’s density is well over 15,000 people per square mile, ranking it among the 30 most dense American municipalities).  Nonetheless, this Bertucci’s, sitting right on the neighborhood’s main arterial has to devise special sales to attract visitors to a weekend lunch.  This restaurant’s valiant effort to lure customers only serves to reaffirm what empirical evidence already suggests: that Newport is only lively from 8a to 6pm on Monday for Friday.  Then it hibernates.

The two sons of the late developer Samuel LeFrak strive to continue to his legacy through the family business, but they also hope to improve upon some of the past architectural missteps.  Visual evidence confirms that, aside from the spectacular views of Manhattan from the waterfront, Newport is generally not a terribly desirable setting for people to get out and walk around.  It doesn’t help that ungainly, austere parking garages sit between the occasional storefronts.

Or, for that matter, that one of the primary hotels fronting Washington Boulevard includes a big enough setback to allow for considerable vehicle loading/unloading, as well as some spaces for off street parking.

Obviously, the majority of American hotels—including those in our city centers—include these exact same driver-friendly features.  But the vast majority of American cities cannot boast the sort of multi-modal or mass transit access of Jersey City.  Such a configuration would be virtually unthinkable in Manhattan, and, to this day, even many smaller American cities—often with significantly weaker transit systems—would still include zoning stipulations that vociferously discourage off-street parking lots for hotels within the central business district.

Perhaps, however, the biggest hindrance to Newport ever succeeding as a round-the-clock active urban district is the land use just two blocks away from this photo series.

As Washington Boulevard continues northward of Newport Parkway (the road that rests directly above the Holland Tunnel to Manhattan), the vista changes completely.

Gone are the highrises, replaced by a series of suburban-oriented big box stores (Target, Staples, Best Buy) and replete with off-street parking lots.  The map below shows that this area in Jersey City offers a host of shopping options that one would just as easily expect to see in an automobile-oriented suburb.

Incidentally, this cluster of big box retail sits just south of a huge rail yard, easily visible on the map.  And north of the rail yard is the border for Hoboken, another densely populated waterfront suburb, but one with a vibrant commercial main street, filled with retail and pedestrians at all times of day.

(And, somewhat ironically, Hoboken’s thriving commercial corridor is called Washington Street—a contrast from Jerseys City’s inert Washington Boulevard.)

To be fair, Newport is hardly the alpha and the omega when it comes Jersey City’s retail centers.  The historic downtown to the west of the waterfront consists primarily of two to four-story 19^th century buildings, with numerous street-level storefronts along Grove Street and Newark Avenue.  Many blocks in the older, “real” downtown of Jersey City boast an activity level on par with Hoboken.

If anything, the uninspiring streetscapes of Newport most likely reflect the mindset driving development during the time of the district’s founding.  Back in 1986, when the LeFrak family’s vision first started to take root, much of Jersey City was down on its luck, having left the doldrums of the 1970s in its wake—a time when the city lost a staggering 14% of its population.  At that point, this inner-ring suburb of New York City had been shrinking ever since the Great Depression.  Though a far cry from its 315,000 peak, it has posted an increase in population for the last three decades.  But no one could have anticipated that in the 1980s, when The LeFrak Organization took a chance by purchasing land in a district of dilapidated warehouses amidst a field of creaky, neglected railroads.  At a time when even Manhattan’s future appeared murky, suburban living still seemed like the solution, so it comes as no surprise that the land uses surrounding LeFrak’s bold move still reflect the demands of a mostly suburban clientele.  The mall, the bargain department stores, the wide streets, the visible parking lots—all of these in the 1980s seemed like essential gestures to attract a population seemingly incorrigibly averse to urbanism.

The times are changing, but the remaining boxy Staples and Best Buy, monolithic amidst their generous parking lots, feel more like the final unpainted portions of a canvas, rather than a byproduct of lackadaisical urban design.  By this point, Jersey City’s escalating land values promise a higher and better use in the near future, particularly for a struggling national chain like Staples.  If the chain folds, it’s a matter of time before a savvy builder puts something with a higher Floor-Area Ratio in its place—that is, a taller building that yields a higher rate of return.

In the meantime, until the stronger economy forces developers to strategize on their urban design, Newport will continue to limp along.  It’s still a killer place for an office, and I have no doubt that Bertucci’s can fill its tables during a Thursday lunch.  But this abundance of youthful skyscrapers in an environment that remains steadfastly car-centered looks less like a satellite of New York City and more akin to Dubai.  (Or, at least, everything except the historic center of Dubai, which still remains pretty pedestrian friendly.)  No matter how great the density of jobs and residents, no matter how robust the mass transit, the fundamental character of the buildings and streetscape in Newport does not lend itself well to pedestrianism.  What it does yield, however, is a perfectly extreme application of urban transect modeling, in which the form skips several typological layers, going directly from an urban core zone (in the heart of Newport) to a suburban zone north of Newport Parkway, where the Staples first appears.  But Newport’s atypical renaissance places it at odds with most theories on urban form, even if the results are less than meets the eye.  If the developers make sharper decisions as they continue to invest in the area, maybe sometime they’ll be able to promote a level of energy to the streetscape that will convince people to walk around.  And Bertucci’s won’t have to deploy placeholder signage to make up for the sluggish weekend business.

Nordstrom brainstorming.

My latest post is up at Urban Indy, focusing on what we can do with a huge vacant piece of real estate in the heart of Indianapolis' downtown: the Nordstrom space to CIrcle Centre Mall, which vacated in summer of 2011.

Still no plans for this space have materialized.  I recent post from the Indianapolis Busines Journal suggests that, in spite of one of the mall's two department stores remaining vacant, the sales per square foot have actually improved in recent years.  But the occupancy rate is lagging.

This blog post looks at both the positive and negative indicators for the long-term future of the mall, with lots of photos offering empirical indicators of its economic health, which in turn support or challenge the numbers.  Finally, I list a variety of the proposed options for filling the Nordstrom space, while encourage readers to come up with their own.  Even if you aren't from Indy or don't even know it, please feel free to contribute.

If a mall implodes in a small town, is anyone there to hear it--or to care?

I’ve documented evolving retail trends with a keen eye over the past few years.  Regardless of the size of the community, certain similar features have emerged that very well may augur a monumental shift in typology, akin to what transpired in the 1950s and 60s when pedestrian-scaled downtowns lost all their commerce to suburban strip malls and shopping malls catering to the automobile.  This time, the loser is exactly what previously vanquished the downtown: the enclosed shopping mall.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or even an entry-level associate at Simon Property Group) to conclude that the era of the mall is over.  Sure, plenty of malls out there are still thriving, but you’d be hard pressed to find one person in this country who cannot think of a mall that is dying, or is already completely dead.  The last mall built in the US was The Mall at Turtle Creek in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 2006.  (Incidentally, it was the second mall to open in the Jonesboro metropolitan area; the older mall, Indian Mall—serving the community since 1967—promptly lost nearly all of its tenants, and quickly died.  Demolition crews took down everything except the still operating Sears in 2012.) While Simon (among others) proposed some malls in the latter part of the decade, all deals collapsed at the onset of the 2008 recession.  Not a single mall has broken ground in seven years.  As recently as the early 1990s, a new mall opened somewhere in the country at least every month—in the 80s, they opened practically every week.   Not only is the mall no longer the dominant hub for retail in large metro areas, it has lost out in the smaller ones as well.

I noticed this shift—already widely documented throughout major cities—in the small metropolitan area of Houma, Louisiana, where pocket neighborhood shopping districts (scattered throughout the city) and the moderately sized Southland Mall were losing out steadily to a throng of big-box stores, all lined up in a row along one of the biggest highways in town.  It seemed like residents of Houma were more than willing to drive greater distances to run the gauntlet of traffic around the superstores, rather than enjoy the convenience of a smaller retail plaza close to home.  Today, those neighborhood strip malls, close to most of the housing, generally share high levels of vacancy and disrepair.  Meanwhile, the Southland Mall clings to life, its occupancy rate at around 60%, well below the level indicative of a healthy commercial landscape.

Now, apparently, the enclosed shopping mall even struggles in municipalities so small that it’s hard to spot the competition.

The above photo depicts the Village Square Mall in Effingham, a community with a little over 12,000 inhabitants in south-central Illinois.  Truth be told, the economic conditions in Effingham are not hugely different from Houma: the regional economy has weathered significant ups and downs over the last few decades, but the population of the municipalities themselves has remained mostly stable.  Both municipalities are regional employment hubs, offering both jobs and retail offerings that serve a broader spatial area than their populations would suggest.  And in both cases, the downtowns show some evidence of revitalization, featuring locally run shops and restaurants in refurbished older buildings.  Effingham has only about one-third of the population of Houma, though, and it boasts one significant advantage: it sits at the convergence of two major thoroughfares, Interstate 70 (connecting St. Louis to Terre Haute, and eventually Indianapolis) and Interstate 57 (connecting Chicago and Champaign eventually toward Memphis).
 
No doubt this geographic blessing helped the city christen itself as “the Crossroads of Opportunity” and emboldened it to earn the status of a Micropolitan Area by the US Census Bureau, indicating that it attracts commuters well outside its city limits, much the way a metropolitan area does—except that Effingham is not populous enough to classify as a metropolitan area.  However, its centrality and influence span the entirety of Effingham County, which contains a population of 34,000 people—almost identical to the city limits of Houma. 

Thanks to these two interstates, Effingham may be preferred stop for travelers coming lengthwise across Illinois, or for those seeking a pit stop between St. Louis and Indianapolis.  In case the long-distance traveler wasn’t aware of Effingham’s regional significance, the local Cross Foundation helped erect a 198-foot steel cross structure on the outskirts of the city limits, broadly visible from a distance and dedicated just days after the September 11, 2011 attacks.

It is the region’s biggest attraction.  And, surrounding the cross in almost every direction is a none-too-surprising industry.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get any good photos, but Google Streetview offers a perfectly good representation, both here and a bit further to the north. It should come as no surprise that Effingham boasts a flourishing logistics and trucking industry, no doubt providing the city with tax revenue that explains its well-paved streets, abundant sidewalks and jogging paths, and a well-maintained downtown.

But nowhere along the I-70 or I-57 corridors does a motorist encounter a sign for the Village Square Mall.  Taking another look at it, it’s easy to see why it gets neglected.  The photos at the top of this essay actually showed the good wing of the mall, with a still operational J.C. Penney.  But what about the other wing?  Pivoting to the left, this is what one would see:

And then a bit further to the left:

A pretty bleak scene.  It was never a large mall; it probably only has space for 25 inline tenants.  But that parking lot can sure accommodate a lot of cars.

As for the interior, it offers about what one might expect, given the abundance of cars milling around out front.

I was pretty taken by the tenant at the other long-vacant anchor store (opposite the J.C. Penney):

Obviously I’m giving away the time period that I visited the mall, but I have never seen a haunted house in a mall’s dead space before.  Essentially, haunted houses such as these operate in much the same fashion any other holiday-themed pop-up store, viable only a few weeks before Halloween.  Then, no doubt, the large retail space returned to its usual vacancy.  Here’s the outside view:

A neglected mall such as Village Square would probably suffer serious vandalism if it were in a more high-crime area.  Effingham doesn’t strike me as that sort of place; so instead, the low levels of security and supervision elicit some amiable eccentricity:

I was about halfway through writing this essay when I learned that the well-known site Labelscar had already covered this tiny mall a couple years ago.  Now I’m trying to find ways to distinguish my essay from the one on there.  That site offers a broader array of interior photos, though they’re older, and our primary observation/argument is just about the same: Village Square Mall has endured a steady decline over many years.  The writer for Labelscar claims that a series of non-local property managers showed persistent ineptitude in operating the mall and attracting tenants, and I wouldn’t doubt it.  But the general patterns of development around Effingham are what really stacked the deck against the Village Square Mall.

The map above perfectly demonstrates the problem.  The blue rectangle south of central Effingham shows the general location of the Village Square Mall parcel.  It’s not far from downtown (in Effingham, everything’s close), but notice that the majority of the street grid and development has occurred in a northerly direction.  In addition, the double-barreled interstate I-70/57 wraps around the northern and western city limits—far from the south.  Even if the Village Square Mall were worthy of promotion along the interstate, no amount of signage would make it a convenient destination after getting off the exit ramp.

The map above also reveals what has most likely lead to the mall’s virtual demise.  A purple ellipse on the northwest side of town shows the new retail hub for Effingham, right where busy State Route 33 meets I-57/70 at the exit ramp.  I neglected to photograph the retail at the “Avenue of Mid-America”, but once again Google Streetview comes to the rescue here and a bit to the east, but still in that general location.   You’ve got the usual suspects for shopping and dining: Wal-Mart, Ruby Tuesday, Menards, Arby’s, Starbucks, T.G.I. Friday’s, Cracker Barrel, and a slew of hotels catering to all price ranges.  To the north, sitting amidst an undeveloped field in Effingham’s “frontier”, is a Kohl’s.  Given the persistent success of this supremely well-run company, this land will undoubtedly morph into further big-box retail in the near future, if it hasn’t already (the Google Streetview dates from 2008).

No surprises there.  Much like Houma, the preferred retail hub for Effingham has become even more decentralized than before, lined up along a busy highway that maximizes visibility to the thousands of outsiders who pass through this town on any given day, thanks to those two interstates.  This migration is hardly earth-shattering.  What leaves me scratching my head is the original inspiration for the location of the Village Square Mall.  Why put it to the south?  Was there ever a point when that seemed to be the growing side of town?  If, as Labelscar claims, the mall opened in 1972 through the initiative of a local developer, why didn’t he investigate the construction plans for the interstates?  By the early 1970s, huge portions of these interstates were already complete, and it is likely that the Effington “wraparound” was fully designed, if not already operative.  Did he just have his sights on what most likely has always been the cheaper land?

It’s possible that Village Square would have declined even if it had been front and center along the interstate.  After all, plenty of other malls have sat a stone’s throw from a major highway and croaked in spite of everything; I chronicled the well-known Bannister Mall in Kansas City a few months ago. Not a trace of the Bannister Mall remains, even though I-435 runs immediately to the west.  But Effingham has another peer city in much closer proximity than Houma: Mount Vernon, Illinois, just 70 miles to the south.  I don’t know much about Mount Vernon, except that it, too, sits at the junction of two interstates (I-57 and I-64), has a similar population (15,000), and claims a similarly sized retail hub: the Times Square Mall.  Most online buzz suggests, however, that the Times Square Mall is in much better shape, with three fully operational anchors (Sears, Peebles, J.C. Penney).  It even has a website!  Times Square Mall can claim these victories, despite the fact that Mount Vernon shows evidence of lower economic health than Effingham: it has a higher poverty rate and more notable population loss over the past decade.  But…the Times Square Mall sits just a quarter mile from the busy I-57/64 interstate (probably visible to passers-by), and its on the west side of town—the same direction in which the town’s urbanization seems to be advancing.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Effinghamians go south to Mount Vernon to shop; certainly not the other way around.  Perhaps the Village Square Mall has succumbed to the retail tsunami sweeping America, or it could be something simpler: location, location, location.  The original developer opted for cheap land rather than good land, and though it has taken forty years, eventually the time has come to pay the devil his due.

MONTAGE: Stratification across the river.

Late last year I featured an article on the unusual Oxford Valley Mall in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a mostly upper-middle income suburban region of Philadelphia.  It’s a distinctive mall because it’s simultaneously both low-rent and affluent: it has such high-end tenants as Williams Sonoma or Swarovski, but it also has Five Below, Dollar Hut, and a number of mom-and-pop establishments that you’d typically only see in struggling or dying malls.  This is unusual, since most malls either assume a uniformly upward trajectory, or they manifest their gradual decline.  Meanwhile, Oxford Valley has a higher vacancy rate than it probably should, especially since one of the four department stores has been empty for several years.  But it’s still attracting new tenants, both fancy and downmarket: Sephora (the former) and H&R Block (the latter) are opening in the mall over the upcoming weeks.  So what’s the verdict on Oxford Valley?  Is it on the fritz or will it persevere?

I’m not from Bucks County and haven’t gotten to witness it over the years, so it’s hard for me to form much of a judgment.  But it’s not the only mall in the area that suffers from this strange split personality.  Just across the river, in Windsor Township, New Jersey, the Quaker Bridge Mall must grapple with an equally uncertain future. 

It’s not far at all: less than 15 miles from Oxford Valley.  Like the Pennsylvania mall, Simon Property Group manages the space.  In fact, the story here is so similar to its predecessor, I’m going to intervene minimally with text and let the pictures tell most of the story.

Quaker Bridge Mall opened in 1975, just two years after Oxford Valley.  Like its Pennsylvania counterpart, Quaker Bridge sits in a mostly affluent suburban area, just a stone’s throw away from Route 1.  It, too, contains over one million square feet across two floors, though Oxford Valley has it beat in size by about a quarter million.  (Quaker Bridge just barely passes the one million mark.)  Both malls feature four department stores, though only Quaker Bridge can claim occupancy in all of them.  The ubiquitous J.C. Penney, Sears, and Macy’s take three of the spaces, while Quaker Bridge’s most prestigious department store is the Lord and Taylor, featured above.

In addition, if one were to judge the affluence of a mall by its interior aesthetics, Quaker Bridge would probably come out ahead.

The shiny, white faux-marble floors and the relative lack of ornamentation evoke contemporary notions of privileged consumption a bit more precisely than the dowdy, middlebrow appearance of Oxford Valley.  To top it off, Simon Property Group (50% owner as well as manager) was investing in a full renovation at the end of 2012.

Apparently, until recently, Simon had bolder ambitions for this property: the company hoped to inject a distinctively upscale vibe through a 600,000 square foot expansion that would include Nordstrom, Nieman Marcus, and about 100 new inline stores and restaurants.  The recession a few years later put the kibosh on those plans, and these days the renovations are a bit more modest: new flooring, ceilings, lighting, signage, hand railings, and landscaping.  And apparently within the past year, Simon leased a newly constructed space to The Cheesecake Factory attached to the mall and widely visible from the parking lot.

The presence of a recognized restaurant chain at Quaker Bridge further enhances its advantage over Oxford Valley; while the Bucks County mall can claim a few outparcel restaurants, none are physically connected to the mall.  A drive around the perimeter of Oxford Valley reveals nothing more than a blank wall; the mall orients itself completely inward.  Simon also has made no announcements regarding any upgrades at Oxford Valley.  Regardless of the scaled-down ambitions at Quaker Bridge, the fact that Simon Property Group has invested in both renovation and new restaurant construction suggests the company’s confidence in the long-term viability in the mall.

All of the above conditions indicate that Quaker Bridge enjoys more auspicious economic forecasts than its counterpart across the Delaware River.  But does it?   To the right of The Cheesecake Factory in the photo above is an entrance to the mall, and as soon as a visitor walks through the doors, this is what he or she sees:

The checkerboard motif coupled with intermittent yellow accents suggests California Pizza Kitchen to me, though if Quaker Bridge hosted a branch of this popular restaurant in the past, it must have folded a long time ago; I can find no online evidence that it existed here.  Across from the old CPK?

The photo featured earlier, with the renovation explanations, also shrouds a huge vacant in-line storefront.  This entire minor entrance corridor is vacant.  Proceeding through this passageway to the mall’s main commercial spine, the vacancies are glaring:

Quite a few on the upper floor as well.  It has reliable tenants, like New York and Company:

And a Hallmark store, which seems to be more prevalent in the Northeast than it does in the Midwest.

The typically commodious Forever 21 seems to be taking a major space in the near future:

But much of the floor is patchy.

That Wendy’s is a real oddity.  It’s all by itself on the second floor—no other restaurants nearby.  In mall milieus, one usually finds a Wendy’s in either the food court or an outparcel in the vast parking lot.  The fact that the Wendy’s is isolated reveals two other leasing hurdles the mall is trying to overcome.  The first of these hurdles is that the mall currently lacks any real food court.

Apparently one is on the way, but, in the meantime, the management has crammed remaining fast-food eateries in an unpleasant passageway leading to another mall exit.

Not much to look at, and the eatery options are meager.  Despite the thick crowds, this hallway cannot attract better tenants than a locally owned convenience store:

One typically only sees the likes of QB Express in seriously struggling malls.  The second of the two hurdles that explains the oddly located Wendy’s is that the mall didn’t need an appropriate tenant at this space; it just needed any tenant.  To put it frankly, Quaker Bridge will take whatever tenant it can get to put a dent in its approximately 20% in-line vacancy rate.

So maybe Quaker Bridge is floundering?  The Star-Ledger article that I cited earlier acknowledged that the mall recently ushered in a slew of new upscale online tenants, such as Michael Kors, Sephora, Teavana, and Sur la Table.  It also can claim the following choosy tenants:

And a few other specialty retailers are on their way:

But the current retail mix does not seem like the type that could usher in a Neiman Marcus.  I was quite surprised to see cash-for-gold store at this mall—a service that spouted like mushrooms about the time of the Great Recession.

And just take a look at the mall’s deadest wing, over by J.C. Penney:

The notion that J.C. Penney would be the least active section of a mall surprised me; after all, most of my mall tours of the past have proven that Sears is the typical Achilles’ heel.  (I blogged about it a while ago.)  But the general profile of the J.C Penney wing at Quaker Bridge is emptiness or unknown mom-and-pop stores.

As far as I can tell, this is the only location in the nation for Pelle and Company.  It doesn’t seem to have a website.  Just a few yards away, Belgium Jewelers reminds me of the sort of retailer one might see in a second or third-tier mall in Dubai:

Peering over the balcony to the floor below, witness another unknown:

The only other location for this mom-and-pop called Rubee?  None other than Oxford Valley Mall.  Rubee doesn’t have its own domain, but at least it has a Facebook page.  Elsewhere on the lower floor are a few more obscurities:

The Grand Fragrances store again looks like exactly something from Dubai of the 1990s.  Another little-known vendor along the J.C. Penney wing seems to have folded.

Meanwhile, Arthur Murray Dance Studio may be a national name, but its reduced hours and relative lack of impromptu visitors makes it an undesirable fit for a major mall.

After all, it was already closing down on the busy weekend night that I took these photos.  Simon Property wouldn’t even consider a dance studio if this mall commanded top-dollar leases.  The bleakest part of the J.C. Penney wing, however, is the cluster of inline stores directly abutting the entrance to J.C. Penney’s itself.

A Payless Shoes in a mall with upscale aspirations?  Not likely.  But J.C. Penney has suffered meager revenues these past few years, and, despite all the renovations taking place at the Quaker Bridge Mall, the management at J.C. Penney’s has apparently postponed updating this particular branch to the new “jcp” logo that is becoming more commonplace.  Then again, since it’s the third logoin as many years, it’s probably understandable that a floundering department store isn’t willing to hedge its bets at a conspicuously transitional mall.

As mentioned earlier, demographics around Quaker Bridge loosely echo those of Oxford Valley: both are mostly upper-middle class suburban areas with large foreign-born populations, which lean poorer in the older urban sections and wealthier in the newer exurbs.  This New Jersey side may be more extreme though: just a few miles away down Route 1 from Quaker Bridge sits the state capital, Trenton, a swatch of intensely concentrated poverty.  Conversely, the neighboring suburbs of Princeton and West Windsor Township far surpass anything in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in terms of affluence.  But Quaker Bridge also hosts a more intensive concentration of retail within a mile radius, because several newish “power centers” (inward turning strip malls) stretch along this same segment of Route 1: Mercer Mall, Nassau Park Mall, Windsor Green, and the Square at West Windsor.  The purlieus of Quaker Bridge Mall offer a ton of shopping options, all of them competitors of Simon Property Group with discrete goals of skimming away some of the choicier tenants at the forty-year-old enclosed mall.

Quaker Bridge might be more worthy than Oxford Valley of a follow-up blog in a year or two; it is, after all, under renovation (albeit a modest one), and it would be interesting to see if Simon’s original vision ever materializes.  At present, though, all the judgments I made in my Oxford Valley article—income disparities, the over representation of malls, and the increasingly diverse consumer base—still apply at Quaker Bridge.  The economic fortunes of these two populous, culturally dissimilar states may ultimately prove the stronger determining factor regarding which (if any) mall prevails.