When public spaces reflect modern life--by not reflecting anything at all.

Just over a month ago, the City of Indianapolis eagerly heralded the opening of a new Marsh grocery store downtown—the second within the Mile Square, which has in recent years exploded in apartment construction.  The other, older store still loosely refers to itself under the name of O’Malia’s, a smaller Indianapolis shain bought out long ago by Marsh, though a handful of stores survive today under the O’Malia name.  It’s only about six blocks away, on the edge of the Lockerbie Square neighborhood, in a converted old Sears and Roebuck Department Store building.  The new Marsh occupies two floors and 43,000 square feet, as part of the five-story Axis mixed-use development near the Canal Walk.  Although the Lockerbie Square O’Malia’s has long tried to satisfy the downtown grocery demand, it was much more in keeping with a neighborhood corner grocery store and never had the feel of a regional supermarket.  It was satisfactory but hardly poised keep pace with the rapidly growing downtown population, as well as the increasingly spendy denizens of surrounding gentrifying neighborhoods.  In short, central Indianapolis apparently had far greater income density that the spread of grocery stores would suggest, and it was underrepresented.

Thus, enter the new Marsh.

At the time of these photos, the facility had been open about six weeks, even though the apartments within the Axis building are not yet complete.  I didn’t spend enough time roaming the aisles to get a sense of the quality of its offerings.  But aesthetically, it almost definitely fills a demand niche.

The Marsh’s interior is like slicing open an avocado, and maybe a tomato right next to it. It’s not a bad idea, and those shades of green (and the occasional bright red) certainly seem au courant enough.   Shiny and new is critical, because the Marsh Supermarkets brand has lagged considerably in recent years, though it was once the defining grocery store of the Indianapolis metro.  Former CEO Don Marsh’s opulent life, rumors of mistresses and financial mismanagement escalated from the late 1990s until around 2006; the company inevitably dominated news headlines for all the wrong reasons, and its share of the local grocery market plunged below Kroger, Meijer and Walmart.  Its nadir may have been the late 2006 purchase by Sun Capital, a private equity firm out of Florida.  Whether the new owners successfully re-branded it or its image was strong enough to prevail on its own, Marsh has endured, though still at a shadow of its former self.  It shuttered all of its Illinois locations, reigned in the majority of Ohio stores, discontinued its spin-off brands like LoBills (and most O’Malia’s) and announced another wave of closures at the beginning of this year.  Nonetheless, through the Marsh/O’Malia’s at Lockerbie and this new location, the declining chain dominates Indianapolis’ downtown grocery market, at least for the time being.  And this latest is definitely trying to splash a new coat of paint on the company’s overall image.

The aesthetics of grocery stores is something that I suspect resonates in our unconsciousness, far more than the blogosphere suggests.  After all, supermarkets seem more resilient to the encroaching dominion of online shopping than a lot of other retail.  Sure, some people feel confident ordering groceries online.  (Indianapolis is home to a successful cybergrocer; Green B.E.A.N. Delivery has grown into a multi-state enterprise.) But most people still prefer choosing their own groceries, particularly when it comes to selecting the produce, meats, and baked goods firsthand.  Thus, how a store looks can influence heavily how much people are willing to patronize a store.  And this Marsh looks contemporary—a stark comparison to the surviving Marsh locations in less chic parts of town, most of which have interiors that evoke the 1970s when they were built.  My suspicion is that renovating a grocery store is particularly capital intensive.  And since they sell such a large quantity of non-durable goods, with new shipments arriving daily, it is nearly impossible to upgrade a supermarket and keep it operational for its customers.  And when a location completely closes, even if just for a couple months, most of its clientele will find somewhere else…and they may never return.  Thus, grocery store interiors across the country are particularly likely to remain frozen in time.  Far more likely than, say, apparel stores, which also have to stay fresh to fight off that online competition.

From murals of the soon-to-change Indianapolis skyline to its subtle mezzanine that may go mostly unused, the new downtown Marsh in the Axis is as effective at conveying trendy urban living today is it is likely to look dated in fifteen years.  What seems particularly telling—and most reflective of the importance of novelty in design—are those public restrooms.

The swimming-pool-mosaic look has taken over in recent years, as popular a tactic in domestic kitchens as it is in gym locker rooms.  It will seriously date itself by the year 2020, but doggone it, it looks good right now.  These small, antiseptic restrooms in the new Marsh also reveal a certain feature that may not go out of style quite as soon.

The restroom is more significant for what it lacks: a mirror above the sink.  More and more businesses are opting to exclude mirrors from their restrooms altogether, much to the chagrin of the narcissists out there.  Why?  It could be because of a growing concern for privacy and the use of restrooms for unlawful voyeurism; after all, stories routinely hit the local news about cameras installed in public restrooms to spy on people.  Mirrors only expand the potential lines of sight that peeping toms can exploit.

But the bigger problem with mirrors in public restrooms is, unfortunately, the vandals out there.  This observation is probably axiomatic to anyone who has ever had to use a public restroom in a busy urban setting—which covers the vast majority of the adult population.  Mirrors harbor graffiti and its companion, the scratchitti, in equal measure.  In most restrooms, they’re right behind the interior stalls for suffering from various markings and tags.  Most Marsh locations are much more suburban, whereas this one, occupying the street level of a building with zero setback, is far more likely to receive walk-in pedestrian traffic that exclusively uses the restroom.  Thus, these restrooms will get more users, they’ll be harder to monitor, and the vandals will soon come out of the woodwork.

Or at least they would.  Removing the mirror deprives them of a popular canvas—a small omission that inconveniences a few people while allowing one more safeguard against any chances of diminishing the store’s aesthetic integrity.  Six weeks after its opening, the Indianapolis Marsh remains free of nail polish tags on its mosaic tiles or messages on the men’s room stalls.  And the ambiance of a fresh bowl of guacamole pervades.  Bon appétit.

Separate the ersatz and collect up all the cream.

While the interplay between the built and natural environments occupies the bulk of my ruminations, every now and then I can’t help but indulge myself.  And I step fully into the world of pure imagination.  The aisles of a Meijer discount hypermarket store might not be exactly what Roald Dahl had in mind through his chocolate factory (or Leslie Bricusse), but it’s just about as fabricated as a movie set... 

…and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  For those who live in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois or Kentucky, Meijer is as much a part of the shopping landscape as Walmart.  It’s a fierce competitor in these five states, and I have no doubt it continues to frustrate the executives in Bentonville, Arkansas—my suspicion is that Walmart’s market share in this part of the country is lower than it otherwise would be, thanks to this modest chain that germinated just outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan exactly 80 years ago, making it nearly 30 years older than the world’s largest retailer.  But how did Meijer remain confidently ensconced in its Midwestern niche when Walmart dethroned so many others?  (Ames, Pharmor, and Venture went the way of passenger pigeon well over a decade ago, even if some telltale labelscars remain.)

I could expound on how Meijer has effectively cramped Walmart’s style for a few decades now, all while refusing ever to go public.  It avoids far-flung locations like its home state’s Upper Peninsula, no doubt saving it a fortune in logistical costs.  It expands its territory slowly, preferring to densify within its five signature states for the time being; rumors of an inaugural location in Wisconsin have yet to materialize.  It has attempted to broaden its scope through standalone discount department stores (without the groceries), pharmacies, warehouse clubs (like Sam’s Club), and specialty clothing.  None of these concepts proved fruitful, so the home office closed them within a few years.  Yet it continues to flourish in that cluster of great lakes states (and Kentucky).  Last year, Meijer opted to open a store in the Detroit city limits, seen in the photo above--a breakthrough of sorts, since many other major retailers (including the goliath from Arkansas) have shunned the Motor City.  These conservative strategies may have helped Meijer survive the competition that Walmart decimated, but I’d like to think another tactic has helped give the regional chain its edge.

Virtually every Meijer that I’ve seen has an entire row in its well-maintained grocery devoted to ethnic foods.  The specific location often dictates exactly what options it sells, but regardless of the offerings, most evidence suggests that the company has done its research.  Rarely will you see Walmart accommodate an ethnic group (such as Amish buggy parking in Northern Indiana). But online forums like British Expats routinely refer to Meijer—not Walmart—as the go-to for hard-to-find European goodies, and most locations have at least a small but well-stocked British shelves, including the one in the Detroit suburb of Allen Park featured above.  This particular location, with a trade area that includes sizable Mexican, Polish, and Arab populations, not surprisingly offers generous Latino, Eastern European and Middle Eastern sections.  It also distinguishes the Indian subcontinent from the rest of Asia.

But what really caught my attention was the adjective before these regional references.

We see “authentic Italian” followed by “pasta”.  Does this imply that the pasta section, for whatever reason, is otherwise inauthentic?  Or is it pasta from other countries?  Meijer also splits hairs on the other side of the aisle, providing its customers with “authentic Mexican”—

and “Mexican” without the authenticity.

Tex-Mex.  Or American Mexican.  A taqueria versus Taco Bell.  Various studies have shown three ethnic cuisines in the United States consistently vie for the title of most popular—and, not surprisingly, the most ubiquitous.  While the US has more Chinese restaurants than McDonald’s, Italian cuisine has long rated most highly.  But the surge of Mexicans and the cultural influence have elicited a concomitant increase in the popularity of cuisine from south of the border.  Virtually all ethnicities, however, can claim a rise in the popularity of their cuisines.  Thirty years ago, Thai and Indian restaurants were relatively rare outside of the biggest metro areas; now they are fairly easy to find in a small city of 50,000.

The inevitable result of this?  We see more Americanized knock-offs, as well as Meijer’s need to distinguish between the “authentic” (often imported) and the bastardized.  No doubt in another decade, with the ascendancy of falafel, hummus, and shawarma, Middle Eastern cuisine will approach mainstream status, just as it already has in Metro Detroit, home of one of the largest Arab populations outside of ethnically Arab countries.  We already have hummus flavors that would constitute blasphemy in many parts of the world, adulterated to meet mainstream American tastes.  The “authentic” partition in the grocery aisle will soon envelop new nations, impelling greater need to distinguish idiosyncratic, ethnically precise merchandise from its vanilla counterparts…and another opportunity for Meijer to capitalize on something it already does well.

Retrograde retail: there’s weakness in numbers.

Some businesses just fail to quit, though it’s not necessarily from lack of trying.

And if all the negatives in that sentence dilute the denotation, that might be the whole point…at least when the businesses in question are former retail leviathans like Kmart and Sears.

I’ve written about both chains many times in the past on this blog, but little to nothing since 2010 or so.  Truthfully, neither has changed much.  The two brand names, formerly separate companies but merged since 2005, continue to hobble along, shedding a few of the most underperforming stores each quarter, while even the ones that linger still leave onlookers scratching their heads.  How do these retailers—now essentially one company called Sears Holdings Corporation—manage to stay in business?

To a certain extent, they employ the Star Trek mantra: going where no man has gone before…or, to be frank, where no one else is willing to go anymore.  So they aren’t exactly doing it boldly.  Kmart’s approach (which I blogged about four years ago) frequently involves lingering in early automobile-oriented suburban areas that peaked in the late 1950s—the point in time when Kmart was still a juggernaut for discount shopping.  However, these aging suburbs, which typically offered the coveted homeownership ideal to an emergent middle class within a car-dependent milieu, are no longer so savory.  Check out the surviving few Kmarts in Indianapolis, from the blog post above.  Generally speaking, these areas have declined enough economically that the robust Walmart won’t touch them.  In Kansas City, the formerly thriving Bannister Mall area began to tank in the 1990s; today, it represents one of the largest expanses of blighted suburban retail I have ever seen anywhere, featured in this prominent post.  But, as of the fall of 2012, the Kmart at Bannister survives…pretty much the only well-known sign amid the retail wreckage.  (Well, that and the notorious Burlington Coat Factory, but that’s another story.)

Then there’s Sears, whose brand image isn’t quite as weak these days as Kmart, mainly because it still clings to its aggressively middlebrow origins, a contrast from the always low-budget offerings at Kmart.  (Though Kmart has managed the more effective viral commercials in recent years.)  The department store remains a staple at most middle-class malls.  But enclosed shopping malls ain’t what they used to be, for the most part, and if a mall is starting to show weakness in the form of diminishing occupancy levels, it’s often safe to guess which area will get hit the hardest.  That’s right—the Sears wing.  I blogged about it awhile ago, at the primarily successful Castleton Square Mall in Indianapolis, where vacancy was low throughout this super-regional shopping hub…except for the hallway leading to the Sears.

Meanwhile, Cortana Mall in Baton Rouge took the ailing Sears corridor to a whole new level.  My first trip to Cortana in December 2005 confronted me generally busy shopping center, even though locals had longed viewed Cortana as the “other mall” in Baton Rouge, at least since Mall of Louisiana opened in 1997 in a more affluent part of town.  In 2005, most of Cortana flourished (perhaps due to the holidays), except for the hallway leading to Sears, which was overwhelmingly populated with local, mom-and-pop tenants…the type that pervade a struggling mall.  Jump ahead to April 2010—the time of my blog article—and Cortana was peppered with vacancies throughout the structure, while the Sears corridor was dead as a doornail.  Pretty much no inline tenants left, except for Sears.  Even in the most vibrant of malls, the Sears wing tends to host the highest concentration of off-name retailers, clearly suggesting that 1) national brand names don’t want to lease space close to Sears, and 2) mall management, desperate to maintain good occupancy rates, must lower the cost of leasing space, consequently attracting retailers who cannot afford the higher costs in the corridors leading to Macy’s or Dillard’s.  Thus, Sears gets the off brands…when it’s lucky.

A recent trip to suburban Detroit revealed another example of an anemic shopping hub anchored by Sears, but this time within a different typology.

 

Sure, it doesn’t really look that different from your typical Sears in a mega-mall.

But it’s a freestanding Sears—formerly a mainstay of American retail but now relatively uncommon.  It is untethered to any larger mall; no other department stores are nearby.  While the standalone Sears might still occasionally splay out along the highway in the purlieus of a small city (under 25,000 people, for example) the one in the photos below is anything but rural.  It’s in Lincoln Park, a blue-collar inner-ring suburb belonging to Detroit’s “Downriver” communities, which is the local term for the extensive concatenation of municipalities that band along the Detroit River as it eventually distends into Lake Erie.  A fully built-out suburb that exploded after World War II, Lincoln Park is also surrounded in almost all directions by other tightly packed suburbs from more or less the same time period.

Freestanding Sears operations made sense in large towns or small cities surrounded by farmland, since those settlements didn’t necessarily have the trade area to support a regional mall.  But Lincoln Park can claim hundreds of thousands of people within a 10-mile radius.  Perhaps, because of this, one could speculate that this particular Sears serves as a more effective anchor than others: not only does it serve a huge trade area, but it isn’t competing with other, more robust department stores like Macy’s.

Such a guess would be wrong.

This is the remaining strip mall attached to the Lincoln Park Sears.  In the first photo, the edge of the Sears portion is partly visible on the far left.

It’s almost completely vacant, with the exception of a Dollar Tree and an outparcel Big Boy restaurant.

Predictably, a shopping plaza such vacancy levels won’t shell out the cost for basic common area maintenance; drivers have to proceed with caution to avoid huge potholes or neglected debris.

Does Sears Holding Company, parent of Sears and Kmart, know something the rest of us don’t?  Both chains are born from major Midwestern urban centers—Sears from the Chicago area, and Kmart from metro Detroit (in Troy, MI, just 25 miles northeast of Lincoln Park) but customers in their home states aren’t showing any greater loyalty to their brands than they are anywhere else.  The business expansion practices that impelled these brands to stretch from coast to coast may very well be doing them in; most Midwesterners don’t even know the brands came from their part of the country.  Compare this to southern department stores Dillard’s and Belk, which are still mainstays south of the Mason-Dixon and have ever so slightly begun to expand, though never to the ubiquity of the two former titans above.

I will be amazed if this Lincoln Park Sears is still operating two years from now.  Beyond that, I see only two other plausible courses of action: the company sheds virtually all of its locations outside the Midwest and concentrates its energy by reinvigorating loyalty in its region of origin (which happens a lot with restaurant chains); or, it folds altogether as a brick-and-mortar entity and becomes an online wraith, akin to the formerly pre-eminent but now essentially defunct Montgomery Wards (as Wards.com) and Service Merchandise.  It’s not exactly boldly going anywhere, but the cybermarket offers the best chance scoping fertile pastures when finicky customers reject all but the choicest grapes on the vineyard.

When egalitarianism rests on two wheels.

With scores of urban advocacy blogs out there, I find it hard to imagine that I have much to add to the conversation on the defining characteristics of Mackinac Island, Michigan.  Even if the northerly island in Lake Huron—a former Jesuit mission, Ojibwa sacred site, and strategic military encampment—elicits little more than a head-scratching among people from the coasts, nearly everyone in the Midwest is at least familiar with the name.  And in the summer, the isle draws tens of thousands of visitors daily from downstate and elsewhere in the Great Lakes region.  Even those who consider the Great Lakes a pale substitute for a genuine sand beach would probably concede that the town itself is fairly picturesque.

While most visitors to the Island will first encounter the dense cluster of buildings along Main Street, the overwhelming majority of the 3.8 square mile island is unsettled.  Not only is the entire island a State Park, but the National Park Service also classifies it as a Historic Landmark. The impeccable condition of the buildings should therefore come as no surprise.  What distinguishes it from most other historic districts, however, is that it shows little to no evidence that the historic preservation movement that emerged in the mid 20^th century spawned a revival of Mackinac.  It’s difficult if not impossible to spot any telltale indications that the town was ever down-and-out: few, if any, architectural embellishments fail to conform to the rest of the structure; not a single building (some of which are over two centuries old) is in even slightest disrepair; no parking lots where a building once stood.  It looks like the town never went out of style.  And, to be frank, Mackinac probably never did suffer.  It earned popularity with tourists after the Civil War, then quickly expanded to serve as the premier summer destination for wealthy downstate industrialists during the Victorian era, the time period influencing the preponderance of the town’s architecture.

Generalizing though it may be, the nation’s pioneer spirit has always valued novelty—whether through our persistently decentralizing metropolitan areas, or for our storied history of domestic vacation destinations that peak suddenly then decline to a permanent malaise (Atlantic City, Monticello NY, Salton Sea).  Or, conversely, those vacation destinations that have demonstrated sea legs for remaining viable over many decades—Las Vegas, Disneyland—primarily because they have reinvented themselves every few years through the demolition and construction of new attractions.  Mackinac Island has done none of this, yet has continued to age gracefully.  It’s an outlier.

Of the three aforementioned preservation indicators listed above, however, one should stand out in particular: the absence of parking lots in the space of buildings.  Mackinac has no parking lots because it doesn’t need them.  It has no cars.  The island’s government passed a law forbidding motorized vehicles as long ago as 1898, a time well before the motorized vehicle had become commonplace.  The law’s original aim was promote clean, noise-free air and to avoid startling the town’s horses; subsequent leadership has maintained the law ever since, with few exceptions for snowmobiles, shipment trucks, and emergency vehicles.  But no residents or entrepreneurs on the island can own a car.

The absence of cars on Mackinac translates to a modified system of rules for human settlement, which manifests itself in the look of the town.

Not surprisingly, roads don’t need to be particularly wide to accommodate on-street parking, and parking lots are unheard of.  The town itself doesn’t look particularly unconventional in terms of the positioning of structures—instead, it looks almost hyperconventional, an unsullied facsimile of Main Street Americana.

Even outside of the most urbanized parts of the island, a dense network of paths crisscrosses through the woods and the hills, almost exclusively intended for horses and bicyclists.

And the perimeter of the island features a complete multi-use path, which many of the beachfront homes depend upon for access.

And, of course, the inordinate cluster of bikes parked together.

One might easily confuse such a vista for Copenhagen or Amsterdam, but in this case the bikes are almost uniformly in good condition—no need to grime them up to deter thieves.  And the proof is the fact that virtually none of them are locked or secured.

If it all seems impossibly idyllic, it’s likely that you formed the same conclusions that I had, at least until I set foot on the island.  I’ll concede that I was expecting a bohemian enclave, with provocative murals on the sides of buildings, purveyors of hemp products, unwashed street musicians, and vegan pastry shops.  And if that guess was way off base (and it was), at the very least I was anticipating something a little bourgeois-bohemian—a resort town for affluent urbanites, filled with expensive pet salons, micro-brewpubs, Asian tapas, or wine bars.  Strike two.  Maybe these were bad assumptions on my part, to think such a settlement would thrive in such a remote village.  But such communities do exist: Vermont is filled with hippie hamlets like my first description, and Michigan can claim more than its share of ritzy waterfront towns that attract weekenders from Chicago and Detroit (Petoskey, MI is the first that comes to mind).

But Mackinac Island is neither of these.

The most famous comestible for sale along Main Street is fudge, offered from a variety of vendors.  Other shops display different flavors of hot pretzels, Native American-inspired crafts, family dining, soda fountains.  And so forth.  Superficial as it may seem for me to define the character of a community through its retail, it is a judgment call we all make in our assessments of unfamiliar urbanized places.  And what it indicates is that Mackinac Island is, for the most part, a slice of Middle America.  Nary a whiff of counterculture.  I guess it got the bourgeois part right.

Was I naïve in expecting Mackinac to appeal to society’s fringe?  Probably.  But since the island’s most enduring claim to fame is its century-old ban on automobiles—in the state that serves as the cradle of the automotive industry, no less!—it’s understandable to expect the community to push its anti-establishmentarianism to greater extremes.  But, as far as I can tell, it really doesn’t.  Instead, we get chubby Midwesterners on bicycles.

In many ways, this is a greater marvel than if Mackinac were filled with hippies, or hipsters, or Luddite militias.  The fact remains that banning cars is unorthodox just about anywhere in the world, and such a gesture could have easily scared away the peak of society’s bell curve.  After all, most people crave convenience on their vacations, and yet here is a community that outlaws one of the most quintessential American creature comforts.  And middle class families flock here anyway.  And while some opt for the horse-drawn shuttles to view the town, many more rent bikes.

I’m probably being a bit unfair to Middle America in my astonishment—and more than a little patronizing.  But, in many regards, Mackinac is wonderful because it’s so normal. It aggregates a population that, though not necessarily averse to bike-riding, is certainly unlikely treat it as a utilitarian means of getting around—and these vacationers are even less likely to take a hardline stance toward bicycle advocacy, the way the fringe groups do.  They’re recreational bicyclists back home (if they use bikes at all), but on Mackinac, getting around by bike is both utilitarian and recreational.  No militancy to be found.  Yet Mackinac is militant about its ban on motorized vehicles.  The accomplishment of Mackinac Island vaguely resembles the achievement of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail—a shared use path through the Circle City’s downtown, less interesting for attracting hipsters (we knew they’d use it) than it is for luring Mom and Dad and the kids from the suburbs.  It effectively democratized bicycle riding by making it much less intimidating.  I suppose Indy’s achievement is greater than Mackinac’s, since it’s easy not to be afraid of biking the streets of a small town when the streets have no cars.  (Indy obviously still has more than its share of vehicles on the roads.)  But the implementation of this Mackinac law and its unlikely pairing with mainstream culture still makes the island more of a peculiarity.

Mackinac’s ability to perpetuate this ban ad infinitum may depend on a few other embedded advantages the town has over other enclaves.  First of all, the community is really only bustling five months of the year at most; otherwise, population plunges to below 500 people.  Bike-dependency is unlikely to demonstrate such widespread appeal during northern Michigan’s long and unforgiving winters.  Secondly, its island status means it discriminates who wants to arrive there, as well as who can arrive.  Passers-by just don’t stumble onto the community.  By paying for a ferry, visitors have already largely bought into the way of life while they’re there.  And the geography fosters a sense of comfort impossible to replicate if it were part of the mainland.  Even if crime does occur, it’s clear from the absence of bike locks that no one perceives it to be a problem. It’s hard to steal bikes too far on a 4 square mile island in which 99% of the people arrive by ferry.  (Though I guess people could take bikes on the ferry and claim they belong to them?)

If I were more of a cynic, I could see these two advantages (the isolation and the seasonality) as inextricable with Mackinac’s biggest cultural drawback: people like it precisely because it’s an escapist novelty, meaning that all but the few hundred year-round residents are perfectly happy to return to the comfortable, auto-dependent suburbs of Detroit on Sunday evening.  The characteristics that make Mackinaw distinctive also preclude its replicability anywhere else.  But since I don’t think the abolition of cars makes for pragmatic policy in most of the country (at least not in jurisdictions much bigger than this town), I resign myself to appreciate the island’s broadly accessible charms on their own terms.  Mackinac is just fine without the car-hating counter-revolutionaries.  At least everybody has a good way to burn the calories from all that fudge.

Retail's retreat from risk.

Forgive the hiatus.  I just relocated to the city featured in this article.  Set in metro Detroit (the first, no doubt, among many), it’s straightforward enough that it doesn’t really demand a long introduction or exposition.

From the outside, this unusual shopping center looks like it’s on the fritz:

 

No signs above any of the windows; it doesn’t seem like anything is going on.  The inside—in which the building reveals itself to be little more than a strip mall with an enclosed hallway linking all the stores—isn’t really any more promising.

After all, not a single storefront along this silent hallway has a tenant.  From the looks of things, this row of shops has been vacant for quite some time.  Notice the one on the left.

The color scheme should at least hint at the logo of this formerly ubiquitous chain, but if it doesn’t, the slot to the right of the gate is a dead giveaway.

That’s right; it’s the broadly recognizable as the after-hours depository for the once-mighty Blockbuster Video.  Since this company faded to nearly nothing about four years ago, chances are strong that this storefront has sat vacant for quite some time.  A few doors down, the rustic entryway suggests the former home of a Bath and Body Works.

The hallway is silent.  But this strip mall is L-shaped, with storefronts facing both of the intersecting streets. Turn the corner within the mall, and it’s an entirely different story.

All the storefronts are occupied, and the entire shopping center looks fine—quite nice, even.

The tenant mix includes both mom-and-pops and national chains.  If the mom-and-pops were fledgling establishments, one might still be able to argue that the strip mall is declining, and eventually all the chains will leave.  But that doesn’t seem to be the case here.  Buddy’s Pizza has multiple locations in the Detroit area.

And Gibb’s World Wide Wines has apparently been in business for 76 years.  Down the corner from the national mid-priced chain Dress Barn is a Barnes and Noble Booksellers, serving as the apparent anchor tenant—hardly one that you’d see in a dying retail center.

Interestingly, the Dress Barn is new…to that spot.  A label scar (which I regrettably failed to capture in a photo) revealed that it previously occupied a different space in the strip mall—in the half that is now completely vacant.  The relocation is recent.

So what’s going on with one half of the strip mall?  A little knowledge about the physicality of the structure might help.  Here’s another outside view of the vacant half of the L shape:

It’s the lowest level of a parking garage, and the entire structure is connected to the St. John Hospital and Medical Center, resulting in an unconventional healthcare/shopping complex.  The name of the retail component is Pointe Plaza.  After questioning a clerk at one of the fully operating stores, I learned why one side was so vacant.  The row of vacant storefronts will allow enough consolidated space for one of the major gym/health clubs to move in, such as an LA Fitness.  I was unsuccessful in reaching Schostak Brothers, the property management company, to confirm this rumor, but it makes sense: a gym seems like an appropriate tenant for a complex that directly abuts a hospital.  Due to the gym’s size, it might serve as an additional anchor counterpart to the Barnes and Noble at the opposite end of the L shape.

But the peculiarities to Pointe Plaza extend well beyond the structure itself.  They’re political too.

This strip mall/garage/hospital sits right at the corner of Mack Avenue and Moross Road, as indicated in the map above (the small red circle is the site of the Plaza), and in the photo below, with the garage poking above the trees in the background:

Detroiters generally know this intersection as the boundary between Detroit the city and two of its suburbs: Grosse Pointe Farms, to the east of Mack Avenue, and Grosse Pointe Woods, to the north of the hospital.  In most metros, central city/suburb boundaries carry obvious significance in terms of distinctions between municipal tax burdens and ordinances, but in this case, those differences are unusually pronounced.  Detroit, as virtually everyone knows at this point, is among the most impoverished and economically challenged large cities in the country.  Meanwhile, Grosse Pointe Farms and Grosse Pointe Woods each have median household incomes of over $85,000.  I have yet to witness such an extreme juxtaposition between two municipalities anywhere in this country.  While the Detroit side of Mack Avenue in this district is in significantly better economic health than many other parts of the city, it still visibly lags far behind the affluent suburb on the opposite side of the street.

Pointe Plaza sits at the absolute easternmost vertex in Detroit city limits.  And, as the map indicates, it hugs the Detroit side of this inordinately influential boundary.  (The actual Detroit line is at Kingsville Avenue, just to the north of Pointe Plaza, which forms a three-way boundary between Detroit, Grosse Pointe Farms, and Grosse Pointe Woods.)  The proximity of the shopping center to this boundary inevitably complicates the property management agency’s ability to attract tenants, because its identity straddles sociological extremes.  One might expect that the management company would prefer a tenant mix more reflective of the affluent Grosse Points than the long-embattled Motor City, and the best way, of course, is to suppress every potential reference to Detroit.  A simple online search suggests that Google is giving Schostak Brothers, the property managers, an intrinsic advantage:

Not only does Google yield an address that incorrectly lists the facility’s address as Grosse Pointe Woods, but the thumbnail map falsely depicts the facility north of Kingsville Avenue—the boundary that would place it in Grosse Pointe Woods instead of Detroit.  The structure listed where Google Maps shows “Pointe Plaza Shopping Center” is something completely unrelated and definitely not a strip mall.  Meanwhile, Pointe Plaza’s identity online places it squarely in posh suburbia.

I decided to test this locational confusion a bit further, by asking each of the Pointe Plaza tenants a simple question: “Which city are you in?”  Of the seven tenants, only two correctly responded with Detroit.  Just to make sure I wasn’t misinterpreting the information available to me, I also rephrased my inquiry as a leading question: “Are you guys in Detroit?”  Interesting, all but one respondent conceded that yes, they were in Detroit, but most of them mentioned that they were right on the boundary with two of the Grosse Pointes.

Retail has long enjoyed a privileged status in the American commercial landscape: we always build far more facilities than there are tenants, meaning the majority of them can be incredibly picky about location.  The emergence of online shopping has only compounded the issue, because fewer goods and service providers depend upon bricks-and-mortar facilities to conduct their trades.  The fact that Pointe Plaza has avoided any stigma of sitting within the Detroit boundaries is a boon to this bankrupt city, since, for taxation purposes, the assessed value of the commercial property is undoubtedly higher than it would be if it could only attract marginal local tenants.  Only time will tell if this shopping center actually does absorb a major health club chain.  If it doesn’t, it may affirm my initial suspicions: that the vacant wing of this L-shaped strip mall has to overcome the challenge of directly looking out upon the impecunious city of Detroit.  Hopefully a revisit to Pointe Plaza in 2014 will prove me wrong.