The Death & Life of the Shopping Mall

As America’s malls close down, more than stores are vanishing along with them.

The Schuylkill Mall in Frackville, Pa., is open for business, but you have to look hard to know it. The stores that have shuttered–Sears, Kmart, Spencer Gifts, Hallmark Cards–far outnumber the dozen businesses that remain. The customer-service office is cordoned off by a metal gate. The plants underneath the skylight droop toward a ring of yellow caution tape, and the piped-in music echoes off barren walls. The mall used to have a dance club. Now it’s a dialysis center.

A decade ago, the Schuylkill Mall and its 90 stores, restaurants and knickknack kiosks was a nexus of daily life in this part of Pennsylvania coal country, where teenagers met to flirt as warm-up-suited seniors walked laps around them. Crowds thronged to the annual Easter egg hunt and Lithuanian Days festival, a nod to the region’s ancestral ties. “I had to say excuse me a million times to get to work,” says Jane Krick, a waitress at Suglia’s Pizzeria & Restaurant, the last full-service restaurant standing. “It was full of people. Now we get a million phone calls a day asking, Are you still open?”

It won’t be for long. In early May, management gave the remaining tenants 60 to 90 days to close up shop. Tenants expect the property to be demolished. The wrecking ball will put the mall in good company around the nation. By 2022, analysts estimate that 1 out of every 4 malls in the U.S. could be out of business, victims of changing tastes, a widening wealth gap and the embrace of online shopping for everything from socks to swing sets.

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