The South Hills Mall has been in decline for years, so it’s no wonder that plans are now in the works to transform the space from an aging pedestrian mall into a state-of-the-art strip mall featuring courtyard spaces, restaurants and new retail outlets mixed amid remaining cornerstone stores. But the push for progress combined with the feelings of nostalgia that the old mall evokes makes this an interesting capstone to an era that began when the mall first opened off Route 9 in 1974.
At that time, just one year after Main Street in Poughkeepsie was closed to traffic to promote shopping on the Main Mall, cities were losing retail shoppers to suburban malls. But the street closing, rather than promoting the pleasant shopping experience that planners hoped for, instead doomed Main Street to a decline in business, a rise in crime and a bad reputation that the city is still trying to shake. South Hills provided a clean and safe shopping experience, and as more and more shoppers left the increasingly seedy streets of the city to conduct their business there, the mall thrived.
But the mall’s prosperity became its downfall, because as shoppers increasingly flocked to suburban malls, the opening of the neighboring Poughkeepsie Galleria in 1987 sucked much of the vibrancy out of South Hills in the form of both retailers and shoppers. Although South Hills tried to invite new businesses to its spaces, the decline continued, and in recent years, much of the mall has been vacant and shoppers have been few and far between.
But as Dan Barton points out in his story this week, the mere mention of the South Hills name generates nostalgic feelings for members of the generation who knew the mall as the best thing going, and for good reason. For many modern teenagers, the mall was and is a place to get away from parents and feel “grown-up”: flush with money and the chance to socialize on their own terms, it becomes a proving ground of sorts. And it’s striking that little more than 30 years after the mall opened as a gleaming, power-packed example of modern consumerism, it is being repackaged and remade, while the commerce of the city shopping experience it replaced is again on the upswing. It speaks to the cyclical way of the world, we suppose, but also to the importance of trends, shopping and otherwise. The suburban mall is not declining in popularity, and with the Galleria just next door, there simply was no space for a second pedestrian mall, but just the same, the demise of South Hills makes us wonder how business will change in the next 30 years – teenagers’ tastes in shopping are as fickle as in love, it seems – and how the new mall model will fare.
In any case, here’s hoping the new South Hills Mall spawns a fresh set of nostalgic memories for the shoppers who enter its doors, and look back in fondness on the original that once stood there.