Grand atrium

And here we are at the main event of this mall -- the four-story central atrium, built in a semi-circular shape with escalators on full display and a huge skylight topping it off. This has to be one of my favorite indoor spaces in the city, and the recent remodel honestly made it even nicer, something that's not all too common these days. Something super cool about this mall is that someone did a Street View tour of it before the remodel, which I'm going to be referring to a lot throughout this set -- here's a similar angle from 2018. 

Obviously, the original design is a completely different style -- it was designed in the indoor-outdoor style that was so popular in the 90s and early 00s, and featured significantly more ornamentation (which means that I wouldn't be surprised if some of you strongly prefer the old design! 🙂). The atrium also featured a coffee kiosk (apparently run by Il Fornaio, the restaurant that used to occupy a large exterior space), which was replaced by a hole in the ground to partially open the basement up to the main atrium. If you spin the Street View image around, you can see the 8telier storefront that was removed to build the new entrance hallway.