Fashion Boulevard's ceiling is pretty unusual too. I've seen some other malls with ceilings painted to look like the sky, but a night sky scene like this isn't something I've seen elsewhere! I quite like the effect, especially with all of the lighting concealed above the painted stripe, illuminating the wood carvings on either side.
Right across the way from the beauty school is the International House Career School. These certainly aren't the types of tenants the mall's developers intended, nor are they likely to bring in much foot traffic, but I guess they at least pay the bills, unlike the completely vacant storefronts further along.
Northwest Mall here in Houston, the mall which had the Foley's with the British Columbia themed grand opening, had some kind of a for-profit nursing college in it in the era when it was still open, but it didn't have any anchors and not too many in-line tenants either. Even still, the mall managed to have a fairly full food court. One reason is that the mall was located near the headquarters for the Houston Independent School District and other office buildings and so people from those places would go to the mall food court during their lunch breaks. But, also, the nursing school people would go to the food court. So while those schools might not provide much retail traffic, they can generate some traffic for the food court!
ReplyDeleteGreenspoint Mall in Houston is another mall whose food court stayed relevant long after the mall itself did, but that was because the mall was part of a greater development plan in that area to kind of turn it into a suburban 'downtown' business district area. I'm not going to say that it failed because it did attract a number of businesses, but the 1980s oil glut limited that and a lot of the apartments built around the mall to house professionals working in the office districts failed. The apartments then started to take in anyone who could make rent payments and it didn't take long for the reputation of the area to sink and the crime rate to skyrocket, which led to a situation in the 2000s-early 2010s where about the only thing going on at Greenspoint Mall were people from the office towers going to eat lunch there. However, ExxonMobil, who had a lot of major offices there, consolidated their many Houston offices scattered around town in the suburb of Spring and that pretty much ended whatever little Greenspoint Mall had going on. That mall is physically decaying very quickly, much faster than Houston's other dead malls...even the ones older than it. The sad sight is even more unfortunate because the mall isn't far from IAH. Technically Deerbrook Mall, which is doing fine, is the closest mall to IAH, but most people going and coming from IAH use the Beltway, where Greenspoint is, rather than FM 1960, where Deerbrook is, and so visitors to Houston are likely to see that huge, rotting mall.
Yeah, it seems like private schools (especially vocational schools) are a common thing for struggling malls. I guess the cheap rent draws them in. I don't know of a ton of examples around here (those for-profit colleges developed a bad reputation in the 2010s and a lot of them have gone out of business or closed their Washington locations), but I saw several others in the Vancouver area.
DeleteSince this is Canada, I don't think this mall needs much to draw people to the food court! We'll get there eventually, but yes, the food court is the one bright spot here.