Rise and fall of the Findlay mall

FINDLAY — When the main part of Findlay Village Mall is demolished in the coming weeks to be replaced by a Target store, it will mark a new chapter in the retail center. It opened in 1962 as an outdoor mall, Fort Findlay Village Shopping Center. It featured Britt's and JC Penney, followed by Sears. It was enclosed in the 1970s. Other stores were American Handicrafts, Findlay Toggery, Gray Drug, Hello Shop, Hobby Center, Household Finance, Jo-Ann Fabrics, Nobil Shoes, Ostermans, Paul Harris, Pegg's Shoes, Singer, St. of Shops, Fort Findlay Barbers, and a cinema. It strutted its stuff in full-page advertisements in The Courier. "Always Growing For Your Changing Needs" a 1977 ad proclaimed in big, bold type. It then continued to boast in smaller print, "Our Covered Mall gives you pleasant and comfortable surroundings with easy access to all stores under one roof. Once you've parked FREE take advantage of the many values and service — two things every shopper has the right to expect. You always come first with us — and we plan to keep it that way." The full-page ad included a map depicting the locations of stores at the mall. It had an inexorable tide of momentum in those days, with a variety of stores in one climate-controlled location and free parking. Paid and limited parking became a sore subject in downtown for decades. The mall steadily gained more tenants, and drew more retailers and restaurants nearby even if they did not move into the mall. The center of shopping gravity moved away from downtown and farther east. '80s-'90s boom "The Heart … of Findlay's Shopping Area" shouted a 1981 newspaper ad, again with a map depicting the locations of stores at the mall. A bubble above the map promised more: "We're Expecting a Face Lift!! Coming Soon … Newly Redecorated & Remodeled Interior of Mall." By 1987, it had grown to 36 stores and announced a huge expansion. At least 30 more stores were added within a few years. One of them was an anchor, Elder-Beerman, which already had a store on South Main Street downtown. The Elder-Beerman at the mall opened in 1990. By January 1994, the downtown store was closed. Findlay had become a regional shopping destination, drawing from towns in neighboring counties. Names of some of the stores changed over the years. When one left, the mall was able to fill the space with another tenant. When the Big Kmart store closed in 2003 after Kmart filed for bankruptcy protection, the mall redeveloped the space with a Best Buy, T.J. Maxx and Dunham's Sports. And the three anchors – Sears, Elder-Beerman and JC Penney – held steady. But when times and people's tastes switched, it was difficult for the Findlay mall to adapt, mall and retail experts said. After the 2008-2009 recession, retailers preferred to locate in bigger malls with larger surrounding populations having higher incomes. Out of step When the mall's Sears store was closed in 2014 as part of a wider company restructuring, the mall had difficulty finding another tenant. In 2017, the JC Penney store closed. More tenants left. Eventually, Elder-Beerman did, too. For decades, Findlay Village Mall was in line with its customers and their income, tastes and values and the competition of its time, said Mark Stapp, director and Fred Taylor endowed professor of real estate at Arizona State University, said in a 2014 interview. "I would suspect the makeup of the population has changed and the competitive environment has changed ... The mall remains fixed while everything around it has changed," Stapp said. Large shopping centers, with a community-center feel, have been built in recent years with varieties of stores not enclosed in a mall. So-called lifestyle centers at Levis Commons in Perrysburg, Fallen Timbers in Maumee, and Easton Town Center in Columbus offer a mall's efficiency but also an experience people seek. "When your disposable income is constrained or you have got different values, you want something more out of spending your dollar than just getting the good or the service," Stapp said. "So the environment becomes important. You want to be in a pleasant environment," he said. "You want to be in a place that you want to stay at, and these lifestyle centers have helped create places that are more desirable for people to go to and stay at around their values." Limits, obsolescence Some of the lifestyle centers' appeal is the outdoor feel, and some of it is location. "If you look at the characteristics of the area around the lifestyle center versus the one around Findlay mall, you would begin to see differences," Stapp said. "These other places are now able to provide a different level of service, and Findlay can't because of its population makeup." It was impossible for Findlay Village Mall to respond to such change. "Because (malls) are clunky, durable, fixed assets, they can't as easily change to react to the changing context within which they exist and the changing demand," Stapp said. The decline of the Findlay mall, like many others in smaller towns, was a common one. By its very nature, the mall was ill-equipped to adapt to 21st-century changes in consumer tastes, retailer strategies and the rise of online shopping. "Demand (for goods) is mobile. The (mall) is not mobile," Stapp said in a 2020 interview. "As the demand changes, and either shrinks or its characters change, the supply — which is the stores — can't move with that and it's hard to change them to adapt because they are expensive to change and they're difficult to change and so they become obsolete."