Will Northway Mall Bounce Back...or Evolve Again?

A few weeks ago, we looked at Ross Park Mall’s resiliency. While it may lose a store or two, especially with retailers such as J. Crew filing for bankruptcy, it has the right formula to bounce back by combining high-end stores with a versatile format. Ross Park also has geography in its favor, as it was built on a plateau and has been easy to expand with outparcels in the past. The flat terrain also helps existing wings of the mall to be easily rebuilt, as demonstrated when Nordstrom came to the mall.

Ross Park has evolved over its nearly 34 year history. Its transformations have been a series of microevolutions which have resulted in the mall which stands today. Looking back to 1986, the mall has changed little structurally, but the type of stores inside and the updates made over the years have resulted in a completely different shopping experience—the kind that will survive the rough waters of retail in 2020.

The same cannot be said for its older neighbor in Northway Mall. Northway has gone through a series of macroevolutions. It began as a strip mall in 1953. Due to the geography of the surrounding area, its transformation into an enclosed mall in 1962 led to it becoming outdated quickly with little room for expansion. Once Ross Park was built, Northway quickly rebranded itself as an alternate shopping destination, complete with a new atrium level and less of an emphasis on traditional stores, in 1987. The third incarnation of Northway lasted just eight years; the mall became a collection of big box retailers with smaller stores in between in its 1995 evolution. This was followed by the conversion to a partial outdoor center in 2007 and the current Block format, which began to mature around 2017.

If you’re doing the math at home, you’ve found that over 67 years, there have been no fewer than six completely different versions of Northway Mall. It has appeared to be near death several times, losing major anchors and most smaller stores, before somehow roaring back and finding a way to reinvent itself.

The Block format looked to be a way to stabilize Northway for years to come. No longer wanting to compete with fashion-oriented Ross Park, the mall shifted focus to off-price outlets, entertainment, and dining. Just a few months ago, this was a winning combination.

Enter the pandemic and resulting recession. Two of those three categories are among the hardest hit industries in the country, and the third may go either way at this point. Some restaurants are operating at the moment in a takeout capacity. Wahlburgers has even donated meals to those on the front lines over the past few weeks. Restaurants will bounce back, although their profit margins will be diminished for a few months as they are eased back into normal operations: dining rooms at limited capacity first, then a gradual shift toward usual dining and bar capacities over what most predict will be a longer period of time. Whether Northway’s restaurants bounce back will depend on how healthy their parent companies are and how consumer trends shift as dine-in services resume.

Entertainment venues are an endangered species at the moment. Large-scale gatherings are out of the question for a while. They could return this year in some capacity, but likely won’t be as numerous or as popular until next year. Northway has gyms for rowing, pilates, and cycling, as well as Dave and Buster’s. Not everyone will be eager to get back to the exercise venues, which are likely to be among the last businesses to reopen in the area. Dave and Buster’s may be hit the hardest, as it will require new sanitization protocols for arcade games and relies on its dining room and sports bar for additional revenue. It also happens to be an anchor tenant. Losing Dave and Buster’s would be awful for Northway, as well as the community, but if it’s not allowed to re-open soon, it may create an all-too-familiar sight at the mall: a vacant anchor space.

Off-price retailers are a mixed bag. The J. Crew outlet is likely to go in the wake of the company’s bankruptcy. The others will face some uncertainty. They may be flooded with spring merchandise currently sitting behind locked doors at Ross Park or other retail centers. They may also have difficulty obtaining future merchandise, as the normal summer clothing isn’t being sent to closed stores. Additionally, the middle class may put off purchases such as clothing. In a sense, an off-price outlet may benefit from those looking to save a few pennies, but if clothing is shelved in favor of, say, home improvements or a rescheduled vacation, which now takes a larger chunk of the budget due to a temporary loss of work hours, stores like these will be hit as hard as, if not harder than, their full-price counterparts two intersections south on McKnight. Only time will tell what happens here.

Of all the retailers at Northway at the moment, the safest appear to be Aldi and PetSmart. Wahlburgers is likely the healthiest of the restaurants at the moment. Sadly, nearly everything else seems to be in some sort of danger, either from a corporate standpoint or because of the fallout from long-term closures. This means Northway may very well have to evolve for a seventh time, finding yet another way to rebuild in a few years as the current mix of stores reinvent themselves or close for good.

Should Northway be biologically feline, it still has three lives remaining. Let’s hope this cat’s not about to roll over to its seventh life and can bounce back with number six. After all, nobody wants to see a beloved mall with a great history undergo another dark period, especially since rebuilding it this time won’t reveal the long-lost blue tile left over from Horne’s.