Ford City Mall redevelopment proposal deserves more scrutiny

Pete Kastanes is reminiscing about the golden days of the Ford City Mall.

The rambling Southwest Side indoor shopping center opened 60 years ago this summer, as Chicago's enthusiastic answer to the big suburban malls that were luring customers — and retail dollars — from the city.

Kastanes grew up in Ashburn and hung out in the shopping center as a teen in the 1970s, when major retailers like Wieboldt's, Sears and furniture store John M. Smyth's Homemakers — along with a seeming endless roll of other merchants, restaurants, a bowling alley and other entertainment — packed the mall with shoppers.

"It was wonderful," Kastanes, host of the Vanished Chicagoland podcast, said. "It was so vibrant and fun. I had a great time there. ... [But] you know they shop online now, and kids don't hang out much at the mall like when I was a kid."

Ford City, 7601 S. Cicero Ave., has been in decline for years, and the mall's days are apparently over. Under a $150 million plan filed last week before the Zoning Committee, most of the shopping center would be replaced by a 66-acre warehouse and distribution campus.

But in a city starved for jobs and affordable housing, to turn over that much land to a single industrial use without much public input in advance seems like a potential mistake.

Bulldozing the troublesome mall and replacing it with yet another distribution center is easy enough.

And maybe that's the problem.

‘A lot of fun’

The likely fate of Ford City is yet another eagre in the sea changes that have rocked the shopping mall industry over the past decade.

A center of commercial and cultural life in the 1970s and 1980s, malls are suffering from the blows delivered by the rise in online shopping, and the disappearance of big national stores that once anchored the centers.

But it's also a major urban planning issue for cities and suburbs. What to do with struggling shopping centers and the vast amounts of land they often occupy?

"The very nature of the suburban shopping mall made it extremely isolated from any communities," Phil Enquist, adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Chicago's College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, said.

"You're seeing efforts to try to break through or eliminate the ring road [that surrounds most malls]," Enquist said. "And break through the sea of parking and open up the mall with a finer grid of urban streets and create active uses that are oriented to the outside, not just to the inside."

For instance, last year, Skokie officials gave the nod to a $100 million plan to add 800 units of housing, additional retail and new public event space at Orchard Mall.

This is good thinking. Building housing and amenities close to the mall brings customers and workers, while potentially adding some vitality — the kind a great urban street corner has — to the experience.

Architect and planner Victor Gruen had this very thing in mind when he was selected to design the pioneering Southdale Center — the country's first real postwar mall — built in 1956 in Edina, Minnesota.

Born in Austria, Gruen saw how cafes, shops and activities joined together to create vibrant cultural centers in Vienna. He thought the new American indoor mall could accomplish the same.

For a while, U.S. malls almost got it right. Shopping centers offered a collection of restaurants, art installations in public areas, events, live music, book signings and the like.

"I grew up ... in the Riverside-Brookfield area and our high school band, every year, did the Christmas parade at Ford City," said David Aldrich who runs Pleasant Family Shopping, a Facebook page that looks at postwar stores and shopping centers.

"We'd march inside that mall, and it was a lot of fun," he said. "But imagine listening to Up on the House Top every eight minutes."

When malls hit rocky times in the 1990s, many of those amenities were the first to go, or get seriously downgraded.

"They made [malls] less attractive places to go," Aldrich said. "And then when online competition came in, well, the mall is not that exciting anymore. I can order this with a series of clicks and be done with it."

Another industrial park

At Ford City, Bridge Industrial wants to buy and redevelop the ragged and largely vacant mall into a campus that would contain 913,000 square feet of buildings, 923 parking spaces and 92 loading docks.

No doubt something has to happen there. In information sent to his constituents, Ald. Derrick Curtis (18th) said the mall is half-empty and too often beset by shoplifters, while the parking lots are a popular site for crowds of motorheads burning rubber.

"A lot of [people] aren't going to the mall because they are afraid to go," Kastanes said. "When [the plan ] was announced, I wasn't fully surprised."

If approved, Bridge would return the mall to its industrial origins. Developer Harry Chaddick constructed the mall on what had been a Ford Motor Co. factory, where engines for bombers and cargo planes were built during the Korean War.

Still, one can't help but wish more voices were brought to the table to figure out the best future for the mall.

If keeping it and improving it like Old Orchard is a bridge too far, then can the industrial campus be designed to accommodate worker housing, light retail — something other than trucks, vans and asphalt roads?

It's worth considering. The city's planning department should weigh in to make sure whatever is built provides the most benefit to the community.

"The evolution of the shopping mall — I think it's been very interesting to watch in our own lifetime," Enquist said.