The potential demolition of Metro Atlanta’s first enclosed mall raises hopes and questions
North DeKalb Center opened in 1965 as the first fully-enclosed shopping mall in metro Atlanta. Here’s an aerial view of it right after it opened, with a ginormous parking lot visible. [Photo source: GSU Digital Collections.]
The owners of the shopping complex are now proposing to tear it down to make way for a new project. Following years of store closings and decline, there’s now a plan for turning what’s currently called North DeKalb Mall into a mixed-use development with retail, housing, and a hotel.
It seems significant: the first enclosed mall in the metro — once a symbol of the region’s embrace of suburban-style land uses that separated retail from homes — is potentially going to become a place where uses are mixed. When it comes to the concept of retrofitting suburbia with some more-urban ideas, this could be considered at least a small step in the right direction.
Why not incorporate the structure into a redevelopment?
As some commenters online have pointed out, a demolition/rebuild plan is a missed opportunity to use the existing building as part of a new development. Wasting the structure is not only environmentally costly (the “greenest” construction is always the reuse of an existing building), it’s also a loss of a potentially lower-rent space that could offset what will undoubtedly be high rent new buildings.
Above: North DeKalb Mall today. Source: Wikimedia.
To make the “numbers work” on incorporation of the current mall infrastructure into a project, there would likely need to be a private-public partnership. That kind of partnership would pay off not just in preventing waste, but also in allowing for some more-affordable spaces in the end product, versus having nothing but high-rent new construction through a purely private, market rate product.
Look to Colony Square for ideas
To help envision what could potentially happen in terms of reuse, take a look at the Colony Square project in Midtown Atlanta. Its enclosed shopping mall is relatively tiny compared to North DeKalb, but perhaps there’s a lesson here nonetheless.
Colony Square opened in 1973 as Atlanta’s first big mixed-use development. With two office towers, a condo building, a hotel, and a shopping mall in between — plus underground parking — it set a standard in the city for vertical, large-scale developments on a small footprint. It’s a standard that didn’t really find an imitator until Atlantic Station came along in 2005.
Above: Colony Square mall in 1986. Source: GSU Digital Collection.
North American Properties purchased Colony Square a few years ago and they have big plans for a major update of the property, including the mall, which will be turned into an open-air plaza.
Above: rendering from the developer of Colony Square redesign. Source.
What about taking at least part of the existing North DeKalb Mall structure and turning it into an open-air mall, while adding taller buildings around it? Basically the owners could create a smaller version of Colony Square, built around the current shopping structure.
Bottom line: good urbanism can happen in the suburbs
To some, it may sound odd to try to apply ideas like adaptive-reuse of buildings to suburban places. But to expect less of land use in the suburbs is to set the bar too low for what can be achieved outside of cities.
Good urbanism happens at different scales and in various contexts and can be inclusive of suburban areas like the one around North DeKalb Mall. We certainly have many examples of the unfortunate flip side of that in Atlanta, where car-oriented, single-use urban design happens intown.
In fact, some healthy competition in urbanism between cities and suburbs could be beneficial, and it isn’t outrageous to think that the burbs could best city centers in some ways.
From “The American suburbs are the next fertile ground for architectural and urban experimentation,” published at ArchPaper.com last year:
“While suburban residents crave quasi-ersatz urban experiences, many in the urban areas are living as if they are in the suburbs, in more insular developments that minimize their interactions with the city and other citizens. In the suburbs, on the other hand, there is potential for an increase in mixed-use and mixed-experience living.”
