Barnstorming Ohio by David Giffels

Author:David Giffels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2020-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

Modern mass-retail commerce can be broken down into three eras: the downtown department stores that represented the boom of American cities in the first half of the twentieth century, the suburban shopping malls that coincided with the outward movement of the middle class, and the online shopping that has exploded in the digital age. Each successor has been blamed for killing off its predecessor, and nostalgia has remained robust for the lost forms. Few scenes are more evocative of midwestern romanticism than the Parker family’s visit to the holiday department-store window displays (where Ralphie first spies that coveted “official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time”) in A Christmas Story, which, though set in a fictional Indiana town, was filmed at downtown Cleveland’s Higbee’s department store. That nostalgia fueled a certain derision for the suburban mall, which in turn is now warmly sentimentalized (see: Stranger Things), with new blame placed on Amazon’s uber-dominance of American mass retail.

But here’s where the story finds its next strange twist. Over the past few years, Amazon has begun buying up dead American malls and repurposing the properties as “fulfillment centers,” strategically placed warehouses that help the online retailer get packages quickly to customers. The vast size of the mall properties and their proximity to either population centers or highways make them uniquely attractive for this new use. And Ohio has found itself at the epicenter of this strategy. In 2019, Amazon was in the midst of an aggressive move to buy up dead malls. Ohio, with its abundance of failed retail properties, relatively cheap real estate, a transportation infrastructure that was built to the hilt during the manufacturing heyday, and a nationally central location, had a lot to offer.

A 2019 analysis by CBRE, a real estate research firm, showed twenty-four projects nationally since 2016 in which former retail space had been converted to “industrial/logistics space”—facilities like the Amazon warehouses. Of those, seven were clustered around the Great Lakes, and four were in Ohio. In 2016, Amazon did not appear on the list of the one hundred largest employers in Ohio. By 2019, it had rocketed to No. 25 with a bullet, employing 11,500 in the Buckeye State, up from 6,000 in 2017 and 7,700 in 2018. Two of Amazon’s newest facilities were built on the site of former shopping malls in the Greater Cleveland area—Randall Park Mall in North Randall and Euclid Square Mall in Euclid. It was impossible to observe the trend and not recognize how Rolling Acres might fit the pattern.

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