Are you aware of any abandoned shopping centres or run down places that brought back to life?

Here in my area, we have the old Towne Square shopping centre. It was built around 1975. Originally it was anchored by a Kmart and an Winn-Dixie. There was also a laundromat and a Dollar General that I’d guess opened maybe in the 1980s.
Out front of the center was a Hardee’s restaurant of the 1990s and a Twistee Treat ice cream stand.

The Kmart had moved to the new shopping mall in 1992, and the Winn-Dixie closed around 2000, in place of a newer location. The shopping centre had gotten quite run down after that, with plywood covering missing siding damage from the hurricanes in 2004, and the parking lot pavement  was cracked, faded and buckled.

The only businesses left by then were the Dollar General and laundromat and a few utility offices. The Twistee Treat cone has been removed and the Hardee’s closed around 2002.

It was really a blight on the downtown, and an eyesore that they really wanted cleaned up.

So around 2009, the city had the parking lot resurfaced, and he buildings got all new facade with new stucco and paint to replace the old sheet metal parapets.

The old 3 arm poles with cobraheads were replaced with new concrete poles with MH shoeboxes. The landscaping was also replaced, and a Save A Lot moved into part of the former Winn-Dixie and a climate controlled storage into the old Kmart section.

A CrossFit gym and a furniture store as well as some doctor offices moved into some of the smaller storefronts.

The original plan was to have a bunch of boutique and collectible shops move in, but it never happened.

Because the center isn’t on the main thoroughfare of town, where most of the commercial development has been since the 1980s, I doubt the center will ever be a major shopping destination again, but at least it isn’t semi abandoned and run down anymore.

It was likely a reasonable place to build a center in the 1970s, as it was closer to the original center of town, and not far from some of the shopping centers that had been built in the 1960s, on highway on the south end of town.

We have one of these. It was old, dingy, and rundown. 70s beige exterior coloring and an overall weird feel to it. It had three tenants: a sushi place (our go-to), a PetValu, and a McCafferys supermarket (small independent grocer around here).

Ever since Brixmor bought them in 2019, the changes have been IMMENSE. It went from old and rundown to THE most popular and high-end center within a 25+ mile radius. Just last week, a Capitol Grille (high-end steakhouse) opened after the previous tenant vacated just two months prior to that. The facade was completely updated to white with black accents, new stores built (freestanding Citi bank ATM and a Starbucks) PLUS additional retail space on the opposite end of the lot which was once a field.

As a result of this transition though, it did lose the Wide-Lite 1000W metap halide "cubes". I remember we were eating out at the sushi place one night and we watched the new poles go up.