Instead of a new $400 mil jail..

Here's an idea, and you all can tell me if I'm crazy or not.

Instead of asking tax payers to pony up $400 million for a jail we really don't need to spend $400 million on, and instead of lining the pockets of Sheriff Whetsel and his "public safety" cronies--why don't we just use Crossroads Mall instead?

I mean, it's practically the best location I've ever seen for a jail. Isolated from the rest of the city and cut off by a highway interchange, with a landfill towering over it, and the city's best collection of strip joints just a jailbreak away--it's the world's most perfect site for a new county jail. It's also conveniently located near a very high-crime part of the southside and has limited ingress/egress that could easily be watched--and of course, you would encircle it with a great wall.

That kills three birds with one stone. That way people can stop talking about how to revive Crossroads, we don't have to spend public resources to bulldoze it, and we have a new solution for the county jail.

What's the asking price anyway? Probably under $5 million, just a guess. So 1/80th of the cost to build Sheriff Whetsel's dream prison.

Malls, malls, malls.."galore"

I was doing a post on Crossroads Mall, which most people know I hate, and I was thinking of a lot of different things. I was thinking of how evil indoor shopping malls are. The advent of Crossroads Mall in the 1970s as the 8th largest shopping mall in the U.S. at the time was the death of the inner south side. Another thought was, God it will be great when Crossroads bites the dust, as it'll free up some retail demand for the inner south side. You see growth all over the metro, everywhere, except the inner south side. You especially see it in NW OKC and the Cleveland County area, however in order for the "urban revival" fad to spread to the inner south side, it will require some kind of impetus to get the ball rolling in a positive way.

I think the good thing about new urbanism is that it takes into account the full lifespan of a mall, including its decline. With these indoor mega shopping malls, once they go into decline, it's difficult to find any useful purpose for them to serve. Shepherd Mall got converted into an office building, but that only works if you have a large office tenant lined up and ready to go, such as AOL in the case of Shepherd Mall. Northpark Mall just shifted its focus to older, upscale demographics and filled its stores with high-end local boutiques, which is kind of cool for a mall, but they would have a better location lining a pedestrian-friendly avenue. Penn Square has managed to stay on top of the game by being close to OKC's wealthiest areas. Sooner Fashion Mall has stayed pretty nice by being the only place to shop in the midst of rapidly-growing Cleveland County.

Crossroads Mall has gone the way of the dodo by being close to OKC's worst areas, not keeping its best long-time tenants, and the sheer inability and unfeasability of converting it to any other meaningful use. There is no way to make good use of Crossroads Mall. The mall is too horribly designed, the site plan kills the idea of any other use, and it's literally located between a ghetto and a towering landfill. AND the site connects to nothing except freeway onramps at I-240 and I-35, so the name Crossroads Mall itself is even somewhat deceiving. Whoever's idea it was to build this mall needs to be shipped and Mexico where hopefully they won't ever again have any say in American city planning.

This brings me to Quail Springs Mall, which is obviously a vibrant mall today, but in the future..it will be the next Crossroads Mall. Things it has going for it.. one: it, like Sooner Fashion Mall, is surrounded by an extremely high-growth area of the metro that will economically buoy it for a long time; two: the site does actually connect to much more than just freeway onramps, and Memorial Road itself is lined with so many office complexes, developments, and so forth, that it's hard to imagine this corridor will give way to suburban blight. Things is has going against it.. one: the Quail Springs area will likely always be a pretty nice area, but that doesn't mean that the main focus area for retail may not shift to OK 74 or some other road if Memorial Road isn't any longer a short 15 minute drive for these people; two: Quail Springs Mall will soon be facing competition from more exciting new urbanist developments, one of which will be directly adjacent to the mall's north side, where Dillard's is. The Quail Springs area will also be facing increasing competition from Edmond, which will probably become the new urbanist mecca for Central Oklahoma. It's hard to say that Quail Springs Mall will stand up to more exciting developments along the far north edge of the metro for very long.

The moral of this story: When you plan a development, consider its full lifespan (its vitality, its middle-aged period, its decline, and its reuse). Indoor shopping malls are always a bad idea.

A Crossroads update

The mall that just won't die. That is Crossroads Mall. It's like a huge flying cockroach that you keep trying to kill by stepping on it, but just won't die because its damn carcass is too squish-proof. Crossroads Mall has lost every long-time anchor: Ward's, Foley/Macy's, J.C. Penney's, and Dillard's. It even lost Steve & Barry's Crappy College XXL Megastore.

Thank goodness though for that southside ingenuity, that rugged hard-headedness that won't take defeat as the last word..instead of having a completely blank sign fronting I-35, they've filled up the spots maintaining the appearance of a mall, somewhat. It announces to a hundred thousand commuters a day on I-35 that its major anchors are Bath&Body Works, Waldenbooks, and Chick fil-A, and that there is an AMC movie theater on I-240 in front of the mall. That's what I call "maintaining appearances" through hard times.

And thank goodness that ODOT did not go through with an overhaul of the I-35/I-240 intersection just because it would have blocked off the main I-240 exit to this oasis of cosmopolitan shopping that is Crossroads Mall. Nevermind that there are deadly car accidents every day here, and the constant traffic tangle during the day, because if Crossroads Mall had died, the southside would have been without its crown jewel, Crossroads Mall.