On Topic: Retail and great expectations

In hindsight, I'm uncertain if the turtles appreciated our efforts or not.

After all, no matter how many times my friend Bill and I stopped by the pet section of the S.S. Kresge five-and-dime, the little green reptiles would be piled on top of each other in a heap at a corner of their plastic display. It was as if they were trying to make a break for it, figuring the turtles at the peak would climb over, then drop a rope ladder or something for their fellow prisoners at the bottom of the tank.

We thought we were helping by lifting each turtle off the pile and redistributing them comfortably throughout their tub. But maybe not.

The Kresge turtle display was just one of our many checkpoints at the then-burgeoning Boardman Plaza, erected far enough from the odors and black rain created daily by the miles of then-bustling Youngstown, Ohio, steel mills. My parents had moved to what was then the suburbs to get away from the mills and closer to the promise of less crime and stronger schools.

Our tiny house was literally just behind the plaza, and I was in the stores of that strip mall - at its height of popularity proclaimed to be the largest such shopping center in the world, with 623,000 square feet - every single day. So when I say I pretty much grew up in retail, I'm not only talking about how my father spent his entire professional life managing stores.

On our way home from school each afternoon, Bill and I would drop by the drugstore to see what new comic books had come in - until we figured out the new stuff was delivered only once a week. Later at the hardware store we'd paw among the paperbacks we'd be murdered for bringing home. (Yes, the hardware store sold paperback books, too - I can't explain it.)

Less religiously we'd go into the various five-and-dimes - Kresge, Grant's, Woolworth's - for something to eat or to annoy the clerks by snapping through the record albums we couldn't afford to buy. And, on a good day, there also was J.C. Penney, Hill's giant discount store, a handful of groceries, some small clothing shops, a decent bakery and even a bowling alley-pool hall.

We cruised each every day, just in case something had changed.

The plaza also was the default meeting spot. Fights were set for somewhere along the milelong back parking lot.

If we'd run into some girls at the high school football game the evening before, the mating ritual always began with, “You're going to be at the plaza tomorrow …?” (You already know about the legendary connection between northeast Ohio and Friday night high school football, right? To my surprise, I've been told a fair number of folk actually went to watch the games.)

When I visited my parents this past autumn, I drove over to the plaza. It still stands, though many of the storefronts are vacant, and what is occupied are, for the most part, low-rent - they sell cigarettes, scrapbook supplies or remaindered greeting cards.

Crowds back in the mid-1970s shifted a half-mile east uphill to the Southern Park Mall, a 1.1 million-square-foot enclosed shopping center that today boasts the likes of Macy's, Dillard's and a movie house.

You go in, get your socks or back-to-school clothes, your hardback book, your greeting card, then leave. Where's the fun in that?

After moving to Columbus, I got a job at a glossy statewide magazine headquartered downtown. As the state capital, the city center had everything you'd expect - a dominant statehouse, commanding statues, plenty of banks, old-line restaurants, hotels small and large, stuffy lobbyists' offices and historic theaters for stage productions, ballet and opera, as well as enough newsstands and used-bookstores to keep any budding journalist occupied.

But in 1989, Columbus unveiled a downtown enclosed shopping center - 17 years in the making and costing $200 million to build, as I wrote at the time in a story about its construction.

High expectations were rooted in the 100-store Columbus City Center, as the mall was named. It was “always the great hope,” one city planner told me at the time. “It's going to realize a dream, one greater than anybody ever thought it might be,” a well-established Columbus architect added.

Whew.

At first, the two-story retail-and-office complex was packed with downtown office workers, attendees at events at the huge convention center a few blocks north, and suburbanites in for a meal and a tour of the up-ticket clothing stores.

But over time, those expensive brand names gave way to lower-end shops - the high-toned establishments couldn't draw enough shoppers - and gangs replaced couples with strollers. Harpists and wine-tastings were supplanted by teenagers with empty wallets and outbursts of violence.

In 2010, while I was in town for a conference at Ohio State, I drove by the Columbus City Center, just to see how it fared.

It was gone. Flattened.

From South High Street I could see straight across to Third Street. Where 19 years earlier had stood the great hope of the city was now an empty lot.

It didn't live up to its dreams. Today the downtown is vibrant with baseball and National Hockey League stadiums, but shoppers moved on, many to the far northern suburbs where Les Wexner, head of Limited Brands - at one time or other parent to The Limited, Lane Bryant, Abercrombie & Fitch, Henri Bendel and Victoria's Secret, among others - had built Easton Town Center.

Easton - which Wexner erected with various partners, including Arnold Schwarzenegger (he's a story for another day) - presented each store as free-standing. Together, they created a mini-Georgian-themed village of shops and restaurants surrounded, moat-like, by a parking lot circle.

So the wheel of retail turns, from outdoor strip centers to enclosed malls to big box behemoths to retail towns inspired by 18th and 19th century English monarchs. And we keep an eye on the many dark windows in Westdale Mall in Cedar Rapids and the ongoing developments at Iowa River Landing in Coralville.

Shopping preferences change. Retail trends follow and developers try for something new. Sometimes.

Though, if it were me, I'd try adding turtles.