A poignant blogpost (hat tip: Tyler Cowen’s marginalrevolution.com) with pictures of the closed-door food court at the White Flint mall in North Bethesda, Md., provides visual proof of what the author writes is “a general and growing American discontent with the enclosed shopping malls that captivated the 1970s, 1980 and 1990s in favor of the roofless ‘lifestyle center’ of the 2000s and beyond.” Another example might be the gutted-out Georgetown Park mall in Georgetown.
Both also may have been mislocated. White Flint was intended to be a premier, upscale mall, but it’s located at the north end of the most affluent parts of metro Washington rather than in the geographical middle, like the Mazza Gallerie mall at Wisconsin Avenue and Western Avenue at the boundary between the District of Columbia and Chevy Chase/Bethesda, and access to the Capital Beltway is considerably less convenient than at the Tysons Galleria in Tysons Corner, Va.
