“It’s been time for a creative refresh for the mall for a while now.” Urban planners see a way forward. “It was never intended to last as long as it’s lasted in the exact same configuration,” Goldsmith says. A multimillion-dollar spruce-up is underway. It counts nearly 100 stores, a high school, a comedy club, bumper cars, and a cigar lounge, and remains profitable (at least pre-pandemic-it brought in $13 million in 2018). In 2018, it was 94 percent leased, according to Simon’s most recent report to the city, the mall’s landowner. The Indianapolis Star moved into the old Nordstrom space in 2014, and Circle Centre finished the next year with what was at the time a record profit-$11.2 million, up 30 percent from 2014. Then Carson’s (Parisian’s replacement) shuttered in 2018 despite city tax subsidies to prop it up, leaving the mall without an anchor.īut this thing wasn’t going down easily. In 2011, Nordstrom closed because its new Fashion Mall location had slashed downtown sales. Yet Circle Centre continued to turn a profit. Between 20, one in five of the largest 2,000 malls in America closed. “The fact that you could come downtown to have dinner or shop in stores was a big deal,” he says. Hudnut’s successor, Stephen Goldsmith, says it was the first time in his life that downtown Indianapolis was alive.

Nordstrom and Parisian were the opening-day anchors.Īnd, for a while, it was novel. By that time, Ayres and Block were long gone. (City planners would later say that digging those holes was the best thing they did, because otherwise the city might not have been motivated to finish the project.) Six years after construction began, Circle Centre opened. But buildings had already been torn down and large holes had been dug at the construction site. So what took 16 years? Property squabbles, funding shortages, and a recession in 1990. Hudnut saw Circle Centre as a crucial part of his vision for a vibrant downtown-along with a convention center, hotels, and a stadium for a potential NFL team. In 1979, Melvin Simon & Associates unveiled a plan for a $100 million shopping mecca between Meridian Street and Capitol Avenue that would connect the two retail titans of downtown, L.S. By September 1995, when Circle Centre opened, the indoor mall boom was over.īut it started out promising. When Mayor William Hudnut pitched the idea of a downtown mall to the Simon brothers in 1977, mallrats were a thriving breed.

Circle center mall