1. As thunder said, Indy’s Circle Centre is located in the main convention and entertainment district. It is an added attraction to the area, but feeds off that traffic as well.

2. Circle Center became the focus of the main downtown restaurant/bar scene (see #1)

3. Circle Center had Nordstrom as an anchor, and was for some time the only Nordstrom in the state.

4. Unlike City Center, which was build before most suburban malls in Columbus, Circle Centre in Indy is still the newest enclosed mall in town. By contrast, Indy’s suburban malls are dowdy and mostly failing.

5. Circle Centre is also the nicest mall in town architecturally – and vastly better than City Center. It has its problems with an inward facing design and such to be sure, but it is simply in a class by itself in Indy. The more upscale Fashion Mall may have better stores, but it doesn’t look nearly as good.

6. Circle Centre is owned by Simon company, the largest mall owner in the US, which is HQ’d a block away. While Simon could let suburban malls fall apart, it would be highly embarrassing to the Simons if their own hometown downtown mall that close to their very headquarters failed. They are very motivated to make this mall work.

Just a few thoughts.

A considerable amount of the sales are to visitors.

Contrast that with Columbus, where the mall is stuck on the “government complex” axis toward the south end of downtown, when the convention center and arena are at the opposite end.

In other words, Columbus’ mall died from tactical problems specific to Columbus.

Indianapolis’ mall may yet be threatened by the “strategic” issue of general demise of enclosed malls, but not because it’s poorly located.

When you “mothball” your winter clothes, you put them in the back of the closet until you’re ready to bring them back out. You don’t leave them in a beat up cardboard box in your front yard for the whole word to see.

By the way, Walker Evans runs one of America’s great city web sites out there, Columbus Underground. You should definitely check it out.

I’ll be the first to admit the difficulty of redeveloping the site. But if you can’t do anything with it in the short term, why scrape it? That seems to be a popular emerging solution for failed malls. However, we’re still early days in the suburban style redevelopment retrofitting business. If the city mothballed it for a few years, maybe something would come of it as we learn more about how to deal with these structures. I’ll tell you now, once you make a park out of it, the politics of ever building on that site will become very problematic.

As another commenter noted, Indianapolis has a similar park called University Park. It’s a National Historic Landmark. It is also lined with many skyscrapers, any one of which has more office space than the entire proposed buildout of this project. Yet that park is almost always empty except for the homeless unless there is an event there.

I interviewed Guy Worley with Capitol South and the CDDC last week, and it sounds like every other opportunity for salvaging the site, or developing something grander in Phase 1 has been explored and deemed financially improbable to execute right now. The mall was built to be a suburban fortress, and retrofitting the building for apartments or offices would be very cost prohibitive.

So what are we left with? We can either have an empty mall for another 5-10 years until the right developer with the right money at the right time comes along to do something with it.

Or we can have greenspace that may or may not get limited use in the meantime.

I wouldn’t discount the other 100,000 office workers, thousands of students, or thousands of downtown residents who have set up shop in downtown Columbus over the past few years. Granted, I can see this park being relatively empty on weekends compared to Goodale or Schiller, but that should be all the more reason that the development inflll over the park will be a more attractive option when the time is right.

On a personal note, I played in a kickball league on the Statehouse lawn last summer. The grass there is nice, but the space is just a bit too small. I’m looking forward to the possibility of moving these types of recreational activities to this new park.