Continuing a brief two-part series looking at retail centers in Richland, WA we shift our attention to Richland’s Uptown Shopping Center, a large strip mall up the road from The Parkway, built some time in the 1940’s. The Uptown Shopping Center is home to some 80 businesses, ranging from the cliché craft store typically found in dying malls and third-tier strip malls, to restaurants and bars that have been tenants at the mall for over 40 years. None of the businesses are of the caliber found in medium to high-end retail centers or representative of national chains such as the Banana Republic or Victoria’s Secret. The older tenants remain to be represented by their original signage characteristic of 1960’s roadside architecture, giving the impression that time has stood still for the last 30 to 40 years.
The strip mall sits in the middle of the proverbial sea of parking which appears as though it could never be filled to capacity during normal business hours. The shops and businesses face all four sides of the mall, with a service road / corridor running down the middle of the length of the mall. Pedestrian malls periodically cross the mall, populated with the requisite landscaping and park benches popular in Entourage catalogues. The architectural styling of each of the businesses represents a wide range of styles – nearly all installed during the early years of this mall – and representing a mish-mash of disparate styles that the designers of today’s Lifestyle Centers claim help to give these newer malls the feeling that they have been built up and grown over time in the same way a real Main Street or city would.
While the Uptown Shopping Center could clearly be categorized as a dying mall or strip-mall, its position in this small city gives it potential to be a significant place of urban significance and public space. Richland is one of three cities that comprise the Tri-Cities – all similar in size and without a downtown of any significance. Richland’s downtown is The Parkade, a sort of centerpiece in a fictitious arts district that is an arts district more so in name than in substance. Kennewick’s downtown (one of the other cities) is maybe less impressive and might better serve the city if it were to be flattened and turned over to alfalfa fields, rather than to be strung along and resurrected as another arts district in name. If the Tri-Cities were to have a ‘downtown’ of any significance, it would be the centrally located Columbia Center Mall.
The Uptown Shopping Center is in a unique position of being able to provide the city of Richland a useful centerpiece and framework for outdoor public space. The over-sized parking lot, which surrounds the mall, has the potential to serve activity other than that of parking. The continuous asphalt surface has the potential to be reclaimed as either temporary or permanent building. It was the site of temporary fireworks shanty over the 4th of July weekend, though the population and density of Richland doesn’t likely warrant additional retail or office space. As with most surface parking lots, it would easily lend itself to a landscaping strategy that turned the outer edges of the lot to ecological uses, ranging from vegetative space that captures runoff or absorbs the hot desert sun. It could also host agricultural use. During my visit to the shopping center a 10-year-old boy was collecting cherries from one of the cherry trees in the parking lot.
The mall appeared to be most active in the evening as it is host to a nightlife district often reserved for Main Street or Downtown. Three to four bars along one side of the shopping center mimic strings of bars found along main drags in college towns. The parking lot in front of this strip is nearly full, and groups of young people congregate on the sidewalks outside of the strip mall, activating the space of the parking lot. It appears to provide Richland with its closest semblance to public space, yet this is completely accidental.
Uptown Shopping Center [Flickr]
Ouch.
I found this article as I was trolling for information about Uptown Richland. The "ouch" comes from the painfully true observations about the place I have done business for 30 years. I have to wonder - is there a way for subsistence retailers to turn around an area such as this and make it vibrant?
Posted by: Douglas | February 04, 2007 at 11:15 AM