Toronto Star: What should we make of empty big-box stores?

[marmar]

URBAN RECLAMATION
TheStar.com | Insight | What should we make of empty big-box stores?

While we routinely mourn the disappearance of the small storefront, we rarely ask what happens to the texture of a city when a big-box store closes shop.
For starters, a new language to describe the concrete ephemerality would help.
Bigness, it seems, 'has yet to find its own poetic dimension'

Mar 29, 2009 04:30 AM

Ryan Bigge
SPECAL TO THE STAR


Except for the fact that they're rapidly disappearing, the hundreds of aging New York shops captured in the new book Store Front share little in common. Having spent eight years snapping up the modest beauty and idiosyncratic style of drugstores, bakeries, barbershops, butchers, luncheonettes, beauty salons, fish markets, florists, candy stores, diners, delis and corner groceries in the five boroughs of New York, photographers James T. and Karla L. Murray argue in the book's introduction that "These storefronts have the city's history etched in their façades."

Like people, storefronts absorb and deflect the abrasions of time very differently. Some, such as the Frank Bee 5¢ to $1.00 Store in the Bronx and Barney Greengrass (The Sturgeon King) in Manhattan, retain pristine signage, their stores serving as both museums and functional retail locations. Others, such as Ideal Dinettes in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighbourhood, are resigned to the elegant decay of rust and corrosion, a slow, graceful withering away.

And some are such community fixtures that they no longer require perfect signage, like the I Y L E S store in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant (add a "B" at the beginning and two "C"s in the middle) or the AIR stylists in Bensonhurst. (The "H" is dislocated, rather than missing, and drifts slowly down toward the awning.)

The Murrays note in their intro that about a third of the shops documented in their book are now gone. And while their interviews with proprietors raise the usual issues relating to survival, gentrification, chain-store incursion and the importance of community, Store Front works best as an aesthetic defence of small stores.

(For a sample, visit www.flickr.com/photos/jimandkarlamurray .)

Not every establishment is pretty, but each is unique, and the neighbourhood texture they provide is invaluable. Our own Queen and Spadina, for example, is no longer the same intersection without the Stem Open Kitchen, and Queen and Bathurst is still struggling to overcome the abscess created by last year's fire. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/610023

[datasuspect]

1. homeless shelters?

[Heidi]

2. Thank you for this article!

:hi:

[marmar]

3. Will do.....Sorry about that.

:hi:

[itsrobert]

4. Big Lots, 99 Cents Only stores? eom

n/t

[Tanuki]

5. Vanderbilt University Medical Center created a new outpatient health care facility

from space in a mall that had fallen on hard times. This could be a solution for empty big-box buildings in other cities.

http://www.vanderbilthealth.com/100oaks/



(edit for typo)

[Starry Messenger]

6. I agree with the comments at the news link.

Abandoned big box buildings are best torn down and the materials recycled and the land put to better use. Most of those buildings are just heinous eyesores. The death of the little store-fronts has been one of the saddest things to witness, especially here in the Bay Area where usually the only neighborhoods that have "character" are the wealthy neighborhoods. The little storefronts in the ailing neighborhoods have been almost totally gutted.