Nova Place, Pittsburgh, PA

[TheFugitive]

This is a very cool idea for how to re-use a closed mall.

Nova Place is the new name given to the former Allegheny Center Mall,
which was launched with much fanfare in the early 70's, but was pretty much toast by the end of that decade.

I remember my parents dragging us there in the 70's, mainly because they had a Sears, which my dad liked, and GNC, which my mom really liked as she had gotten us onto a health food kick (she had basically kicked Captain Crunch out of the house and put us on a diet of healthy stuff and vitamins).
My very first experience with video gaming was on the Pong display unit in the electronics department at Sears in Allegheny Center.

The mall failed for several reasons, mostly because the neighborhood that surrounded it was in steep decline, and the resulting crime issues scared most shoppers away to suburban malls that were seen as safer.  Also you had to pay for parking, either at a street meter or in their underground garage.  As it was in a heavily urbanized neighborhood a stone's throw from downtown, getting in and out of there with traffic was generally problematic as well.

Pretty much all of the retail had left by the mid-80's.  More and more of the space was being turned over for office use.  I know a couple of the local banks ran customer service out of there, and when our regional sports network (currently AT&T SportsNet) got going their studios were in Allegheny Center.

The sports network moved out to a newer building near Heinz Field, and the mall was reinvented as Nova Place, an office and co-working space devoted to helping local tech startups.  The surrounding neighborhood has been gentrifying rapidly, and the young techies who work there really like being able to reach Nova Place on foot, by bike, or on public transportation.  All of the things that made that location unattractive to shoppers in cars have been turned to appeal to a different set of users.

There is also a fitness center and some restaurants located onsite, which means that the techies putting in 80-hour weeks coding for some new release won't have to travel far for a meal and a workout.

This is probably one of the most successful reinventions of a dead mall that I can think of.

https://novaplace.com/about-nova-place/