Opening A Big Box Of Trouble - What Towns Can Do With Abandoned Superstores

[hatrack]

EDIT

Studying big box reuse is such a timely and fascinating project. How did you get started?

I began the project because I grew up in a small historic town in central Kentucky called Bardstown. It’s very well preserved with over 300 buildings in the national registry of historic places–and meanwhile Wal-Mart has expanded twice there involving three sites in town. The company’s original store, abandoned so they could build a larger structure on the other side of town, remained vacant for about ten years. Eventually the town needed a new courthouse building and they decided to build on that lot. Doing so really changed the civic structure of the town. It was very intriguing.

How so?

The town bought the whole lot including the Wal-Mart and all of the outlying stores. There was a Goodyear tire and a Radio Shack and a Chinese food restaurant and whatever. Those are now the police station, the EMS, and so on. There are also restaurants. It’s been turned into a government center.

So you guessed that other towns were dealing with the same problem–essentially a hole in the local fabric?

At the time it was just a hunch that other communities must be dealing with empty Walmarts and asking what to do with these buildings. I started doing research, found some sites, and went around the country documenting how these structures are being reused and talking to the people who are doing it.

Don’t they just feel like disposable buildings though?

Exactly. They give off this aesthetic of disposability–maybe because corporations leave them behind so frequently. But it’s funny because they’re really anything but disposable. All of the buildings that I visited in my book were first generation big boxes, some built in the 60’s. And these groups that I documented moving into them–turning them into libraries and schools and so forth–are not thinking in temporary terms. They’re thinking long term: 50 or 100 years.

EDIT

http://www.infrastructurist.com/2009/02/25/big-box-of-trouble-dealing-with-the-coming-plague-of-empty-superstores/

[lsewpershad]

1. How to get the big box

Expropriation for $100 or less.

[madokie]

2. We have a couple abandoned walmart stores here in the neighboring town

That for the most part are setting empty. They were abandoned as they moved to larger stores. I remember when the first one there had a big ass sign out front that proclaimed that they proudly sold, made in USA merchandise.

[bluesmail]

3. What a great concept. Taking a corporation's abandoned

buildings, turning them into, dare I say it, productive for society structures. HA!

[druidity33]

4. excellent website...

thanks for the tip!

K&R!

[Sancho]

5. hmmm...let's see...

-torture prisons for convicted ex-politicians
-warehouses for paper ballots archived from the last election
-stock trading floors where transactions really don't happen but wall street executives don't know that
-Limbaugh diet and addition treatment centers
-immigrant processing centers (with English instruction)
-DUer meet-up centers
-natural disaster supply warehouses
-government owned banks
-free public health and medical centers
-volcano monitoring centers
-moose and turkey processing centers (only in alaska)
-wind and solar power power factories

I'm sure there are lots of uses for the buildings...

[formercia]

6. The question is: Were they really built to last 50-100 Years?

What I've noticed is that the big boxes tend to be made from prefab concrete slabs for walls with a fairly light frame holding it all together.

There's a Super-Wally going up here and the local freight salvage store has put bids on the old box. The 60's-70's era mall is slowly being abandoned as local businesses get attracted to the new big box. Classic inner-town flight.