Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe retailers Sunglass Hut and GameStop have closed their Circle Centre stores.
Sunglass Hut’s last day of operations at Circle Centre was Saturday, an employee told IBJ. The chain also has stores at Castleton Square, Clay Terrace, the Fashion Mall at Keystone, Greenwood Park and Hamilton Town Center.
GameStop also has closed up shop, according to a mall employee. The store is no longer listed on GameStop’s website.
Last month, Texas-based GameStop announced that it had closed about 800 stores since 2019 as part of a larger effort to transform itself into a “digital-first, omnichannel retailer.” The company said it planned to close a total of 1,000 stores by the end of its 2020 fiscal year, which ends Sunday.
GameStop still has more than 5,000 stores, including 23 GameStop locations and two ThinkGeek stores in the Indianapolis area.
Sunglass Hut opened its first store in Miami in 1971. The company is now part of Milan, Italy-based eyewear giant Luxottica Group.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.
Gamestonk!!
Time to start letting everyone out of their leases at Circle Centre and convert the mall to something else. No it won’t turn into lafayette square or washington square like everyone that comments on these things tries to say as the real estate is too valuable. But it needs to become condos or a college or something.
I don’t think they need to scrap the mall altogether, but it’s going to cost an insane amount of money to redevelop. You’d have to somehow build up above the current building. I’m guessing this would mean two apartment and/or condo towers on top of the anchor spaces. You can’t just destroy the whole thing because of the historic facades. The City, Simon, and another major developer would have to partner to make anything worthwhile happen. I would imagine hundreds of residential units in the building could liven it up enough to support retail. Retail has to be a component though. One of the things that used to make Indianapolis so appealing to convention tourism was the skywalk system connecting to a nice mall. The mall isn’t nice anymore, but tourists still appreciate having shopping they don’t need to walk through weather for.
Whatever happens to the mall, is going to have to wait until we know what happens with the future of the office space space sector downtown. Between that and the mass exodus of the city county building, the future of downtown is going to be very different whether you’re ready to accept that or not.
Maybe Indy and the Simon’s should look to other cities comparable in size for ideas on the mall.
Columbus, Ohio, Nashville, TN, Milwaukee or Charlotte.
There’s more than comparing simple size, particularly when Indianapolis is really “artificially” a large city, which is the source of alot of it’s problems. Columbus is the best comparison Nationwide in all likelihood. Regardless, I think you’d find most cities of note have removed their equivalent of Circle Center. The proverbial train has likely already left the station on what may have been the best concept for CC, which would’ve been the tranait-combination concept. Now, in all likelihood, it will be competing with much more adaptable friendly sites nearby for residential conversion to some degree. Quite frankly, that’s if the trend of the young wanting to live in urban cores holds strong, which I’m not as bullish on as I was one year ago.