The 163rd Street Mall is Dead.  Long Live the 163rd Street Mall!

by Josh Colletta
The terrifying "Escalator of Death" (which is a term of endearment, I promise) at the 163rd Street Mall in North Miami Beach, Florida.

Since 1956, the northwest corner of Northeast 163rd Street and Northeast 15th Avenue in North Miami Beach, Florida has been the site of a legendary shopping mall.  No, it wasn’t the first shopping mall ever built, nor was it ever the largest.  But for nearly 30 years from its inception as the outdoor 163rd Street Shopping Center, it was THE regional destination shopping experience in northern Dade County and southern Broward County.

Miami’s most successful native department store, Burdines, was originally the sole anchor around which all of the other stores were built. You had to go to Downtown Miami to shop at the next closest Burdines location. That Downtown location was the flagship store in the heart of Miami — literally on the center of the street grid, at the corner of Flagler Street and Miami Avenue (now housing a Ross location). It, along with the rest of Flagler Street, had been the commercial center of South Florida.

But the 163rd Street Mall changed that as the suburbs grew, and the 163rd Street Burdines was, by all accounts, far more luxurious than its Downtown forebear. The 163rd Street location was even designed by Raymond Loewy! It really didn’t get any more swanky than that!  Check out these 1957 photos from the Library of Congress, courtesy of the Mall Hall of Fame blog:

  • A broad, two-level cement wall building with a third level in the central portion.  A giant sign on the front says "BURDINE'S Sunshine Fashions," while a partially-obscured sign on the side of the third level also says "BURDINE'S."  An American flag flies from a pole atop the central portion.

The Miami Herald did a great piece with some fantastic pictures of the mall in its heyday.  Visually confirm what I’m telling you.  This place was BOSS.

J.C. Penney had a single-level location that sat on a footprint smaller than the other anchors, but still larger than the regular mall shops.  Woolworth’s had a slightly smaller store, Walgreen’s sat on the east side of the courtyard, and a grocery store called Food Fair, later renamed Pantry Pride, sat at the northeast corner.  Richards, another Miami-based department store (never as successful as Burdines) came shortly thereafter in 1957 on the west end.

That big gray square in the upper-left corner of the image below was originally a single-screen Wometco movie theater, and was later expanded to a two-screen cineplex.  Interesting connection for the broadcasting geeks like myself: Wometco was the founder and original owner of Miami and Florida’s first TV station, WTVJ, starting in 1949.  The station’s original studios were the former Wometco Capitol Theater on the northwest corner of Miami Avenue and Northwest 3rd Street.  Coincidentally, the company owned the station until 1983… a year that will become very important to the mall’s story later on.

The layout of the 163rd Street Shopping Center circa 1957, from the Mall Hall of Fame blog.

In 1971, the mall experienced an expansion with the addition of a three-level eastern anchor occupied by Allied’s — later Federated’s — Florida division of the department store Jordan Marsh.  This was a separate Miami-based company from the original Boston-based store, and… well, over time, it showed; let’s just put it that way to be kind about it.  But at the outset, they were doing great business in the state, and the 163rd Street location was no exception.

The expansion necessitated some rearrangement of the northeast portion of the mall. Woolworth stayed put, but expanded toward the back, and the shop space immediately to its east added another storefront toward the back, as well. Across the walkway to the east, the building holding the original Pantry Pride location and the small shop within its front-facing corner was torn down. The new Jordan Marsh building was built in its place, with a new shop space along the western interior side.

A new Pantry Pride building was built partially behind the Woolworth and its attached small shop section.  A roof was added over the back wing corridor, making it the only enclosed portion of the mall at this point, but the grocery store itself only had an exterior entrance, so the corridor had its own entryway… at least for the time being (we’ll come back to that later)

This would be the mall’s final footprint for more than 30 years.

The layout of the 163rd Street Shopping Center circa 1972, from the Mall Hall of Fame blog.

That was enough to sustain the mall even into the late 70’s, but there was increasing competition:

  • The Biscayne Plaza Shopping Center in northern Miami’s Little River neighborhood (literally right on the river itself!) actually opened a year earlier in 1955, which included Miami’s first J.C. Penney location.
  • Northside Shopping Center in Miami’s West Little River neighborhood was actually modeled after 163rd Street in 1960, and it included the Southeast’s largest Sears store.
  • Kendall’s Dadeland Mall, designed by the same man who designed Northside, became southern Dade County’s regional shopping hub in 1962, and it was actually bigger than 163rd Street (and is still thriving today).
  • The high-end Bal Harbour Shops opened in 1966 with Neiman Marcus as the anchor, and it continues to thrive with an extremely carefully-selected collection of stores (both Neiman’s and Saks Fifth Avenue included).
  • The Hollywood Fashion Center opened up in Broward in 1971… interestingly enough, ending 163rd’s draw from that part of the area with its own Burdines, Jordan Marsh, and Richard’s anchors.
  • The Omni International Mall opened in Downtown Miami in 1977, centered around a Marriott-owned hotel, a previously-existing Jordan Marsh anchor, and a newly-built J.C. Penney on the other side… plus an incredible double-decker carousel the likes of which hardly exist anymore (and I’d sure love to know where the Omni’s ended up!).
TOP: A print advertisement black and white picture of the Omni carousel from the floor, showing the stairway up to the second level.
BOTTOM: A color photograph of the Omni carousel from above, with a couple of bystanders revealing the scale of the fixture.
Photo from the Flashback South Florida – Memories and Memorabilia page on Facebook.

163rd Street’s owners got the message. Bigger, enclosed malls were now the thing, and they needed to act to stay on top of the region’s shopping destination list.

The perfect opportunity came with the bankruptcy of Richard’s in 1980.  A holding company called City Stores had purchased the chain not long before, but due to severe mismanagement, they were forced to shutter almost all of their department store brands — many of them well-respected regional nameplates, Richards included — and sell off the few that remained throughout the 70’s and 80’s.  To be clear, Richards was a successful chain, but City Stores had bungled everything else so badly that they had to get the money out somehow, and Richards was one of the final victims.

But City Stores’ failure was the impetus for the biggest change yet at 163rd Street.  Officially changing the center’s name to The Mall at 163rd Street in 1980, the owners embarked on a two-year renovation project that completely transformed the joint.  Firstly, they built “The Dome,” a metal-framed archway of translucent white Teflon-coated fiberglass over the top of the central concourse.

New store spaces were added to fill in roughly three-quarters of the width of the southern courtyard, forming a new southern entryway directly into the mall concourse. And new small shops were also added on the south side of Jordan Marsh with a roof over this new southeastern entryway.

Of course, this came with something that every Southerner — and indeed every Miamian, living in continental North America’s only tropical climate zone — could be eternally grateful for: air conditioning! Trust me, in a place on the globe where the regular afternoon weather is 85 degrees and 99% humidity, complete with a drenching downpour at 3 PM that you can set your watch by, you too would worship at the altar of Willis Carrier.

But what of the Richards space?  Well, the first and second floors were turned into more mall shops with a westward extension of the main concourse to a three-level atrium.  The second floor notably added a second location of the Spec’s record store called “Spec’s Metro.”  While the original Spec’s location on the main concourse maintained the usual variety that the chain normally carried, Spec’s Metro focused on a more youthful demographic with the burgeoning hard rock and new wave scenes.  Up on the third floor was the “Grandstands” food court, a sports-themed area with the usual mall food fare of the era.

The layout of The Mall at 163rd Street circa 1982, from the Mall Hall of Fame blog.

A side note here: the extension of the concourse into the former anchor space on the second level meant cutting into and removing that portion of the floor.  This had the unfortunate side effect of making the second floor concourse walkway slope downward a few inches toward the railing overlooking the first floor.  It was perfectly safe, but it used to scare the ever-living crap out of me.  I always felt like the damn thing was going to break off at any moment.  I stayed the hell away from it and walked as close to the storefronts as possible!

However, while the third floor did have an opening for the atrium, it may or may not have suffered from this problem.  The atrium might have been there in the Richards store all along. I wouldn’t know, it closed before I was born.  But by the time the third floor was occupied by a new anchor (read on to find out who), there was a half-wall surrounding the opening, and merchandise was set up against it, so I wouldn’t have known one way or the other.

Anyway, the addition of teenager-friendly offerings was especially beneficial. North Miami Beach Senior High School and its neighboring feeder, John F. Kennedy Junior High, both built in the early 70’s, are literally right across the street from the back side of the mall’s west end. Kids could come in to grab some food after school, do a little shopping for the latest music and fashions, then catch a movie at the theater, all in the afternoon before heading home. And given South Florida traffic, they’d probably still get home before their parents did. Throughout the 80’s and even into the 90’s, 163rd Street was everything a teen mall rat could ever dream of.

It all went so well that it was being referred to in the media as “The Miracle on 163rd Street.”

Which, as I’m sure you’re guessing right now, means that it couldn’t last forever.


Let’s go back to the early 1970’s.  Developers Eddie Lewis and Don Soffer looked at some swampy estuary land in unincorporated Dade County along the east side of Biscayne Boulevard north of North Miami Beach, and they saw an opportunity.  Condos.  Luxury condos.  Luxury condos and a resort.  Luxury condos and a resort surrounding an incredible golf course.  Scratch that, two incredible golf courses.  All of it sitting right where the Intracoastal Waterway flows into Dumfoundling Bay (I swear I am not making that name up).

Originally, the entire area was going to be called Turnberry… and the neighborhood surrounding the country club is named Turnberry Isle (even though it’s not an island).  But the developers later thought a different name would be appropriate, and as the story goes, they thought back to one of the earliest moments when they were planning the whole thing out, when one of them said to the other, “what an adventure this is going to be!”  So while the central development remained Turnberry, the surrounding area — later incorporated into its own city in 1995 — took as it’s name the Spanish word for adventure: Aventura.

By the early 80’s, there were already plans to build an Interstate-standard limited-access causeway from Biscayne Boulevard on the west to Collins Avenue on the east, providing the first heavy-traffic, wide-vehicle access between the mainland and the barrier islands south of Sheridan Street 5.5 miles to the north in Hollywood and north of the Broad Causeway 4.6 miles to the south in Bal Harbour and Surfside.  The beachfront communities were already heavily developed, and the hotel and condo towers were only going to get taller, so efficiently getting commercial deliveries to them was quickly becoming a necessity.

A topographically-respectful route winding along the baseline of Northeast 192nd Street was deemed the best option given its proximity to the I-95 exit at Ives Dairy Road (which is 203rd Street at Biscayne Boulevard).  Ives Dairy couldn’t be extended due to the development that had already begun at Turnberry, and while the closer 207th Street bounded Turnberry to the north, there was already development needing access along that street, making a six-lane tall bridge over the Intracoastal an impossibility at that location.

Lewis, Soffer, and their partners at Oxford Development quickly realized the corner of Biscayne Boulevard and the William H. Lehman Causeway was going to get very busy — and very visible — very quickly.  So, to sit on that corner, they planned out Aventura Mall, which would open in the same year as the new bridge: 1983.

I told you that year would be important later on.

The mall actually opened in April, almost six months to the day before the Lehman Causeway opened to traffic.  The first jab at 163rd Street was poaching J.C. Penney.  The company was on the upswing nationwide, and the relatively tiny space they were confined to in NMB just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.  Aventura Mall made them the prominent northern anchor store with a space to themselves larger than anything on site at 163rd Street.  That new location opened alongside a Lord & Taylor on the west side of Aventura Mall, coinciding with the opening of the concourse stores and the “Treats” food court.  Sears opened as the south side anchor in July, and Florida’s very first Macy’s location opened on the east side, just south of the food court, in October.

It was an immediate success.  Almost overnight, Aventura Mall became the shopping destination in northern Dade and southern Broward Counties.  Even the Hollywood Fashion Center, which wasn’t really in direct competition, had already been seeing decline due to its location in an increasingly dingy area that was losing money.  Aventura didn’t help them any more than it helped 163rd Street.  The shoppers’ choice was clear.


Back at 163rd, the writing was on the wall.  Their anchor spaces were tiny compared to newer malls and even older malls that had more property to work with and could expand for their existing or new anchors.  What was once seen as the rebirth of an iconic South Florida shopping destination was almost as quickly seen as the outdated has-been that it was soon to become, a mere three years after embarking on its remarkable renovation.  It wasn’t about to exhale its last breath yet, but everyone knew that day was coming sooner rather than later.

Penney’s was obviously gone, so the ground floor was divided up into six small shops, and the basement (which had been the previous occupant’s office and warehouse space) became an Oshman’s Sporting Goods store… something I have very clear memories of, because basements are exceedingly rare in South Florida.  The water table kinda gets in the way since you’re literally one foot above sea level.

None of which was going to replace the amount of traffic J.C. Penney brought in.

On top of that, the drug wars were taking their toll.  If you’ve ever seen or heard me talk about growing up in Miami in the 80’s and 90’s, you’ve heard me say this before: Miami Vice was a *lightened* dramatization of what was going on at the time.  Just about all forms of violent crime in South Florida were somehow drug-related in that era, and the 163rd Street Mall took a major reputational hit because of it.

To wit, here’s a 1984 report from Katherine Couric, who was a local reporter for WTVJ at the time (what a coincidence!).

By the way, the organization which provided this video, the Wolfson Archive, was founded with a donation from the estate of, and hence named after, Mitchell Wolfson, the “Wo” in “Wometco.”  He died in 1983.  Crazy how this all keeps coming back full circle, huh?

Anyway, what Couric is side-stepping there is that drug traffickers used to use the 163rd Street parking garages as exchange sites.  The purse-snatchings, the muggings, the rapes; none of that was detached from the central criminal activity taking place there: drug deals.  And yes, those meetings would go sideways every so often.

Here, let me show you something:

A partial map of North Miami Beach showing a straight line from the former site of the eastern Jordan Marsh parking garage at the 163rd Street Mall to my childhood home, some 15 short blocks north and 1 wide block east.

This map is oriented westward.  That yellow line is a direct path from the entrance to the former eastern Jordan Marsh parking garage, which is where Couric was standing at the end of that piece… 15 short blocks north and one wide block east to the exact point of my bedroom in my childhood home.

I could hear the gunshots inside, then turn on Channel 10 Eyewitness News at 5 and watch Ann Bishop and Dwight Lauderdale tell me all about what I’d just heard a few hours before.

And this was in a relatively safe neighborhood.

So if things were already that bad in 1984, and I was hearing gunshots coming from that direction in my early childhood in the late 80’s, it was kind of a problem for the public’s perception of the mall.  It had quickly turned from the Miracle on 163rd Street into the Nightmare on 163rd Street.

Not for nuthin’, Pantry Pride got the hell out of there in ’84.  They moved to the newly-built (but never really successful) Skylake Mall about a mile to the north up 15th Avenue on Miami Gardens Drive (I could see it over the tops of the houses from my favorite perch in our backyard grapefruit tree).  Service Merchandise took its space at 163rd and the concourse entryway at the end of that wing, in essence creating an entirely new anchor space with direct mall access.

And we still shopped there!  Our heads were on swivels and we were hyper-alert at all times, but we still shopped there! In fact, lemme show you another thing:

On a far-flung, dusty corner of my desk sits a 1980's GE clock radio on top of a black bookshelf speaker.  The time as I took this picture was 2:24 AM.  Never you mind that device in the background; I keep it within Part 15 limits and I know what I'm doing.
Pardon the dust; it’s on a part of my desk that I haven’t cleaned in forever.

I bought that clock radio in 1988 at that very same Service Merchandise.  Can’t remember if it was Christmas money, birthday money, or just saving up my allowance, but that is the very first electronic device I ever bought in my entire life at the age of 3.

That crack in the front plastic happened when I accidentally dropped it on the kitchen floor while carrying it back to my bedroom from the backyard in 1992.  I grabbed a screwdriver, opened it up, popped the broken piece back in, got the frequency indicator realigned properly, and put it back together.  You wouldn’t believe how proud of myself I was when I plugged it back in and found that it still worked perfectly well!

It got me through all of elementary school, middle school, high school, my one year of college, and the first few years of my adult life on my own.  I still use it in my living room because its big red numerals are easy to see from the couch.

Proof positive that I survived the very real dangers of The Mall at 163rd Street in the 80’s and 90’s.

But the mall itself could not possibly survive as it was.


Let’s take a look at one company’s situation in 1986.  Canadian real estate investment firm Campeau Corporation bought up Allied Stores, owners of both Miami-based Jordan Marsh Florida and Tampa-based Maas Brothers, as well as other brands like the original Boston-based Jordan Marsh, Seattle-based The Bon Marché, New York-based Ann Taylor and Brooks Brothers, and various other regional stores.

The following year, Campeau merged the Florida brands into a joint Maas Brothers / Jordan Marsh Florida division.

The year after that (we’re up to ’88 now), Campeau bought up the previous iteration of Federated Department Stores, owner of Bloomingdales, Lazarus, and by that time, Miami’s own Burdines.

By 1990, Campeau was in massive debt up to their foreheads, and they were forced to file for bankruptcy for both the Federated and Allied subsidiaries.  As a result of that, they were compelled to do something they should have done in the first place: eliminate redundancies.  So, in 1991, they merged Jordan Marsh Florida and Maas Brothers into the bigger, more successful, and better-liked Florida brand: Burdines.

That meant no more Jordan Marsh on the east end of the 163rd Street Mall, and no more brand protection for Burdines in the center anchor spot.  Same goes for the same stores up at the Hollywood Fashion Center (we’ll circle back to that).

That same year, California-based Mervyn’s — which had been expanding eastward through the 70’s and 80’s and had already established a presence in Lakeland by 1988 — was pushing hard into Florida with conversions of Lord & Taylor locations at several South Florida malls: Cutler Ridge Mall, Coral Square Mall, Miami International Mall, Boynton Beach Mall, and Treasure Coast Square.  In 1992, they took over several former Jordan Marsh stores, including the one at 163rd Street, though they only occupied the first two floors, not the third.

I distinctly remember the commercials, so the marketing team definitely got it right!  “O-pen! O-pen!  O-pen!”

It was about this same time that the “Grandstand” food court was closed down and moved to the second level of the former Richards space, and Marshalls took over the top floor in its entirety.  Which is probably why I had thought for years, until just last year, that the above commercial had been for Marshalls rather than Mervyn’s.

Also, the opening of the Marshalls prompted the construction of…

THE ESCALATOR OF DEATH!

Inside a mall concourse colored in mostly flat, light yellow with fake brick accents and lots of display glass, a single escalator travels up two floors from the ground level to a Marshall's store.  There is nothing enclosing the escalator on its sides at any point, it's all out there in the open.  It's perfectly safe, but I can tell you from much personal experience: it provides ZERO sense of safety or security.
Brace yourself for the harrowing, vertically intimidating, agonizingly slow ride to savings.

That’s a single, upward-traversing escalator, directly from the first to the third floor, with nothing but the handrails enclosing it; and you can’t see it in this picture, but there are no supports underneath it, it is entirely self-supporting.  Which is terrifying.  Oh, it’s perfectly safe.  You’re not going to fall off unless you do something remarkably stupid.  And you’ll probably feel absolutely fine about it as long as you have no problem with heights in open spaces (which I do, so… this thing horrified me).

But that being said, apart from my own fears, “Escalator of Death” is a term of endearment.  Seriously!  That thing is way cool!  The primary access to a mall’s anchor store is a long escalator?!  How awesome is that?! How often do you see something like that?!  And I got to grow up with it practically in my front yard!

(Side note: there had never been an escalator in my current residence of Hillsdale County, Michigan until Hillsdale College installed one at their events hall a few years back.  Make of that what you will.)

Anyway…


Let’s stay in 1992 but jump up north to the Hollywood Fashion Center.  Things ain’t goin’ so well up there, either.

Richards, of course, shut down in 1980 along with the rest of the chain, but Massachusetts-based Zayre took over their anchor space in 1982.  It was a discount store, so not quite up to the same money demographic that Richards had been, but at least the space was occupied, and they were bringing in customers that didn’t have local access to such a retailer otherwise.  Whether or not those shoppers were continuing into the rest of the mall, however… well, we can safely say “not.”  Zayre avoided going under entirely by being sold to direct competitor Ames in 1988, and that store continued to operate the Hollywood anchor until they, themselves, filed for Chapter 11 in 1990.

Jordan Marsh, of course, shut down in 1991.

Between the draw of Aventura Mall, the way the neighborhood around the Fashion Center was in decline (both in money and in safety), and the fact that pretty much everyone in the department store game already had a home in the region, the mall’s owners couldn’t find anyone to fill those empty anchor spaces, and the small stores began to pull down the security gates for good.

To add insult to injury, the money was moving to the west across Broward County, and another developer had announced plans for a new mall in Pembroke Pines.  Guess which two anchors they signed deals with.

In 1992, J.C. Penney and Burdines moved from the Hollywood Fashion Center to the brand-new Pembroke Lakes Mall, alongside Sears — which itself had moved from the Hollywood Mall, a different enclosed shopping center further east from the Hollywood Fashion Center — and an entirely new Mervyn’s.

Hollywood Fashion Center was fucked.

They tried to hold out with what few small shops they had left, but they didn’t make it past 1993. A Smart & Final food services store, later Gordon Food Services, occupied the Ames anchor for a brief period, and for a couple of years in the early 2000’s, the concourse played host to a flea market… until the cops figured out that literally everything that was being sold there was stolen merchandise. Once that was shut down, the building became infested with bats and was a public safety hazard. Walmart bought the property in 2013 and tore the thing down the following year to build a new store there.

Not coincidentally, both the Hollywood Fashion Center and Pembroke Lakes Mall are both also old stompin’ grounds of mine.  My mother did some shopping at the Fashion Center from time to time, and when my family moved to Cooper City in 1995, Pembroke Lakes was just a bike ride away.  I used to go there every Saturday and hang out with my friends.

What, you couldn’t tell by now that I was, in fact, a mall rat?  Not very observant, are you?


So with the Fashion Center out of the picture by 1994, Aventura was once again drawing from southeast Broward County, while Pembroke Lakes developed a hold that it still has on the southwest Broward County crowd.

That brings us back to North Miami Beach.  Skylake Mall (remember, the place where Pantry Pride had moved?) was pretty much dead.  To be fair, it was pretty much never alive to begin with.

If you were looking at it from its front on Miami Gardens Drive (looking south), here’s how it lined up.  On the far left end was a two-screen second-run (and later arthouse) movie theater.  Immediately to the right of that was the Pantry Pride — which in this case did open an entryway to the eastern wing of small shops; which I think was probably a requirement for their lease, though I could be wrong, and you’ll see why in a moment.  The aforementioned east concourse wing led to a central J. Byrons anchor (another Miami-based department store, this one more midrange than Burdines or Richards) which separated the two concourse wings.  Then, at the far right end of the western concourse wing was a Home Depot.  Which did not have direct access from the mall concourse, and I don’t know whether that’s because the mall’s owners just didn’t care, or if Home Depot strongarmed their way into it, which they probably could have done because they were — by leaps and bounds — bringing in the most business that mall ever saw.

As for the small shops, I have no memory of the east wing whatsoever.  I think my Mom might have walked us through there all of once for some reason.  But from what I’ve heard from pretty much everyone, it was just as empty as the west wing.  The only things I remember ever being in the west wing were a barber shop that my Dad liked to go to, and a cheap Chinese joint called Imperial Garden, where we ordered takeout from if we weren’t looking to spend the money and eat the larger portions served at The Bamboo Garden down on 163rd Street (not in the mall, just on the strip).

For the record, The Bamboo Garden was the gourmet Chinese restaurant in South Florida at the time, as North Miami Beach served as sort of a combination Chinatown and Little Italy back then.  The nationalities have changed since, but it’s still a very diverse community (which I love about it!).

There may have been a couple other small storefronts in Skylake Mall that I’m not recalling… but I doubt it.  That’s about as full as it ever got.  The lights in the wings were never turned on.  Ever.  At any time of day or night that I can remember.  It was always dark in there, only lit by the sun coming through the skylights or the lights coming from the stores.  It was dead.  D-E-D dead.

So, in late 1994, after Home Depot left to build a new outparcel store on the site of the former Wometco 163rd Street theaters — hey, good news for 163rd Street Mall, right? — the owners pretty much said “everybody out, we’re tearing it down and building a strip plaza.”  By that time, Pantry Pride — then owned by John Catsimatidis, who now owns WABC-AM in New York (small world!) — had already shut down anyway.  The movie theater was, by all accounts, no great loss.  Byrons was undergoing financial struggles of their own, and I think they may have actually closed that store before the redevelopment announcement.  That just left whoever was left in the wings, and… like I said, there wasn’t much there to begin with.

The redevelopment into what is now The Shops at Skylake worked out far better than the enclosed mall ever had.  The anchoring Publix supermarket is massive compared to the old Publix store where my family used to shop at a complex called Jefferson Plaza, located beyond the 163rd Street curves west of the mall.  The Jefferson Plaza location itself was larger than the Publix that was actually closer to us on 15th Avenue across from 163rd Street Mall (which no longer exists, and a park has since been built on that site).  The new Jefferson Plaza Publix, built in 2021, is about the same size as Skylake from what I can tell, so it all evens out.  Skylake also has an LA Fitness gym, a TJ Maxx store, and many varied small shops and offices.  It’s everything Skylake Mall had delusions of being better than, and it’s better than Skylake Mall ever was.

So how much did that Home Depot help out 163rd Street Mall?

About as much as it helped out Skylake Mall.  It’s an outparcel.  It never brought people into the mall proper.  When the movie theaters were still viable, at least you had the mall right there to peruse while you waited for your show to start, or to wander around after your show ended, maybe get a bite to eat or something.  With The Home Depot there… it’s a Home Depot.  You go there, you get your shit, you put it in your truck, and you go home to work on whatever it is you bought that shit to do.  It’s not a draw to the mall, It’s a draw to itself.


So Skylake, which was never a threat to 163rd Street to begin with, was now even less of a threat to 163rd Street or anyone else.  Some comfort that was for 163rd.  On the bright side, they still had Marshalls.  They still had Burdines.  They still had Service Merchandise.  They still had Mervyn’s.

Until they didn’t have Mervyn’s anymore.

The gamble on the Southeast and it’s two key metro areas (Miami and Atlanta) didn’t pay off for the California company, and in the mid-90’s they ended up selling off or shuttering their stores in both Florida and Georgia.  Their location at Pembroke Lakes Mall got sold to Dillard’s in 1997, who had practically just built their own store at that mall in 1995, so Dillard’s divided up departments between the two spaces there.

The Mervyn’s location at 163rd Street?  In 1995, it was one of those that simply went away.  Turned out the lights, closed the doors, and that was that.

Now, I cannot find any trace of this online anywhere, but I could swear that Burdines took that as an opportunity to move into the eastern anchor space at 163rd.  I have a very strong memory of driving past and seeing that iconic logo having been moved from the outside of the central anchor to the eastern end.  I’m almost certain that happened, maybe in or around 1996.  If anyone out there remembers it the same way, please let me know that I’m not losing my mind.  Or maybe this is another Berenstein / Berenstain thing and I arrived here from an alternate reality.  Who knows?

Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, because the final nail in 163rd Street Mall’s coffin began to be hammered that year, they just didn’t know it yet.

Just a couple years prior, another developer overhauled a property literally a single block south of Aventura Mall, and turned it into an upscale outdoor mall of their own called Loehmann’s Fashion Island. It was basically your run-of-the-mill high-end lifestyle center of the 90’s, but with a contemporary Miamian look and feel. New, fresh, flashy… expensive. But one of the anchors of this upstart mall was a 24-screen AMC cinema, the largest multiplex showing the widest variety of films for miles and miles around. There was no other movie theater of that size in northern Dade or southern Broward County at the time. It was the place to go see a movie thenceforth.

Well!  Aventura Mall simply could not allow THIS!  And by God, it was time to finally do something about 163rd Street, too.

It started with the first-ever expansion of Aventura Mall in 1997.  Someone just might have whispered in someone else’s ear that a certain major regional indoor mall up the road was planning a big new three-floor wing (the entire rest of the mall was only two floors)… you know, off that blank wall next to Sears where there was always intended to be another anchor?  And let’s just say that if someone down the street could get out of their lease, the other someone might just do the neighborly thing and help them out with building out the third floor of that new wing to someone’s specifications.

And so it was that The AMC Aventura 24 moved from Loehmann’s Fashion Island to Aventura Mall.

But the theater wasn’t the only anchor in that wing; no sir!  Because the theater itself didn’t open until 1998.  What that wing opened with in 1997 was Bloomingdales.  And that, too, was a major get!  But there was always space for a third anchor on that wing.  It was built with one store specifically in mind, and the mall’s owners weren’t going to take no for an answer.

So in 1999, Burdines packed everything up, told 163rd Street Mall “thanks for the memories,” and moved across town to Aventura.

And this is another reason why I’m pretty sure I’m right about Burdines having moved into the former Mervyn’s space, because their leaving that east end of the mall freed up 163rd Street’s owners to make the deal that North Miami Beach had been waiting decades for.

See, there was one shopping experience that was not available locally, and that was the superstore format.  All the way into the early aughts, if you wanted everything under one roof, there were two options, both Walmarts, and they were both a total pain in the ass to get to.

One was in Miami Gardens, just a couple of miles from 163rd Street Mall as the crow flies… but on US 441 on the north side of the Golden Glades Interchange, literally halfway between 163rd Street and Miami Gardens Drive.  You don’t have to be familiar with the area to know what that means, just understand that there’s no direct way to get there from anywhere in NMB.  You either have to go all the way up to Miami Gardens Drive and take that west to 441, then come back south on 441… or you have to take the interchange ramp that turns directly off of 163rd Street northward to northbound US 441.

Which admittedly doesn’t sound difficult, but the first thing you encounter right off the bat is a single-lane ramp merging in from the left at speed that carries traffic from both 441 south of the interchange and State Road 9 from the southwest, and there is no merge lane there.  You either go, let them in, or crash.  At least the next ramp that merges in from the left, again, at speed, this time coming from I-95, adds another lane to the roadway, so there’s less risk of collision.  But God help you during any time remotely near rush hour, because you. will. sit. there.

And good luck getting back home through the interchange.  That’s an even bigger mess.  You don’t even wanna know.

The other Walmart was about 5.5 miles from 163rd Street Mall as the crow flies… but that one was actually easier to get to, it’s just a drive up Biscayne to Hallandale Beach Boulevard, hang a right, then make your way to the left lane, and it’s the last traffic light before you get to the bridge.  That’s the one we went to when we needed to go to Walmart.  Still was a bit of a drive, but you didn’t have to deal with the Golden Glades, and any time you don’t have to deal with the Golden Glades, that’s a win.

Walmart had been trying for years to find a way to get into North Miami Beach, and North Miami Beach had been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to get a Walmart.  So with the east end of 163rd Street Mall no longer occupied and no viable prospects to fill it… it was go time.

In 2003, the entire eastern third of 163rd Street Mall was demolished.  All of it.  The Jordan Marsh / Mervyn’s anchor, the Service Merchandise anchor (that company had shuttered all stores by 2002 anyway), the concourse shops, and the dreaded eastern parking garage were all torn down, and in 2005, NMB’s long-awaited Walmart Supercenter finally opened on the northeast corner of the mall property, at the corner of 167th Street and 15th Avenue.

The layout of The Mall at 163rd Street circa 2006, from the Mall Hall of Fame blog.

Naturally, the mall’s owners took this as an opportunity to refocus, remodel, and attempt to make it work as a full-on “power center” with big-box stores like Office Depot in the former Walgreen’s space and Ross on the first floor of the former central Burdines.

But it never really worked.  A Steve & Barry’s location made a go of it on the second floor above Ross in 2007, but the company liquidated just two years later.  Office Depot shut down in 2015, and according to Wikipedia, its space was later temporarily occupied by “Halloween City” in 2017, which I’m guessing is a competitor to Spirit Halloween.  You always know it’s going well when a Halloween store pops up in a mall, right?  Wikipedia also says a deep discount retailer called “Closeouts World” opened in the mall in 2019.  Also a real confidence-booster.

Ross is still there with a lease until 2026.  Marshalls moved out in 2021, headed over to the newly-rebuilt Jefferson Plaza… right next door to that Publix I mentioned earlier.

And that brings us to today… or at least December 30th,, which is when the good folks at Only In Dade posted this video on Facebook.  It’s what inspired this post.  It depresses me.  I’m re-uploading it here since Wordpress apparently has no capability to embed Facebook Reels (really?  Really?).

Okay, let’s be honest: it’s funny in a dark kind of way.  Like “oh dear God, everything I know from my childhood is evaporating and nothing better is coming along to replace it, so let’s laugh at what’s still here while we can.”  That kind of dark funny.

Seriously, though, this is like watching your elderly dog suffer in pain and fear in the last moments of their life.  Please, for the love of God, give them the shot and put them out of their misery.  It’s painful to witness.

The best thing that could possibly happen here is to just raze the entire thing and build a mixed-use “village” type development with small shops on the ground floors and affordable housing above them.

Heh.  Affordable housing in South Florida.  That’ll be the day.  Zillow estimates that my childhood home — single family, 3 beds, 1 bath, about 1,300 square feet on an eighth-acre lot, built in 1952, — is currently worth $452,900.  My father sold it in 1995 for $69,000 (nice).  It has not increased that much in real value.  Nowhere near it.  That’s just what the absolutely batshit insane housing market has done to prices in the region.

No, it’s more likely to be an upscale urban village development with high-end small shops and luxury condos.

The mall was just acquired by new ownership this past April, and there are already plans.  They don’t really strike me as anything particularly inspired or even anything that’s going to actually work.  Affordable or not, if it doesn’t include housing, it’s bound to fail.  Time will tell what this new group will do.

I can only hope for success.  That property and my hometown deserve better than what’s there now.  Or, better said, what’s no longer there now.

There can be another miracle there.  I believe it.

An aerial view of The 163rd Street Shopping Center in its mid-1950’s open-air configuration, from the Mall Hall of Fame blog.

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