I used to work for a company in NYS that used a section of a converted mall for office space. God, that was the worst office space I've ever been in -- the floors moved a ton when you moved your chair, echoed when you walked around, the temperatures were absolutely all over the place depending on how close you were to a heater/cooling vent, and worst of all... malls don't really have windows.
Working in a converted mall might as well be working in a prison, for all I can tell. The walkway through the middle was kind of nice (and the food court still functioned as a cafeteria, so you could walk fully indoors during cold winter/hot summer days to get a coffee or lunch)... but I think I'd still rather be able to see the outdoors from my desk.
Epic will be redeveloping the entire 87-acre site, for reopening in 2024.
The mall is in Cary, NC (Raleigh-Durham / RTP area).
Ironically, I was thinking it'd be kind of cool to work in an old mall building (with the typical US indoor shopping mall layout). Inefficient in many ways (parking, space utilization, HVAC), but the idea of locating teams in small (fishbowl?) office-like pods seems interesting.
Natural light would be a problem. The food court could be appealing...
Some of the complaints you mention sound like they might be specific to that building? Commercial floors should be standard build slab/tray concrete in a mall or office building. Retail HVAC should be adequate if inefficient.. Then again, a failed mall might have failed for a long list of reasons, and a crappy physical plant is definitely one of them!
I did some construction work at this mall in college. Of the many many problems, natural light is probably number 1. It's an absolute dungeon, dark and oppressive. I don't see how you fix it besides blowing it up and starting over.
Money's not infinite (not even Epic's money). Much of the time, it's better (cost-effective) to demolish and start fresh, especially if the foundation and infrastructure are even remotely sketchy.
Demolishing isn't really that expensive, at this kind of scale.
actually there's a case of problems that involve natural evolution, survivorship over time and distributed actors. It can be argued this is also possible if you have the will and the money, but it practically never happens (arguably a minority of vc money maybe?) that people with will and money give it away to a large number of distributed decision makers over a time period to produce a single specific goal.
It might seem like I'm splitting hairs, but actually urban design and working/living environment is exactly hypothesised to be one of those cases. It's why some people argue successful downturn areas and urban environments with walkability and diversity of use/design/ spectacle (so not most US cities), because they have evolved that way from lots of little distributed inconsistent designs, but with individual members tested, repurposed and surviving due to evolution over time.
When a big developer or mega Corp develops or designs, you don't get natural evolution and diversity of design over time, you get mass sameness and waterfall design. It's why you get planned community aesthetics and corporate brand + policy rather than what organically works. The best of them might be bright and shiny (see Apple office/campus), but they still have the overarching ethos of singular design and absolute central/corporate control. Some people like that environment, personally I don't like working in it (don't get me wrong, i'd rather work in a good one rather than a bad one though).
In practice they don't get it perfect. I imagine a lot of people could list problems with the Apple campus in practice, and I'd be good money this isn't going to be the Apple campus...
The article mentions that "some structures" will be demolished, but that other plans are far from certain. I'll definitely keep an eye on this to see if they do a better job converting this mall than the converted mall that I've experienced!
Amazon bought the upper floors of the Seattle downtown Macys building. I worked in there for a few days to get a feel for it out of curiosity (my team was in a dif building). It was awful, it was completely dark inside, almost no natural light, the building is old as shit and super janky as a result. It's also across the street from McStabs so once they moved in, every Seattle employee started getting emergency stay inside texts because of the street level problems outside that building.
Not McDonalds in general, but one particular McDonalds in Seattle is located at a spot with a large number of homeless people, where crime and open-air drug use is pretty common.
That is odd, I dont think there are any locations in the UK where there is open drug use. I also remember seeing clearly mentally ill people on the streets in Miami, something you dont see here ( though you do see homeless every now again - rarely tents ). Is that just a normal feature in cities in the US?
It's a normal feature of many large cities in the US, particularly those run by more progressive politicians. No city has adequate mental health treatment facilities or homeless services. Open drug use has been de facto decriminalized: elected District Attorneys refuse to prosecute and thus police don't bother making arrests.
I do support treating addiction as a health problem rather than a crime. But the current approach in cities like San Francisco is wrecking quality of life for regular people.
Yes. There's a documentary called "Seattle is Dying" that covers a lot of it (particularly the open air drug use), but you might have a hard time finding it because of the recent riots, economic collapse, etc.
It wasn't possible, Macy's abandoned that location. Shortly afterwards there was a shootout right outside (at peak hour) and an engineer was shot in the mayhem. Nowdays thats just another day in Seattle, with the second highest growth in murder of any city in the US!
I actually know that intersection (3rd/Pike) quite well and think the issue is more the 7/11, cigar shop, and major bus transfer point than the McDonalds in attracting loiterers/criminals.
I was wondering how it was possible for Macy's retail employees to work in the mall prior to Amazon's purchase, but how it was unsuitable for software engineers. Surely at one point the Macy's employees were selling fancy clothes, perfumes, and housewares from that location...
Retail can be soul-draining, some places more than others.
I'm sure the costs would be prohibitive at most malls, but the best use of a mall I can think of would be to use the former stores for SCIFs and other secure work areas, onsite hosting, etc. then maximize skylights for the central atrium. The lack of windows in the former store spaces works in one's favor in these use cases.
Yeah, that was fun. I worked in the Rackspace Austin office (an old call center building with it's own problems) but I often had to be in San Antonio for meetings.
The noise was crazy. Even after taking steps to address the noise it was still an issue. Not much you can do with all the concrete a mall is typically made of.
And the 2nd floor shook and moved around a lot after folks moved in. It was actually nauseating.
I'm no expert, but I have a little experience with sound mitigation.
IME, the effort needed to reduce unwanted noise depends a lot on the frequency range.
Very roughly speaking, dampening high-frequency sounds can be done with relatively thin and light sound-absorbing materials. Lower-frequency noise, including vibrations that shake the building's superstructure, require more extensive modifications.
It would be awesome if an actual acoustic engineer or architect could weigh in on this.
Is that really what typical tech office space looks like these days? I know I'm really lucky to have my own office (pre-pandemic), but that looks absolutely miserable. Acres of half-wall cubicles without an ounce of thought for blocking auditory or visual distractions?
In college, I pulled a gas line through 30 feet of existing retail space at this very mall for a retrofit asian bistro. It's an absolute dump, no natural light, sprawling and fundematly unfixable early 80s bad mall architecture.
I have a friend who lives across the street from Epic's existing HQ. It looks like a fun-looking building to work in, I have a hard time imagining Cary Towne Center not being a downgrade no matter how much cash you throw at renovation. Just getting the all-permeating smell of stale roasted popcorn out of the concrete is going to take a small fortune.
You say "no matter how much cash you throw at renovation", but I think you may be underestimating just how much Fortnite alone makes, apparently in 2019, Fortnite brought in revenues of $1.8 billion. With costs of labor in NC, I'm betting they're feeling pretty confident about the renovation.
In 2020, Epic's revenues were somewhere above $4 billion.
I'm sure they got that mall really, really cheap. Here's the current store list.[1] They're down to 22 small tenants, including the co-working space and the model train club.
I've seen a $95 million figure reported for Epic's purchase. They're buying it from a group who picked it up in 2019 for $31.5 million after IKEA cancelled plans to build a store there.
They're pushing out a model train club? That's full moustache-twirling evil.
Serious pivot: there are a lot of hobby, public-service, and charitable organizations which could use permanent, cheap space with minimal features: woodworking and craft groups, maker spaces, library branches, model train clubs, indoor community gardening, political party offices, various service organizations. Why is there no efficient strategy to get them into the large number of empty mall spaces?
"no natural light" -- don't most indoor malls have lots of skylights? I suppose that's only in the common/transit areas and not in the shops (where offices are)?
So, fun story. I did not know this at the time, but I then (and now to much lesser degree) had pretty significant sensory overload/over-sensitivity issues particularly with light. I vividly remember being taken to Cary Town Center by my parents and for some reason feeling an overwhelming sense of relief, though I did not understand why at the time. Going back as an adult, I realized it's because the place was a freaking cave.
I think even mid 80-90s malls had much more natural light, but Cary Towne Center was built in 79 and I think even if they turned the roof into a sheet of plexiglass that the layout would keep large sections dark. The food court for example is on the first floor and is lined with shops, preventing easy windows of any kind.
My recollection of that mall is that if you're more than 30 feet from an entrance, you'll be completely unaware that there's a thunderstorm going on outside unless it knocks out power. However, Google Earth does seem to show skylights through some of the major walkways and one of the larger stores, plus the food court. They didn't accomplish much.
I've long said that if I ever struck it stupid rich, I'd buy a mall to live in.
It would still have stores. I'd pay to have those stores stocked. Ideally it would have a 90s-era movie theatre in it, too. But otherwise it would be empty.
Why? So that I can live every day like I'm the last surviving human. Dawn of the Dead, minus the flesh eaters.
(Alternative plan: buy up a ghost town. Same plan, otherwise.)
> I've long said that if I ever struck it stupid rich, I'd buy a mall to live in.
> It would still have stores. I'd pay to have those stores stocked. Ideally it would have a 90s-era movie theater in it, too. But otherwise it would be empty.
Remember that 90s kid movie 'Blank Check?' I wrote a short fan art film script as a 13 year old that followed a similar premise, the origin of the funds were that the kid was a 'hacker' so the kid stole the funds from a crooked stockbroker firm trying to launder their money and ended up taking so much he ended up living in an abandoned mall and 'sold warez' out of the stores with various business models.. I recently saw the notebook and I had clearly recently just saw that movie with Angelina Jolie and Swordfish when I wrote that as that was around the time I had just discovered Newsgroups.
I somehow managed to get to the beginning of the 2nd act and just forgot about it entirely until the day I re-read it, haha. Which for being 13 was more resolve than I thought I had.
I'd watch this movie. Especially if it somehow had Hackers-era Angelina Jolie, Mathew Lillard, and Jonny Lee Miller. Or, plot twist: Those 3 are now the old/lame parents of the young hacker(s).
> I'd watch this movie. Especially if it somehow had Hackers-era Angelina Jolie, Mathew Lillard, and Jonny Lee Miller. Or, plot twist: Those 3 are now the old/lame parents of the young hacker(s).
Maybe I should revisit that script then... I've definitely gotten more ideas about where it would go now that we're in 2021 and I have way more to work with to flesh it out. It probably wouldn't end up appealing to the Disney crowds like the original, though. Ha.
How is the book app going?
I found more old scripts in boxes I want to update when I have the time, some of my other fan art pilots are digital but lack the proper format of a script and your project sounds interesting for amateur writers as I imagine you have specific templates for the specific type of writing one would use.
All of my formatting is all off and looks like I just wrote long format stories in paragraph with quotes for dialogue as I didn't know any better and just did what I saw in books and wrote with total abandon in a way that only made sense to me.
What would be cool would be able to denote where the arcs and acts are as you're writing to be able to go back to after long pauses.
I'd pay for that! ;)
Sidenote: I think I enjoyed finding out out Ray Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 on a rented typewriter at UCLA just as much as reading the book, and especially more than watching the movie.
Thanks for asking! PaperbackAuthor is coming along.
> [...] I imagine you have specific templates for the specific type of writing one would use.
Right now I'm shooting for the absolute minimum viable product, so on day one it will be a super simple editor that can export to ePub and PDF.
But I've got lots of idea of features I want to roll out, including support for different types of writing. My theory is that what makes most editing software problematic is they try to create one approach to writing many types of things, so they fail to be particularly good at any one of them. With PaperbackAuthor, I'm building the editor I've always wanted for the purpose of writing novels and novellas.
Later, I might roll out support for, say, screenplays. Or graphic novels. Or text books. Or illustrated books. Etc. Each format deserves its own dedicated editor.
> What would be cool would be able to denote where the archs and acts are as you're writing to be able to go back to after long pauses.
I've got some ideas around this, too. But, I need to make sure they're genuinely useful. Some of my ideas, in hindsight, amount to little more than "Trello-like cards in a sidebar", which isn't much of an improvement over simply keeping Trello in a separate tab or window.
> I've got some ideas around this, too. But, I need to make sure they're genuinely useful.
Sounds cool, make sure to do one of those 'Show HN' posts and I'll likely grab it when it comes out! What platforms will it be on, I cannot bring myself to not type on anything but a thinkpad keyboard any more at my age.
Haha, well I guess we will have to have a sort of writers room section of HN as it seems we have quite a few scribblers to make it come alive.
I'm re-watching hackers and following the storyline I wrote back then. I used to roller-blade like every 90s kids and I forgot how cool it must of have looked back then as I tried to force it into the plot so many times with soliloquy about 'strapping in and suiting up.' Kind of reminded me of Stephenson's writing in Snowcrash about YT getting on her board actually, which was intentionally cheesey for the genre.
Brent Underwood actually did buy a ghost town to live in! He has a YouTube channel called Ghost Town Living which shows him exploring the abandoned mines and restoring original buildings in the ghost town of Cerro Gordo. I believe his plans are to one day open it as a retreat destination.
Epic seems to be the one company in the Research Triangle that's been making the news often, recently. Wonder how the startup scene has been in Raleigh–Durham–Cary.
I believe the Google X building in Mountain View on San Antonio used to be the Mayfield Mall. They did a nice job renovating it for their purposes but you still feel like you're at a mall when you go through the building.
HP did the initial renovation of Mayfield Mall into office space in the late 1980s. They moved out in the early 2000s, deciding to consolidate operations after acquiring Compaq.
Pray tell, the downvote without an explanation. Business with China is good and all until you remember what happened with Blizzard and what happens with Disney, NBA...
Google is in the middle of refitting the former Westside Pavilion, located at Westwood & Pico, as a new Los Angeles office. The last I'd seen a few months ago, it'd been taken down to the floors and structural risers; all the walls and other partitions are gone, so they'll be able to include natural light however they see fit.
I grew up in the 80s going to the Cary Mall. It was awesome. I used to converge at the arcade where my dad would occasionally give me $.50 to play 2 games......Mostly I would watch. Anyway, it's great to see my hometown have Epic and SAS as headquarters as this usually leads to good paying middle class and above jobs ..........
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadI grew up down the road from this place.
There are a couple more like this on YouTube. Dead mall videos are a genre.
Working in a converted mall might as well be working in a prison, for all I can tell. The walkway through the middle was kind of nice (and the food court still functioned as a cafeteria, so you could walk fully indoors during cold winter/hot summer days to get a coffee or lunch)... but I think I'd still rather be able to see the outdoors from my desk.
The mall is in Cary, NC (Raleigh-Durham / RTP area).
Ironically, I was thinking it'd be kind of cool to work in an old mall building (with the typical US indoor shopping mall layout). Inefficient in many ways (parking, space utilization, HVAC), but the idea of locating teams in small (fishbowl?) office-like pods seems interesting.
Natural light would be a problem. The food court could be appealing...
Some of the complaints you mention sound like they might be specific to that building? Commercial floors should be standard build slab/tray concrete in a mall or office building. Retail HVAC should be adequate if inefficient.. Then again, a failed mall might have failed for a long list of reasons, and a crappy physical plant is definitely one of them!
Demolishing isn't really that expensive, at this kind of scale.
It might seem like I'm splitting hairs, but actually urban design and working/living environment is exactly hypothesised to be one of those cases. It's why some people argue successful downturn areas and urban environments with walkability and diversity of use/design/ spectacle (so not most US cities), because they have evolved that way from lots of little distributed inconsistent designs, but with individual members tested, repurposed and surviving due to evolution over time.
When a big developer or mega Corp develops or designs, you don't get natural evolution and diversity of design over time, you get mass sameness and waterfall design. It's why you get planned community aesthetics and corporate brand + policy rather than what organically works. The best of them might be bright and shiny (see Apple office/campus), but they still have the overarching ethos of singular design and absolute central/corporate control. Some people like that environment, personally I don't like working in it (don't get me wrong, i'd rather work in a good one rather than a bad one though).
In practice they don't get it perfect. I imagine a lot of people could list problems with the Apple campus in practice, and I'd be good money this isn't going to be the Apple campus...
I do support treating addiction as a health problem rather than a crime. But the current approach in cities like San Francisco is wrecking quality of life for regular people.
Yes. There's a documentary called "Seattle is Dying" that covers a lot of it (particularly the open air drug use), but you might have a hard time finding it because of the recent riots, economic collapse, etc.
I was wondering how it was possible for Macy's retail employees to work in the mall prior to Amazon's purchase, but how it was unsuitable for software engineers. Surely at one point the Macy's employees were selling fancy clothes, perfumes, and housewares from that location...
I'm sure the costs would be prohibitive at most malls, but the best use of a mall I can think of would be to use the former stores for SCIFs and other secure work areas, onsite hosting, etc. then maximize skylights for the central atrium. The lack of windows in the former store spaces works in one's favor in these use cases.
The noise was crazy. Even after taking steps to address the noise it was still an issue. Not much you can do with all the concrete a mall is typically made of.
And the 2nd floor shook and moved around a lot after folks moved in. It was actually nauseating.
IME, the effort needed to reduce unwanted noise depends a lot on the frequency range.
Very roughly speaking, dampening high-frequency sounds can be done with relatively thin and light sound-absorbing materials. Lower-frequency noise, including vibrations that shake the building's superstructure, require more extensive modifications.
It would be awesome if an actual acoustic engineer or architect could weigh in on this.
I have a friend who lives across the street from Epic's existing HQ. It looks like a fun-looking building to work in, I have a hard time imagining Cary Towne Center not being a downgrade no matter how much cash you throw at renovation. Just getting the all-permeating smell of stale roasted popcorn out of the concrete is going to take a small fortune.
I'm sure they got that mall really, really cheap. Here's the current store list.[1] They're down to 22 small tenants, including the co-working space and the model train club.
[1]https://www.shopcarytownecentermall.com/directory
Serious pivot: there are a lot of hobby, public-service, and charitable organizations which could use permanent, cheap space with minimal features: woodworking and craft groups, maker spaces, library branches, model train clubs, indoor community gardening, political party offices, various service organizations. Why is there no efficient strategy to get them into the large number of empty mall spaces?
That's not uncommon, it's just that it usually presages the malls being sold and torn down because they aren't earning any money.
I think even mid 80-90s malls had much more natural light, but Cary Towne Center was built in 79 and I think even if they turned the roof into a sheet of plexiglass that the layout would keep large sections dark. The food court for example is on the first floor and is lined with shops, preventing easy windows of any kind.
Maybe they can use a series of mirrors?
It would still have stores. I'd pay to have those stores stocked. Ideally it would have a 90s-era movie theatre in it, too. But otherwise it would be empty.
Why? So that I can live every day like I'm the last surviving human. Dawn of the Dead, minus the flesh eaters.
(Alternative plan: buy up a ghost town. Same plan, otherwise.)
> It would still have stores. I'd pay to have those stores stocked. Ideally it would have a 90s-era movie theater in it, too. But otherwise it would be empty.
Remember that 90s kid movie 'Blank Check?' I wrote a short fan art film script as a 13 year old that followed a similar premise, the origin of the funds were that the kid was a 'hacker' so the kid stole the funds from a crooked stockbroker firm trying to launder their money and ended up taking so much he ended up living in an abandoned mall and 'sold warez' out of the stores with various business models.. I recently saw the notebook and I had clearly recently just saw that movie with Angelina Jolie and Swordfish when I wrote that as that was around the time I had just discovered Newsgroups.
I somehow managed to get to the beginning of the 2nd act and just forgot about it entirely until the day I re-read it, haha. Which for being 13 was more resolve than I thought I had.
Maybe I should revisit that script then... I've definitely gotten more ideas about where it would go now that we're in 2021 and I have way more to work with to flesh it out. It probably wouldn't end up appealing to the Disney crowds like the original, though. Ha.
How is the book app going?
I found more old scripts in boxes I want to update when I have the time, some of my other fan art pilots are digital but lack the proper format of a script and your project sounds interesting for amateur writers as I imagine you have specific templates for the specific type of writing one would use.
All of my formatting is all off and looks like I just wrote long format stories in paragraph with quotes for dialogue as I didn't know any better and just did what I saw in books and wrote with total abandon in a way that only made sense to me.
What would be cool would be able to denote where the arcs and acts are as you're writing to be able to go back to after long pauses.
I'd pay for that! ;)
Sidenote: I think I enjoyed finding out out Ray Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 on a rented typewriter at UCLA just as much as reading the book, and especially more than watching the movie.
Thanks for asking! PaperbackAuthor is coming along.
> [...] I imagine you have specific templates for the specific type of writing one would use.
Right now I'm shooting for the absolute minimum viable product, so on day one it will be a super simple editor that can export to ePub and PDF.
But I've got lots of idea of features I want to roll out, including support for different types of writing. My theory is that what makes most editing software problematic is they try to create one approach to writing many types of things, so they fail to be particularly good at any one of them. With PaperbackAuthor, I'm building the editor I've always wanted for the purpose of writing novels and novellas.
Later, I might roll out support for, say, screenplays. Or graphic novels. Or text books. Or illustrated books. Etc. Each format deserves its own dedicated editor.
> What would be cool would be able to denote where the archs and acts are as you're writing to be able to go back to after long pauses.
I've got some ideas around this, too. But, I need to make sure they're genuinely useful. Some of my ideas, in hindsight, amount to little more than "Trello-like cards in a sidebar", which isn't much of an improvement over simply keeping Trello in a separate tab or window.
Sounds cool, make sure to do one of those 'Show HN' posts and I'll likely grab it when it comes out! What platforms will it be on, I cannot bring myself to not type on anything but a thinkpad keyboard any more at my age.
It's going to be web-based, so any platform will do. (Including mobile.) But I'm very strongly considering native apps as a next step.
Haha, well I guess we will have to have a sort of writers room section of HN as it seems we have quite a few scribblers to make it come alive.
I'm re-watching hackers and following the storyline I wrote back then. I used to roller-blade like every 90s kids and I forgot how cool it must of have looked back then as I tried to force it into the plot so many times with soliloquy about 'strapping in and suiting up.' Kind of reminded me of Stephenson's writing in Snowcrash about YT getting on her board actually, which was intentionally cheesey for the genre.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEjBDKfrqQI4TgzT9YLNT8g
Guy bought an old silver mining town and has been living there over the pandemic
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/GhostTownLiving/videos