Eastland Mall tenants learn to survive in tough times
From the outside, Eastland Mall can look post-apocalyptic.
The four anchor stores are long gone. Sheets of plywood seal some of the entrances. Chains bind other door handles closed.
Unfettered by hedge trimmers, bushes grow as they please. Paint peels. Concrete cracks. Outside one shuttered mall entrance on Friday, a man sat on a low wall and closely examined an umbrella skeleton that was all ribs and no fabric.
Throw a health crisis like COVID-19 on top of a mall like Eastland, and this should be the stuff of any retailer’s nightmare.
Except it isn’t, at least not for everyone. While the mall’s outward appearance may telegraph decay, “It’s not necessarily representative of what’s going on inside,” said Andrew Pack, who was running The Added Touch jewelry kiosk with his younger brother, Caleb, on Friday.
Eastland, opened in 1968, was Columbus’ first enclosed shopping center and is the last of the original three “directional” malls to survive. The Northland and Westland malls are no more.
That once grand Downtown shopping experiment, Columbus City Center, is gone too. That mall’s fortunes rose and fell in just 20 years, with its business siphoned off by the three new kids on the block: Easton Town Center, Polaris Fashion Place and The Mall at Tuttle Crossing.
And now Tuttle, opened in 1997, has fallen on hard times and is facing possible foreclosure.
Yet Eastland – older than them all – found a way to adapt and hang on. In that respect, perhaps it was uniquely prepared to weather the pandemic.
Still, turning into the Eastland entrance from South Hamilton Road and circling the property on Black Friday, it was hard to resist the obvious wisecrack: “Hey, at least there’s plenty of parking.”
But there are vehicles, clustered around the mall’s central food court entrances. Park and sit for a while, and a steady trickle of turnover at Eastland is revealed. There is always someone
coming or going, even if only by twos and threes.
Walk inside and the place feels – if not Black Friday busy – regular weekday at the mall busy.
Eastland Mall’s surviving businesses have shrunk inward, away from the once-dominant and now-vacant anchor stores. The existing shops crowd around the mall’s center the way a hypothermic patient slows blood flow to his extremities in a bid to save the vital organs.
And you know what? It works. The cluster of merchants, who operate mostly independent small businesses, all seem to know each other. Many sell shoes, small gifts and jewelry. An airbrush artist declined an interview but helpfully rattled off a list of neighboring businesses with owners who would make better interview subjects. And he knew them all by first name.
Among them was Andrew Pack, whose uncle opened the Eastland jewelry store in 1988.
“We’ve seen the mall from its heyday to what it is now,” said Andrew, who is 39.
At its own peak, the Pack family’s jewelry business included 45 stores across Ohio and as far off as Fort Wayne, Buffalo and Pittsburgh. They are down to a handful of stores these days, but for the past 20 or so years, the Eastland store has been their strongest.
The retail industry is brutal, he said, but jewelry and footwear in particular have survived at Eastland for a reason.
“There are things that people need to see in person, even in this day and age,” he said. “Nothing beats trying on a chain or a pair of shoes.”
At the T&M Perfumes kiosk, Bobby Baten, 36, said he depends on a loyal base of regular customers cultivated over the past 10 years. But he acknowledged the past several months have been tough.
“What am I going to do?” he asked. “I’m surviving.”
“This mall has always been a very community-based mall,” Andrew Pack said. “I think everyone here has done OK.”
The Pack brothers said their jewelry sales, in fact, have been stronger over the past five months than they have been in years.
Andrew Pack theorized that their goods have provided a literal bright spot for customers during a universally dark year.
“Jewelry is something that puts a smile on everyone’s face,” he said. “Jewelry makes people happy.” tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker