Factoria Mall Just Keeps Getting Emptier

As reported by commenter Greg Shill on my original Factoria Mall post, several long-standing stores in the mall have now closed down after the mall’s management did not renew their leases.  Among the recent closures are the Flavor Bakery and Cafe (which is apparently moving to a new location in Redmond,) the B. Dalton bookstore and the Orange Julius.  According to the post, the Jamba Juice (which, as I noted in my earlier post, replaced the mall’s arcade just a few years ago) and the Seattle’s Best Coffee near this entrance are also going to close, although for the time being both of these are still operating. 

 

As you can see, for the time being the Jamba Juice is still open, but the bookstore has now closed. Newport House (the womens clothing store that previously occupied the space in the foreground) has moved to a space across the hallway from here, but the appearance of the space looked rather temporary.  Beyond these now empty (or soon-to-be empty) spaces some restaurants (Red Robin, Cold Stone Creamery and Goldberg’s Deli) remain, along with a day spa and the Nordstrom Rack.  Judging from the fact that the Nordstrom Rack store has undergone recent remodeling, I’m guessing that they are not going anywhere for the time being.  No word on the restaurants in the area though.

 

Elsewhere in the mall, the Orange Julius has now closed as well.  I’ve always had a hard time placing the style used here, which seems a bit more modern than the typical Orange Julius, but the look doesn’t seem to have aged well.  In particular, the gratuitous use of patterned sheet metal  seems to be a design trend that was past its sell-by date by sometime around 1998 or so.  Before the place gets knocked down, let’s look at a couple of details from the interior after the jump.

 

It might not be particularly surprising to find oranges in a place like this, but to find freakishly huge oranges bursting through the wall might be just a bit odd.   That’s not the only piece of giant plastic food in the place though:

Near the register, an even larger plastic hotdog wreaks more havoc.  This effect probably would have worked better if they had actually put these with the sheet metal, and possibly even better than that if designer’s mind wasn’t so clearly in the gutter when he came up with this.

 

This is a map showing the expected layout of the mall after the redevelopment (a larger version of this can be found here.)  It comes off one of the signs in the mall, and It’s not the best picture I could find (there’s a better one inside the mall, but it’s behind glass and I couldn’t get a good picture without glare,) but since the picture available on the Kimco Redevelopment website is very low resolution, this will have to do.  According to this plan, the portion of the mall in which the Orange Julius resides is going to get turned into an open air space with a 2-lane street running through it.  Given the fact that much of that portion of the mall is occupied by the Petco and Osh Kosh B’Gosh stores, with only a couple of smaller store spaces on the edge, I suspect that the Orange Julius space will probably end up being demolished, since the existing hallway is probably a bit narrow for a two-lane road and sidewalks.   On the other hand, the plan doesn’t show much change at all to the layout of the northern wing of the mall, which leads me to believe that there will be far more extensive renovation to the existing mall than I had originally expected, with possible consolidation of some of the smaller mall spaces into larger ones.  It does appear that they intend to turn the hallways leading to the former Lamonts/Gottschalks space that currently lead to nowhere into additional store space, although some of the larger existing tenants may be allowed to stay put.  Right now, details on the whole redevelopment plan seem scarce, but it does look like they are either going to begin work on the redevelopment sometime in the near future, or they’re going to empty out the mall.  Exactly what happens here remains to be seen.