Machines will chew through 20,000 square feet of building each day, tearing down most of the mall - and preparing the site for an industrial park project - over three months.
NORTH RANDALL, Ohio -- A single gold sandal, a woman's size 12, glimmers in the gloom of Randall Park Mall. There's no electricity here. No heat. There's just the cold brilliance of a December day, filtered through the dusty skylights overhead.
On the mall's main floor, in a seating area where families once gathered, a stroller floats in brackish water. Wispy leaves still cling to dead trees in planting beds. Slivers of glass, from smashed-out store windows, crunch underfoot.
From the inside, the second-floor entrance to the old Dillard's department store looks like a cave. Mud coats the floor. Debris hangs from the ceiling. It's clear copper thieves and urban explorers have passed through, spelunking in the ruins of what was once known as the world's largest shopping center.
A demolition crew will start its work here, at Dillard's, on Monday. Machines will chew through 20,000 square feet of building each day, tearing down most of the mall - and preparing the site for an industrial park project - over three months.
Thirty-eight years after Randall Park opened, the end is finally nigh.
"I saw the rise. I saw the fall," says Charles Horvath, who started working for the tiny village of North Randall a few months before the mall opened in 1976 and now acts as building commissioner and chief building official. "We were in a depression before the rest of America was even in a recession."
Now, it appears, a recovery is under way.
"This is the beginning of a 25-year run for the village of North Randall," Horvath says, "just like when the mall was built."
For years, many suitors - but no savior
For this community of roughly 1,000 people in southeast Cuyahoga County, things started looking up in July 2013.
That's when a company tied to developers Stuart Lichter and Chris Semarjian quietly gained possession of the main mall building - a hopeful sign of new investment after decades of neglect.
Clik here to view.
View full sizeCars packed the parking lot of Randall Park Mall on opening day in 1976. Once home to 200 retailers and thousands of workers, Randall Park entered a death spiral in the mid-1990s. Scads of stores cropped up in nearby suburbs, siphoning shoppers. Thistledown Racetrack, the other attraction in a village once known for horseracing and breeding, struggled to compete with larger venues in other states that allowed gambling.
Population shifts and suburban sprawl contributed to the stranglehold in North Randall. Smaller buildings at the mall's fringes emptied out. Major tenants left. Smelling blood, real estate speculators crept in, snapping up buildings they hoped to flip for a quick buck. A North Carolina investor acquired most of the mall and sat on it, letting the building rot as blight crept outward.
"The change of ownership over time was basically the demise of the mall," says David Smith, the village's mayor. "Not to mention that this area had become oversaturated with retail. ... It was never because this was not a safe community. It was never because it wasn't governed right."
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View full sizeWhen it opened with a gala party on Aug. 10, 1976, with heiress and sometime actress Dina Merrill cutting the ribbon, Randall Park Mall was billed as the largest mall in the United States. The village spent the last decade having its hopes raised, then crushed, by a procession of would-be developers. Investors flew into Cleveland from New York and Israel to look at the mall.
In 2008, a Cincinnati company announced plans to remake the property with offices and a Christian school or church. Nothing happened. Soon after, the mall's owner closed the main building, terminating leases with the few lingering small stores.
Then an eccentric South African developer swooped in as a potential savior. But his deal to buy the mall, for a mixed-use makeover, fell apart in the face of litigation with the seller and other challenges.
"It was like running into a brick wall," Smith says. "Everybody wanted to know what we could do for them. We were struggling to provide for ourselves. ... All of Cuyahoga County had written us off. And it's a shame."
But unpaid property tax bills were piling up, offering investors the chance to acquire the mall through foreclosure instead of bartering with a difficult owner. An improving economy was lifting prospects for Northeast Ohio's industrial market, prompting developers to consider new projects again after a long dry spell.
And Lichter, a California developer, was waiting just offstage.
Industrial plan promises jobs, new buildings
Last year, Semarjian and Lichter stepped into a foreclosure case that stemmed from unpaid real estate taxes on the main mall building. When the property transferred, in mid-July, it did so with little fanfare.
Soon after, the duo bought the vacant Dillard's store from the village. Then they purchased the shuttered Magic Johnson movie theater and a former Sears.
Now they're razing the mall to make way for an industrial park, which could bring manufacturing, distribution and warehouses - and more than 1,000 jobs - to the 100-acre site near Interstates 480 and 271. Their property could support anywhere from 700,000 to 1.2 million square feet of construction, on top of a handful of existing buildings the developers plan to retain.
Randall Park is the first mall in Lichter and Semarjian's sprawling portfolio, which includes former corporate headquarters buildings, manufacturing facilities and smaller industrial properties in Ohio and Michigan.
Their approach to the real estate is the same, though: Buy cheap. Demo selectively. Sell scrap. Redevelop. Lease to multiple tenants.
"I don't view this as any different than a former automotive plant or whatever," said Semarjian, a Northeast Ohio native. "It's a large structure in a location where demographics have completely shifted. ... Once the mall is actually demolished, you're going to be surprised at how good everything around it looks."
The former JCPenney department store, owned by Ohio Technical College, will stay put. The Cleveland school turned the two-story space into a satellite training campus for motorcycle mechanics in 2007.
For now, at least, the demo crew won't touch the former Macy's store and the Burlington Coat Factory box that connect to the mall. Semarjian and Lichter haven't managed to acquire the empty Macy's, which is tied up in tax-foreclosure and bankruptcy litigation. On the opposite side of the mall, Burlington Coat Factory is still open - at least for a few more months.
The developers expect to preserve and convert two buildings: The boarded-up movie theater and the former Sears.
After a facelift and a complete gutting, the 12-screen theater, which opened in a 1999 mall-revival effort, will become an industrial building. Sears, a 285,000-square-foot building constructed like a warehouse, is a logical candidate for manufacturing or distribution.
Remaking those properties will cost far less than building something new, Lichter said. And reusing them gives the developers an immediate opportunity to chase potential tenants who are hungry for space but have limited options. Two businesses, one of which wants roughly 100,000 square feet, already are looking at Sears.
New construction will follow. Semarjian said he's in talks with a company that wants a 250,000-square-foot distribution building. He and Lichter wouldn't identify potential tenants or discuss the total project costs. But based on interest so far and cutthroat competition for space at some of their other industrial properties, the pair believes they might be able to fully develop the park within three to five years.
They're talking to the village about buying a dilapidated former hotel, on the outskirts of the mall, and looking at other real estate. So far, they haven't asked for public incentives, though it's likely they'll seek help from the county and the state as tenants pop up with promises of jobs, investment and economic growth.
"What made this feasible was the industrial market getting tighter," Lichter said. "Our evaluation was: Could we assemble this at a cost where we could make money, with the value of Sears as an industrial building and the value of the rest as industrial land, with the cost of demolition? We've looked at this for a long time.
"The mayor was asking us to come to meetings, and we met with him and we said 'We can't make it pencil,'" he added. "But the equation's changed with the industrial market. So what didn't pencil started to pencil."
North Randall hopes for reinvention
Just before Christmas, North Randall's council started to talk about a new vision for the village. On Dec. 22, they introduced a master plan drafted by Larry Finch, a consultant whose day job is overseeing planning and economic development for the city of Twinsburg, in Summit County.
"The village is at a turning point in its history and is poised to reinvent itself," Finch wrote in the plan, alluding to Thistledown's recent transformation into a racino - an upgraded racetrack with slot machines and entertainment - and the ownership changes at Randall Park.
If council signs off on that plan and other legislation during the next few months, much of the land where the mall now stands will be rezoned for industrial use. Retail will be a distant memory on the property where Youngstown's Edward J. DeBartolo, Sr., a shopping-mall magnate, once staked his claim.
Semarjian, who grew up in Lyndhurst, compares the Randall Park Mall of his childhood to Disneyland. While skirting debris on the ramps that line the long building, he mentions the original owner in a near-reverent tone.
"DeBartolo was the king," Semarjian said. "To tear something down that he created here, that's something. The flip side is, we watched this thing rot for so many years. This is holding everything down, even on a regional basis."
Less than 40 years after it opened, DeBartolo's palace sits empty. Letters dangle from a brightly colored sign over the food court. A cast-off Christmas wreath, still covered with ornaments, lies on the floor. Water trickles through holes in the ceiling. Otherwise, silence reigns.
Not for long.