Palisades Center
Palisades Center in West Nyack, New York is the second-largest shopping mall in the New York metropolitan area, the eighth-largest in the United States by total area, and sixth-largest by gross leasable space. Built in the industrial style, the mall houses 218 stores and receives 20 million visitors a year. It is also one of the nation's most lucrative malls, producing $40 million in annual sales tax and $17 million in property taxes.
Developed by The Pyramid Companies, and opened in 1998, the mall was named after the nearby Palisades, which border the Hudson River and the eastern part of Rockland County. The mall is bounded on three sides by major state routes: the New York State Thruway to the north, NY Route 303 to the east, and NY Route 59 to the south. It is also located near the Thruway's intersection of the Palisades Interstate Parkway, and is only a few miles west of the Tappan Zee Bridge, which provides access from points east of the Hudson River.
History
Pre-2000s
According to the mall's sponsoring partner, Thomas Valenti, it took 16 years to get the mall approved and built. The 130-acre site was purchased by The Pyramid Companies for about $3 million and promised to clean up the two landfills, which were filled with incinerator ash and garbage. The 875,000-square-foot mall was proposed in 1985 with a goal of luring upscale retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor, and also a promise to keep sales tax dollars from slipping across state lines into New Jersey. The site was selected for its proximity to the New York State Thruway and Westchester County. Its location four miles from New Jersey, where blue laws in Paramus keep the malls closed on Sundays, was also a factor. Local residents, recalling how the Nanuet Mall nearly drew the life out of Rockland County's traditional shopping villages about 20 years earlier, opposed the mall, predicting that it would bring crime, increased traffic, air pollution, and an economic downturn to the area's downtowns, and that the site was not properly tested for toxins. Ground was broken on the project in October 1993. The mall cost between $250 million and $280 million.The Palisades Center was built around the Mount Moor Cemetery, a 150-year-old cemetery for African Americans established in 1849 for people of color, including Native American and African American veterans of American wars from the Civil War to the Korean War. The cemetery is visible from a number of points in the mall, and was undisturbed by construction.
The Historical Society of Rockland County placed a historical sign which reads:
The construction of the mall faced a number of environmental obstacles before it began. What was initially thought to be a mastodon buried there turned out to be a circus elephant. Nesting grounds for a nearly extinct red-legged partridge turned out to be a domesticated pheasant. Other problems included flooding from one of the region's glacier-dug bottom spots and runoff from three landfills on the property.
The mall finished construction in December 1997 and opened in March 1998. Initially the mall had four anchor stores, though this number fluctuated over the years as new anchors opened and closed.
From its inception, rumors circulated that the mall's underground parking lot was sinking because it was built on unstable swampland, and that it would collapse under its own weight.
2000s
After the 1999-2000 holiday seasons, rumors of the mall's closing abounded. On the January 6, 2000, episode of The Rosie O'Donnell Show, host Rosie O'Donnell, who lives in Nyack, mentioned the rumor of the building's sinking to her audience. Local police, town engineering officials and the mall's developers, however, assured the public that there was no truth to these stories and that the mall was safe and in no danger of closing. A managing partner of the mall, Thomas J. Valenti, appeared on a later episode of The Rosie O'Donnell Show, where he performed a song and dance number to the tune of "Cheek to Cheek," debunking the rumors of the mall sinking.On November 5, 2002, voters in Clarkstown voted to approve the mall's leasing of 100,000 square feet of unoccupied space, in keeping with a 1997 covenant in which Pyramid Companies agreed any additional leasing would be decided by a town referendum as part of a deal that let the mall take over three town streets. Opponents argued that Pyramid Companies had previously insisted that this space had no practical use when they had built beyond the original 1.8 million square feet they were allowed, but Pyramid insisted that they did not wish to expand beyond the limits of the mall, but rather to lease space already contained in the building, which would be occupied by Kids City, an educational and recreational center for children ages 3 to 12. Nicole Doliner, president of the Rockland Civic Association, characterized Kids City as a "theme park."
In 2008, opponents of the mall complained that the Superfund site located on the property was paved over rather than cleaned and that the mall tax receipts failed to lower the average homeowner's bill as advertised. "Everything we said would happen happened. Go back and look at all the proposals and drawings. It's a vastly different mall that was built. It was sold as upscale. What they built is arguably one of the ugliest malls in America." Mall opponent Bruce Broadley said in the 2008 documentary Megamall. However, Clarkstown Town Board member Shirley Lasker, who opposed the mall, acknowledged in 2008 that their concerns over traffic did not materialize. Valenti said that the $23 million effort to fix area roads and create a special exit for the mall on the Thruway prevented the predicted traffic congestion. Columnist Greg Clary argued that aesthetics are subjective, that average homeowners' bills did not go down due to continued spending on the part of elected officials, and that while the downtowns were hurt by the mall, this is not unique to the area, and can be averted by town planners who represent some of the 20 million of the mall's patrons. New York Times writer Joe Queenan criticized the mall's Brutalist exterior for lacking any sense of design or theme and characterized its rectangular layout as "a series of interlocking coffins." He also criticized the visible "trash gondolas" near the Interstate 287 entrance. Queenan had kinder things to say about the mall's vast interior, likening its sprawling floors to a retail version of Centre Georges Pompidou, analogizing its amalgamated structure to the "Gotham skyline," and lauding the bowling alley, ice rink, and food court Ferris wheel for giving people an opportunity to play "adult hooky."
In 2009, the mall replaced an ancient 19th-century carousel from Venice, Italy with a modern doubler-decker model.
2010s
On May 3, 2013, Pyramid announced that Palisades Center would undergo a multimillion-dollar makeover later that month, which would be completed by the end of the year. The remodeling was intended to create a more sophisticated appearance to the mall, which had begun to show signs of wear and tear. The renovation brought about a warmer color scheme to soften the institutional beige of the mall, colored glass mosaics, ceiling facets, and designer lighting. Some aspects of the remodeling targeted specific areas of the mall. For example, the four-story court at the center of the mall incorporates glass handrails and architectural lighting elements, and the "ThEATery" area on level 4 received new tile floors and chandelier fixtures. Other areas had soft seating, custom planters, and plush carpets added to them.In 2016, the mall was at full occupancy. In 2017 the mall's J.C. Penney store closed. In October 2019, Bed Bath and Beyond announced it would close the following June.
2020s
The Lord & Taylor store closed in January 2020.On April 18, 2020, Rockland County Business Journal reported that Pyramid was looking to sell the mall, which has become saddled with debt and whose occupancy dropped to 82% with the departures of Lord and Taylor, JCPenney, and Bed Bath and Beyond. The Journal cited a source at J.P. Morgan as saying that the bank hoped to foreclose on the mall by mid-summer if Pyramid Management Group, which had missed its most recent rent payment at the time, did not find a buyer. Several offers to purchase the mall were made by a number of owners, hedge funds, and New York real estate companies, including one from Triple Five, the company behind the Mall of America and the American Dream Meadowlands. Many of the offers were below the market value due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, and the amount of debt incurred by the mall. The Palisades Center had been trying to develop a Hilton Hotel at the Lord & Taylor space before the pandemic, but according to the Journal, that project was not considered likely to proceed.
Layout and attractions
The mall has four floors, which at its opening housed over 220 businesses under a 1 million-square-foot roof, as well as 8,500 parking spaces on the property's 2-million-square-foot imprint, a space large enough to fit 40 White Houses. To accommodate its customers and tenants, the mall houses 40 escalators, eight passenger elevators, and 11 freight elevators.The third floor of the mall contains a 2,000 seat food court with over a dozen quick-service restaurants, and a 60-plus-foot-tall Ferris wheel. That level formerly housed Philadelphia Toboggan Company Carousel Number 15, a carousel that was built in 1907, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. In May 2009, mall management announced that the then-101-year-old carousel would be disassembled and removed the following month and was replaced by a modern double-decker Venetian carousel.
On the fourth floor is a stadium-seating 21-screen AMC Theatres, that includes a once-separate IMAX theater. Since 2016, the former IMAX site is home to 5 Wits Interactive Family Entertainment Center. At the east end of the fourth floor is an ice rink, which is home to many teams and programs such as the Palisades Predators Youth Hockey team and BUDS for Hockey. The rink also houses a free skate and Learn to Skate program, an arcade, and a party room for birthday parties. The fourth floor is also the entry to Palisades Climb Adventure, a five-level, 85-foot-tall climbing obstacle course created by WonderWorks that allows guests to climb on obstacles while strapped into a harness.