By: Charles Cohen

A debate breaks out in Goldstar Jewelry between co-owner Ron Meser and his security guard. The subject at hand is the shopping center in which they stand, Mondawmin Mall.

“They just better have tons of security,” says the guard, who prefers not to be named. Meser shakes his head and laughs.

“I disagree. I think they know what they are doing.”

“They” are Mondawmin’s new owners, General Growth Properties, the Chicago-based real estate investment trust that purchased the Rouse Company in 2004. General Growth is leading a $70 million renovation that will give the mall new entrances, flooring, and restrooms, as well as expanded space for restaurants. Two major new anchor tenants are also on their way: Shoppers Food & Pharmacy should open by the end of this year, and a Target store is due next year.

The new landlords might have their work cut out for them. The security guard rattles off the mall’s troubles: the shoplifting, the dangerous image, the perception that white Baltimore would never patronize the place. But Meser dismisses his employee’s doomsday spiel. An Israeli immigrant, he recently returned to Mondawmin after leaving town in 1992. “I believe in the changes, and I do think it’s going to be a change for the positive,” he says.

Among tenants and shoppers, opinions differ about the mall. But everyone agrees that Mondawmin is a survivor. Opening in 1956, the city’s pioneering enclosed shopping center has outlived its Glen Burnie twin, Harundale Mall (built in 1958, bulldozed in 1998), along with scores of other first-generation malls around the country that have been superseded by big-box-style developments.

Mondawmin now defies some of the primary principles of mall economics: It has no anchor store and only a handful of major national franchises as tenants. But the mall gets steady midday foot traffic—more than many suburban counterparts.

The news at Mondawmin these days is one part misery, one part salvation. On one hand, there are the mammoth piles of dirt in the parking lot that many retailers say are hurting business. But on the other hand is the coming of Target. Some see the store as a transforming phenomenon that will not only boost this hard-luck neighborhood but could also have national implications for urban economic development. Others predict an outbreak of shoplifting that will soon send the Minneapolis-based mega-retailer packing.

“Give them a year and you’ll find them boarded up and moved out,” says the security guard.

But Frank Costagliola, who owns Mamma Lucia Pizza in the mall, says he believes Mondawmin suffers mostly from a bad rap. Based on his experience running restaurants in other malls around Baltimore, Mondawmin comes out as one of the stronger locales. “Target will draw,” he says. “How do you lose? I just don’t see it.”

General Growth, the second-largest developer of malls in the country, is viewing the Mondawmin project as a test case for its urban initiative, which could involve other properties in Detroit, Chicago’s South Side, and Harlem. The trick is getting companies to look past crime stats and poverty and see the profit-making potential. “That’s a big part of my job—convincing national corporations that there’s a misperception about these communities,” says Lyneir Richardson, vice president of General Growth’s urban development group. “In Mondawmin, you’ve got a hundred thousand people in a three-mile radius, with no competition. To me, that’s pent-up demand for retail.”

City boosters make the case that many of the blocks near the mall—in neighborhoods like Greater Mondawmin, Reservoir Hill, and Garwyn Oaks—are in better shape than their reputations might suggest. “Perception doesn’t follow reality,” says Mark Sissman, president of Healthy Neighborhoods, Inc., a nonprofit that helps on-the-verge neighborhoods become stable. Michelle McEachern, executive director for the Coppin Heights Community Development Corporation, is thrilled with the investment. “I can’t tell you how monumental this is going to be for this neighborhood,” she says.

It’s significant that Target—unlike Whole Foods or Safeway or other chains that have chosen gentrifying neighborhoods such as Inner Harbor East or Canton for their urban outposts—will make its Baltimore debut in Mondawmin. Such large-scale commercial investment remains a tough sell in this predominantly African American area. “I don’t think it’s overt and intentional racism; it’s something very subtle,” says John Quarles, a salesman with Burdell’s Jewelers for about twenty-five years.

“It’s fear,” says Richardson. “There still is a fundamental issue of race.”

nto this void have stepped independent merchants: More than 70 percent of Mondawmin’s tenants are currently either small, locally owned stores or regional chains. (Compare that to Towson Town Center, where only about 5 percent of the stores are local.) Mondawmin’s economic model is thus something of a double-edged sword. Because it is all but abandoned by national chains, the mall’s profits tend to stay in the community. But Mondawmin’s stores now cater overwhelmingly to its main customers: young people, not families who need the essentials of daily life. 

“I’m tired of looking at jeans, T-shirts, and gold necklaces,” says Bill Young, visiting his friend Luke “Santa” Durant, part owner of Somethin’ Good Jr., a candy store tucked away near the stairs. Young says he grew up nearby, on Bentalou Street, and he recalls Mondawmin in the 1960s, when the surrounding community was home to middle-class black families—many unable to join the exodus to the suburbs because of Baltimore’s race-based real estate market. “When everything opened up, everyone moved out,” he says. “It left a vacuum here. Everybody suffered. The kids suffered—all these people who could do something for them left.”

Young watched as the mall’s marquee stores also vanished: Franklin Simon, Rodo’s Sporting Goods, G.C. Murphy. The new tenants focus on teenage fashion, and Young feels left out. He says a Target would give him another reason to visit the mall, besides visiting his old friend at the candy store. But even with a makeover, he doubts Mondawmin will ever reclaim its old luster. “That was a different day,” he says.

It’s difficult today to overstate the zeitgeist-defining event that was the opening of Mondawmin Mall, an early project of famed developer James Rouse. At the 1955 groundbreaking, Governor Theodore McKeldin did a photo op on a backhoe. (The name “Mondawmin” was inspired by the Indian corn god Mondamin in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Song of Hiawatha.”) Rouse—later to gain fame as the mastermind behind Harborplace and the planned community of Columbia—described the shopping center in a 1956 Time article as “more than simply a new plan for retail expansion. It represents a massive reorganization of the urban community.” In 1953, the periodical Architectural Forum did a six-page spread in an issue dedicated to the emerging trend of indoor shopping. Mondawmin was seen as an artful embrace of “everything from bazaar to department store,” drawing inspiration from the boulevards of France and Italy. “It is probably necessary to feel this scaled-down space to realize fully how satisfying and even excitingly it fits the human on his own two feet,” gushed a follow-up dispatch.

When Mondawmin opened, with Sears as an anchor on one end and a grocer called Penn Fruit at the other, income maps put the surrounding community of Park Heights close to the top two-fifths of the market. But white flight was already transforming the neighborhood. After the riots of 1968, Mondawmin swiftly fell on hard times. In 1973, Sears left. The Rouse Company, which had sold the mall to local developers, took over management and led a 1981 renovation; the opening of a Metro station in 1983 turned the mall into a major transit hub, and in 1984 the Rouse Company put Mondawmin’s sales in the top ten among its fifty-seven shopping centers. Despite the neighborhood blight and the fears of crime inside the mall (as in 1989, when three youths were shot), the stores always brought in cash.

“Even in Mondawmin’s state of being underinvested in, there was substantial support,” says
General Growth’s Richardson. “The mall was bustling. It was vibrant; it was embraced by the community. Now that we’re adding to it, we’ll improve that much more.”

This isn’t news to the longtime retailers. “You know who’s gonna spend a lot of money?” says
Hazel Jones from behind the counter at Mondawmin’s AJ’s Polar Bar Cafe. “Black folks. We’re gonna spend money. If you got the stuff, we’re going to spend money.”

Back at Mamma Lucia, Costagliola predicts that the corporations that once snubbed Mondawmin are overdue to discover that for themselves. “That’s what usually happens in business anyway,” he says. “One person takes a chance, they do well, and then you are going to start seeing big chain stores all over the city.”

—Charles Cohen





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