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Several of my friends are in the artist community, both here in Montana and elsewhere.
Many of them are photographers like you’d suspect, but some paint.
I don’t really look at myself as an artist even though I’ve been a photographer in one form or another since I was a kid.
Recently, one of them told me that she was able to rent mall space for her photography studio due to an innovative program in the St. Louis area.
The economy has put a lot of pressure on malls across the nation. Vacancies are way up, and the situation is no different at this mall.
One mall thought differently
The mall’s management could have sat back and whined about their situation. They could have let the mall traffic dwindle and left those spaces vacant. That might have impacted them legally, depending on their contracts with anchor stores.
But they didn’t. Instead, they came up with an innovative program that helps their cash flow, helps the local art community (and the small business owners – the artists) as well as keeping traffic up in the mall.
You can review a TV station news video about the project here.
Think outside the box store.
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Congratulations to St.Louis. Here in Tucson we were just on our way to helping gentrify an area downtown to accommodate low rent studio space when the budget got crushed.
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Well I think that’s great (I’m originally from STL) and just hope that when the economy rebounds Crestwood doesn’t promptly kick the arts groups out of the mall when retailers come calling.
Great post. People do need to think more creatively and the hard economic times may help some do so. My guess is the best part of this for the malls is to try and keep traffic up. I am not their target market though – I have maybe been in a mall 2 times in the last 2 years, maybe not that often.
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