Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Photographing the Centre


The sign above is displayed inside the St. Louis Centre Mall in downtown St. Louis. Actually it's displayed in multiple places, at least 5 or 6. And as most people know, the St. Louis Centre is a dead mall. Walgreens, Famous Barr, T Mobile, and Sbarro Pizza are the only recognizable store names left doing business, with a handful of other random shops attempting to sell their costume jewelry and hip clothing to lunchtime mall walkers and unsuspecting convention attendees. In the four floors of retail space, maybe 8 or so of these shops exist.

Those of you who read Gimlet's blog are aware of the photography situation at the downtown St. Louis Centre Mall. The situation being that it is against the centre's rules to photograph inside the mall without written permission from the management. Well, being ever up to a challenge, I had to go attempt to photograph the inside of the centre myself.

During lunch a couple days ago a co-worker and I ventured into the mall. We took quite a few pictures and did not get stopped or spoken to by anyone. Here is just a sampling of what the St. Louis centre has to offer (click to enlarge).


As you can see, the St. Louis Centre is really "Downtown Shopping at it's Best!"

2 comments:

Merc Man said...

The North County Journal has a front-page story this week about all the empty storefronts at Northwest Plaza. I wonder how these places can even keep their doors open?

Anonymous said...

I am that co-worker...he hee and you know how I feel about it but for the record who should care about whether or not an empty space of public use and access is photographed. If the mall was a club for private use where fees where being paid to have the priviledge of entry than I could see no photographing, but this rule is just plain old ridiculous. They should feel honored that anyone would even consider taking photos of such an eye sore...but I think they made that rule because they are so embarrassed that no shops are there and don't want to attract negative attention.