Owings Mills Mall at 25: Quiet and Lonely

Picture the stereotypical shopping mall: mothers and fathers with children enjoying a meal in the food court, young couples walking hand-in-hand, the buzz of hundreds of separate conversations filling the space from marbled floor to windowed ceiling.

The imagined scene jibes with other regional malls, like those in Towson and Columbia, but not Owings Mills Mall, where sharp-eyed security guards outnumber shoppers in some lonely corridors, the turn of each corner reveals another vacant storefront, and few sounds fill the space between walls, floor and ceiling.

Even in areas where stores are open, finding a clerk in those stores on a weekday afternoon was a challenge, with some spaces seemingly left for a few customers to peruse.

“When you lose stores, and there’s more if you can go to Towson or Columbia, people tend to go there,” said Jeff Freedman, 26, of Owings Mills. “After a lot of stores pull out, people are going to stop coming because there isn’t much to see there anymore.

“There just really isn’t anything. I don’t understand why … maybe they just can’t attract stores,” Freedman said. "There’s got to be a way to get some more stores in there.”

After the departure of Saks Fifth Avenue a decade into the mall’s existence, both Sears and Lord & Taylor tried their hands at setting up shop as the mall’s anchor stores. Sears left in 2001 and Lord & Taylor packed up one year later.

What was once heralded as an upscale “fashion mall” has become largely vacant, though “apparently there are some loyal shoppers, because there are some stores that have been there for a long time and haven’t closed,” Freedman said.

A vacancy report compiled by the CoStar Group, a real estate information company, showed that 100 percent of the spaces in the Owings Mills Mall were leased out. But a recent visual inspection made it appear as if at least one-quarter of the store fronts were shuttered.

A CoStar spokesman could not explain the apparent discrepancy but said he would be alerting the company's researchers so they could update the data.

Clinton Cole, the mall’s general manager, that rumors the mall might be knocked down were false. Instead, he and General Growth Properties, which owns the mall, were exploring ways to improve the existing space. General Growth also owns The Mall in Columbia and Towson Town Center.

Cole did not return a phone call and e-mail asking him to elaborate on those plans and discuss the mall's status. He also declined to allow Patch reporters to interview customers and shop owners on the mall’s premises.

“Patch just did a story [on the mall] two months ago,” Cole said via phone. “Is there going to be a story every two months?"

While General Growth makes plans for the mall's future, would-be shoppers bemoan the mall’s current state, citing crime as a major reason they do not go to the mall.

Baltimore County police said it would take three weeks for official crime statistics to be compiled for the mall, but statistics from CrimeReports.com, which marks the location of crimes based on the county’s 911 Dispatch System, show only three crimes committed there in 2011—all thefts.

“It seems like there’s a bad stigma about it,” Freedman said. “I think a lot of it is just a bad perception. It’s not as bad as people make it out to be.

“You can’t say it is just the perception of crime [that stops shoppers from coming to the mall],” he said. “After a lot of stores pull out, people are going to stop coming because there isn’t much to see there anymore.”

Though a physical inspection of the mall made it appear to be well-kept and clean, some say the mall is not well-maintained.

“Another issue I can think of is the leaking ceiling for at least five years when it rains,” said Adam Thomas, of Owings Mills, "when at places like Columbia Mall, you have janitors cleaning off the handrails.

"People would rather drive just a bit further to a nicer mall.”

This is the second in a series examining the Owings Mills Mall and its deterioration as it approaches its 25th anniversary on July 30. .