{"id":138,"date":"2008-08-11T18:33:05","date_gmt":"2008-08-11T23:33:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/?p=138"},"modified":"2008-08-11T18:36:03","modified_gmt":"2008-08-11T23:36:03","slug":"parisian-richland-mall-early-2000s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/?p=138","title":{"rendered":"Parisian, Richland Mall: early 2000s"},"content":{"rendered":"

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You'll Never Pay More at Parisian<\/i><\/p>\n

Well, that's true, I suppose, though not in the way they hoped.<\/p>\n

The decline of Richland Mall happened mostly while I was living out of town (though still spending quite a bit of time here). I think the first phase: The tearing down of most of the un-enclosed mall, and the renaming it to Richland Fashion Mall<\/i> may have happened around the time I left for Fayetteville, though I'm a bit fuzzy on that. I do<\/i> know that quite a bit of the brou-ha-ha justifying the Fashion<\/i> part of the new name was inducing Parisian<\/i> & Bonwit Teller<\/i> to locate there.<\/p>\n

As I think I have mentioned elsewhere, I felt pretty comfortable buying clothes at White's<\/i>. I felt they were solidly middle-class, and that I could find clothes that wouldn't make me look funny from a staff that wouldn't try to make me feel like an idiot. I wasn't so sure about Parisian. I don't think I ever went in there, but I had the impression that it was something of a frou-frou upscale store, though perhaps less-so than Bonwit Teller. I don't know if that impression was accurate, but perhaps I wasn't the only one who had it because neither store lasted more than a few years. I see from Wikipedia<\/a> that even if it had hung on, the whole chain was bought by Belk, so I imagine it would have closed anyway after Belk's got White's..<\/p>\n

I think Parisian failed before Bonwit Teller and was the initial sign of the impending failure of the mall. I suppose it could have been the other way round -- it's a little hard to say since the BT building remained in use for Black Lion. I do know that nothing else ever used the Parisian space. I wondered a bit about that as I was taking these pictures. It's not good for buildings to remain empty, not only from the morale point of view, but also from the mold, fungus & vermin point of view. It seems to me it would have made sense for the mall owners to let some charity or other set up there rent-free rather than keep such a large space completely dark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You'll Never Pay More at Parisian Well, that's true, I suppose, though not in the way they hoped. The decline of Richland Mall happened mostly while I was living out of town (though still spending quite a bit of time here). I think the first phase: The tearing down of most of the un-enclosed mall, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[5,4],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-historic","tag-stores"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}