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Originally Posted by west-town-brad
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The emerging consensus is that the pedestrian malls in US cities happened to be installed in a time when urban cores were in free-fall. They were pitched as a way to revive downtowns, but they were not nearly enough to offset the cataclysmic amounts of money pouring into freeways, suburban sprawl and urban renewal/demolitions all over the country - as a downtown growth strategy, pedestrian malls were like pissing into a hurricane.
Downtowns struggled (retail vacancy, crime, abandonment) with or without the pedestrian malls, it's mostly a coincidence. And since urban planning in the US is so prone to fads, lots of cities faced the exact same situation at the same time. Then in the 1990s when cities started to turn around, they got money to rip out the pedestrian malls. Another coincidence, they probably would have revived anyway. The few cities that hung onto their malls are thriving, IF the surrounding city is healthy and usually when the surrounding blocks were not hollowed out by urban renewal. Fulton Mall in Brooklyn, Charlottesville, Boulder, Santa Monica, etc. The one in Denver is arguably successful despite the homeless issue.
If Chicago had refurbished the State St mall in the 90s it would probably be a huge success. There is an argument to be made that the details of the modernist design by SOM were a little cold and sterile. It's also worth noting that buses got a lot cleaner, so the frequent complaint of "bus fumes in the State St mall" would have solved itself in time. Also virtually every American city fails at the challenge of homelessness, so eliminating pedestrian malls just shifts them somewhere else - it's not and never was a real solution.