“Photo essay:” Berkshire Mall is Really Empty.
Pics of a gi-normous spread of shabby construction full of stuff that no one ever bought.
Target is the sole remaining tenant, because it owns its own space. We shop there lots. Today we bought a mini-blender, and a long-sleeved tee-shirt in Menswear, then a Coffee Frappuccino at the in-store Starbucks.
Today Google identifies “Berkshire Mall” as a bus stop in Lanesborough MA just outside of Pittsfield, MA, a large husk of a former factory city, which nonetheless in 1998 refused to let Pyramid Management Group build a doomed piece of sprawl in its town. So Pyramid said fine. We’ll build it a few miles away, and the rest is history.
Pyramid Management Group has developed 28 malls in all; 13 are still open.
When Berkshire Mall went bankrupt in 2014, a court awarded the property to Strategic Asset Management for ten dollars.
When Pittsfield’s GE plant once manufactured torpedos for submarines (whether they were T-5’s, a nuclear-warhead-tipped 5-kiloton payload weapon, as is rumored, I can neither confirm nor deny) the town throve. Then GE left for Houston. Game over.
The distinctive logo of the place featured the M in “Mall” as a couple of mountains in the beautiful Berkshires.
Amen, Maybe eventually it'll circle back to local biznesses reinventing deserted downtowns? If not, it's gonna be a sad endgame for commerce...which was once our spine...
Forty years ago it was the Berkshire Malls of the world who initiated the destruction of Main Street retailing. Now it’s Death Star Amazon that had destroyed the malls.. Progress? Sure shopping is cheaper and more convenient but the soul is America’s towns had been inexorably damaged.