Hello everyone, I am ShopKoFan, from the Ames Forums. If you're wondering where I got the inspiration for this page, I've seen many different pages (including blogs and messageboards) out there devoted to retail and retail history (such as Labelscar, Malls of America, The Caldor Rainbow, Deadmalls.com, and Pleasant Family Shopping), and not very many of them are region-specific. I've devoted this page to the life and death of Wisconsin retail. If you're from Wisconsin and like retail history, this is the site for you!
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Ironically I was pondering on firing up one of these 'Wisconsin specific' retail history things, but you beat me to it.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how you would be breaking down your entries, but whatever comes up, will come up. Some towns in this state only had so much. Thus, to cover, say, an individual mall or retail site would be a bit limiting. For example, the city of West Bend, one of my childhood haunts as far as shopping goes (when I was but knee-high) should rather be taken as a whole. The city at one time had three very small enclosed malls (one of them an outlet mall...the country's first), two major strip centers, and a 'historic' downtown that was literally dead in the early '80s thanks to all the retail growth that happened in the 1970s in that town.
Bigger cities though..some of their retail areas deserve seperate entries.
We got our share of malls that are on the brink or have already passed too. Most of them anchored by ShopKo. :-) I was always more of a Prange Way person myself, to which they also anchored a few centers.
Much luck to you with the blog. While I'll have much to contribute, hopefully others will come along as well. We can't be the only ones here in our glove-shaped part of the country who've visited and / or have memories of past retail establishments.
Although I was born and raised in West Virginia (albeit in exile by midwesterners), Wisconsin tends to be the place where my heart resides; retail-wise and otherwise. Last summer I finally moved to Manitowoc; a place famous as the home of the abandoned Mid-Cities Mall.
ReplyDeleteI'll definitely be looking forward to watching this site develop, and may look for the chance to help out a bit here and there too. Take care!
Being from Racine, WI originally (now in ATL designing, of all things retail structures) I'll definitely be following things...
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