The big box on the northwest side is officially being put to sleep. Northridge Mall has been on life support for some time, and Boston Store is the last store remaining, until Saturday.

The failure of Northridge comes at a time in which Mayfair is thriving, and Bayshore is embarking on a major expansion. Meanwhile, Southridge and Brookfield Square are still successful, but certainly seem to be falling behind their competition. What happened to Northridge, and what does all this jockeying for position amongst malls mean?

To start with the first question, conventional wisdom says that the perception of Northridge being unsafe contributed to its decline. Sure the socio-economic makeup of the northwest side has changed, and the spending power may not be as great as it is in Brookfield. However, Ozaukee County, one of the richest counties in the country, is just north of the mall. Also, Brown Deer Road, which intersects with Northridge, continues to be a relatively successful commercial corridor of the city. This is about more than money and perception of crime.

This brings me to the second question about the competition for that mall dollar. Let's call it the K-Mart problem. Most people don't want to shop in a place that is aesthetically displeasing. Consumers who do patronize these types of establishments regard the price of the product as their #1 priority when they choose where to shop. This is why you have seen the huge expansion of Mayfair, and soon Bayshore. Those running the malls realize that people can get clothes, music, and books at many other stores in town (not to mention online). Therefore, the mall has to build on its original intention as an imitation of the town main street of yesteryear.

I would assert there was a growing distaste of the sterile, boring, and uninteresting malls around town. The boom in commercial and residential real estate in downtown Milwaukee is an indication that tastes have changed, and people are rediscovering that sense of place in their experience as a pedestrian. While I'm not a big fan of malls myself, because of the fact that they are poor imitations of a shopping district on a real street, the competition between the area's malls is following that same principle.

Mayfair sensed this change and overhauled the entire environment within its walls. The result was Mayfair was flooded with applications from prospective tenants, and stole the title of the area's most successful mall from the increasingly vacant Southridge Mall.

Meanwhile, R.I.P. Northridge. The mall war just claimed you as its most vulnerable victim.