"No identity, tons of competition... how can Festival Bay Mall survive?"
Article about Festival Bay Mall in Orlando.Conceived in the go-go days of the 1990s, Festival Bay Mall was envisioned as a thriving entertainment destination. But the mall has struggled since it opened in 2003, and tenants say things have spiraled downward in recent months.
posted by Anita at
12:24 PM
4 Comments:
When I lived in the area, (I left in 2005) I would stop by here every so often.
It's a very well designed mall with nice fixtures, etc. But the place was only ever about half full... if that.
The store that were there were pretty decent.
This story doesn't surprise me at all.
This story is almost identical to that of the Great Mall of the Great Plains in Olathe, Kan. It was built as a tourist attraction with more than 10 years of planning and anticipation. Today, it is practically a ghost town, and the stores that remain give it a flea-market feel instead of an actual mall. I would love to write a synopsis of the Olathe mall for this Web site.
Links in post were dead; found this one if you'd like to update:
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2009-09-21/news/0909200160_1_festival-bay-bay-mall-pro-shops
It's a beautiful mall, really. I visited soon after it opened in 2003. The irony is that we found it by accident. We were trying to get to the Prime Outlets and took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up right in front of it. I'd never heard of "Festival Bay", and we had a friend with us who was visiting from Japan, so we figured it'd be cool to take her inside for a little sightseeing.
There was a large sports shop outside, and the main entrance is incredibly beautiful. The mall is unique in that it has waterfall-like feature outside. Inside, there are fountains and a sort of river feature that runs outside, forming the waterfall. It's been so long since I was in a mall with a fountain that it evoked some nice memories. There's something about the sound and smell of water in a place like that that's just magical. It really made a wonderful impression on all of us, and we were really excited to go inside.
The food court was nice too, but once you venture beyond it, it gets spooky. I've seen a couple of "dead malls" around here (the Oviedo Mall and the OLD "Daytona Beach" Mall (which had a roof collapse a few years ago) to name a few. But this one was weird. You could still smell the fresh paint. But nearly all the stores were open. Away from the food court, it felt like a construction site. There were a few stores here and there, but it was incredibly empty.
With the Florida Mall, Prime Outlets, Downtown Disney, Universal City walk, and the Mall at Millenia so close by, I have no idea how this place will ever make a name for itself. I haven't been in years, but I can't imagine much has changed. Calling it a "dead" mall is sort of a misnomer--it implies that it had a life to begin with.
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