Tag: carsonmall

The gas station at the corner of Carson and Stewart, in the parking lot of the Carson Mall, is being torn down. The station hadn't been selling gas for some years anyway. Recently it was home to an auto shop and used car dealership, and the pumps had been removed. But before that it's been a Texaco station and a 76 station. Now it's rubble.

This would be a good spot for a new restaurant. Visible right on the corner, and surrounded by plenty of parking. Maybe the mall owners can make a deal for someone to move in here, so the lot doesn't just sit empty forever.

The new Little Caesars Pizza in the Carson Mall is now open. Of course it feels like we're getting this at the expense of losing the nearby Station Grille, which is hardly an equitable trade. But at least somebody is still betting on the public's need for cheap pizza.

After being burned twice, Little Caesar's is back to give Carson City a third try. There used to be two Little Caesar's in Carson, and they were both brutally evicted. One was located in the Super Kmart at the north end of town that closed, taking the pizza place down with it. And the other was out Hwy 50, in the Lucky/Longs shopping center. That building was torn down to make way for the freeway, leaving them without a home. So now, several years later, Little Caesar's is ready to try again, this time in the Carson Mall in the space that used to be occupied by the Real Scoop frozen yogurt shop.

Also, around the back of the mall, work is coming along nicely on the facade remodel. It's just this tiny little part of the mall that they're working on, but it looks fantastic. Maybe in a few years they'll fix up the rest of the mall the same way.

Construction walls have gone up at the Carson Mall. This is Phase 1 of their remodeling process, where they're going to be updating the facade to give it a fresher, more modern look.

It's not going to be a very involved job, because they're estimating that it will done in the spring. We'll see.

Two drawings of the proposed renovations to the Carson Mall have been released. They're just abstract watercolors, so I'm sure things aren't going to end up looking exactly like this. But it's a good peek into the future of a mall that hasn't changed much since it was built in 1964.

by G.L. Szabo & Associates, via the Nevada Appeal

These pictures were part of an article in the Nevada Appeal about how the owners are still planning to go ahead with the mall renovations, even though one of the recommendations from the Urban Planning Institute was to tear the mall down. The mall is always empty, so something definitely needs to happen, but if this renovation can reinvigorate the space, bring in a few stores that people actually want to shop at, and get foot traffic back inside the mall, I think it will have served its purpose.

It's a second chance that the Silver City Mall never got. It was torn down for a Lowe's hardware store, that probably gets more visitors in one day than the Silver City Mall was able to pull in in a year.

Right now the Carson Mall is irrelevant, but it's going to take more than just new stucco and paint to reinvent it.

We'd all written it off as being dead, but apparently there's still a little life left in the Carson Mall after all. This article details the $12 million plans to renovate the whole mall, top to bottom, to try to freshen it up for the new millennium. I think that out of all the problems the malls has, though, the outdated architecture is the least of their worries. So hopefully this remodeling will also work on bringing in some new stores, stores that folks actually want to shop at, to go along with the new decor. I only venture inside that mall about once a year, even though I drive by it every day, and the reason is that there's nothing inside to draw me in. No stores that I want to shop at. And whenever I do go inside, it's always as dead as a tomb in there. I mean, it's not as bad as the Silver City Mall, which used to stand where Lowe's is now, for those of you that remember that ghoulishly dark place. But the Carson Mall has several problems, and $12 million worth of new paint isn't going to fix most of them. A new restaurant, like the article talks about? That's the kind of thing it needs.

The article also mentions, but doesn't link to, this review of the Carson Mall by bigmallrat.com. The review highlights the dated architectural appearance, truck-stop cleanliness, and run-of-the-mill uniqueness of the mall. Sounds like a winner!