The Mall

I was coming down out of Target today, and looked across the U-Haul, and saw the entrance of the old Mall, Carl Sandburg Mall. It was quite impressive, actually, though the mall has been closed for many years. I don't even know who owns it, so I'll just say, you can take my ideas or leave them, I'm just an average Galesburg resident. I did not shop much at malls even when they were in their heyday, so my advice may not be valuable.
But Galesburg is in the position of many towns of 30,000 or so (23.000?) - it just can't support a mall very well these days. It's partly because the wealthy are doing all their shopping online, and many of the big stores are in trouble no matter where they are. But since the pandemic the whole concept of going to a single place for all kinds of high-end shopping has just kind of gone out of style. People don't necessarily want to be seen in such places, because they just don't want to go out in general.

So what should this person/these people, owners of our mall as we know it, do? I notice that it has a few new tenants. It has not done anything to pave or improve the parking lot or the road around it; Mall Drive is the pothole capital of Galesburg.

In some places, malls as we know them have been repurposed in very interesting ways. Community center? College? Factory or set of factories? These are all interesting possibilities. Maybe what we/they should do is investigate. Maybe the community should get involved.

We could buy it cheap, probably, if we had a good idea.