My latest zine: 43 Ways to Reuse Dead Malls and Abandoned Buildings

Here's a clip of some guys exploring the abandoned Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio.  This is just one of many of the "dead malls" in the U.S. right now.  When I looked this mall up, after seeing Rick McCrank explore it in his Viceland show Abandoned, I got a surprise.  I was born about five miles 13from where this mall was built.  We moved away when I was about 2 1/2, but my grandma lived ten miles away.  So I know this was one of the malls I spent time in as a kid.

Then, just over a month ago, I happened to walk through Oak Hollow Mall in Highpoint, North Carolina, a week before it totally closed down.  As I looked into why entire malls were closing down, I found that 400 of the 1200 enclosed malls in the U.S. are either closed, or expected to close in the next five years.  In addition, well over 3,000 major chain store locations have closed in the last couple of years or are scheduled to in 2017.  We are witnessing Mallpocalypse.

So I made a zine about different ways we could take these dead malls, empty factory buildings, and other vacant buildings, and put them to use.  Here are three of my ideas from the zine:

#2  Adult Big Wheel Drifting Course.  You've seen those things on You Tube.  Build some downhill ramps, or maybe use the multi-level parking garage to let people drift those adult sized big wheels.

#9  Vintage shops that sell real old people.  Seriously, there are way too many elderly people in the world.  We all know of one or two we'd like to sell.  Here's a place to find them a good home.  

# 13 Boy band shooting gallery.  Real boy bands, live ammunition.  They perform, you shoot, society wins.

Those are just three of the 43 ideas in my zine for putting the thousands of empty buildings we have back to use.  To see three more ideas and order a signed and numbered zine, check out my Go Fund Me page for this project:

43 Ideas on how to reuse dead malls and abandoned buildings