American Dream’s troubles aren't just bad timing, writes awalkerinLA
Bad news for the New Jersey megamall. Photo: Seth Wenig/AP/Shutterstock The second-largest mall in the country is in trouble after Triple Five, the developer and third owner of Rutherford, New Jersey’s American Dream, failed to make a payment on an $800 million bond for the property this week.
This is the latest in a trail of bad financial decisions as long as the walk from Saks to the Nickelodeon roller coaster. In 2019, the mall made its grand debut over a decade late with a vision similar to Triple Five’s crown jewel, the Mall of America in Minneapolis. The idea was to make it just as gloriously over the top. But the ribbon had barely been cut on the first phase of its opening when the mall was temporarily shuttered by the pandemic a few months later.
But American Dream’s demise is more than bad timing. The collapse of the mall as an institution may be part of a bigger post-COVID trend, notes Alexandra Lange, who visits the mall in the opening of her new book Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. As she wrote this week in the New York Times, forecasters predict that a quarter of the country’s 1,000 malls will close within five years.