Scrap collectors a few weeks ago stole brass signs off the giant building Macy's abandoned in 2013 in downtown St. Louis. An electrical fire last summer damaged a Macy's store that closed in 2015 in downtown Pittsburgh.
And in the building Macy's vacated in Missoula, Mont., there's a different problem. "It's just sitting there housing pigeons," says Ellen Buchanan, director of the Missoula Redevelopment Agency. "They don't spend a lot of money at the local restaurants."
The departure of a giant department store creates a chance to update and modernize a city center. But it also creates risks, and even danger, as a large empty building goes untended.
Last week's decision by Macy's Inc. to close its downtown store in Minneapolis means the city will be balancing those opportunities and risks for the first time since the 1980s, when a fire in a vacant department store destroyed a city block.
The firm purchasing the Macy's site, a three-building complex known to most Minnesotans as the former flagship Dayton's store, is sending executives to discuss its future with city officials this week. "We want to see a new entity there as quickly as possible," City Council President Barb Johnson said. "But we realize how long it takes to have things happen."
For five decades, American cities have grappled with the closings of big department stores in downtowns, first because of competition from suburban malls and, lately, off-price and internet retailers. Each closing reduces shopping variety, wipes out jobs and reduces the local tax base.
Each also challenges a city's commercial real estate base with a huge parcel that has to be torn down and replaced, or remodeled and put back on the market. The buyer of the Minneapolis property, 601W Cos., a New York real estate developer, will remodel it into a mix of retail and offices, Macy's said in announcing the $40 million transaction.
The conversion won't be easy, said David Frank, the Minneapolis director of economic policy and development. "Some buildings lend themselves well and easily and less expensively to new uses, but department stores aren't one of those," he said.