Welcome to Sky City: Southern Retail Then and Now

UPDATED January 7, 2025

Sky City: Retail History is one of the pioneering blogs documenting the evolution of retail exploration and commercial archeology. With time, the nostalgia that sites like this provided helped people to finally appreciate and celebrate what was once seen as a gregarious and tacky chapter of our history: the golden age of the suburbs. The malls and stores discussed on this blog focus on the suburban era when downtown retail moved to the suburbs where it grew extensively into a sea of strip centers, enclosed malls, chain restaurants, skating rinks, bowling alleys, movie theaters, and gas stations. It was a shockingly different period in our history developed for and centered around the peak of the automobile. 

Generally running from roughly 1956-2006, the golden age of the suburbs formed my earliest memories as I landed roughly in the middle of it watching it begin its slow and painful decline as I became an adult. I watched it all slowly get replaced with newer developments that, while they may have been more aesthetic, they were in other ways terribly inferior. This lost era was the land of gaudy mansard awnings often coated in ribbed, rust-colored aluminum. The brutalist buildings were starkly contrasted with the colorful and elegant logos and were accented with random arrays of reinforced concrete arches, greenhouse entryways, folded plate roofs, and vast parking lots full of amber streetlights. Walk in the stark buildings to be met with an unnatural video game-like world with all of that tempered by that strangely dark and brown look meant to evoke a classic downtown or wooded setting in a place that was anything but that. In my time, you can still hear the soundtrack of what we now call "yacht rock" playing all through these places as the era evolved a musical style that supported this era of excitement and unrealistic expectations. Perhaps it gave us all a false sense of security, but it was pure consumer culture dressed up as an amusement park, and it felt like a friend. At least you came there to see your friends or even go on a date.

As we look at today where daily life has become for many unbearable with overcrowded conditions, a lack of affordable housing, a lack of choices for shopping, oppressive hustle culture, a massive social disconnect, and ever escalating costs on everything we own, we no longer see this lost period with the cynical eyes we once did. We long to stroll the corridors full of neon, cascading fountains, indoor trees, and skylights capturing the afternoon sun to go into those stores full of things we just knew we had to have. We long for the variety of discount stores, restaurants, supermarkets, and wide-open roads we once had to get there. It is not something we will ever see again in our lifetimes the way it was back then, and some things from those times are better left in the past, but these images remind us that fun and adventure was once something we actually left home to pursue. 

The good news is that what we do have today is an ever-increasing number of images of places we once thought were lost forever. These places of our childhood that we once thought nobody cared enough to photograph or take a video of ultimately were captured by many in newspapers, ads, promotional photos, and of course people actually enjoying the moment enough to save it for the future. We ignorantly believed they would never be gone, but commercial buildings and architecture never last for a very long time as their mere existence is dependent on how profitable they are. People like me were the first to realize what was happening, and we raced out with our then new digital cameras to capture what was left despite dirty looks and sometimes worse as nobody back then believed our motives were pure since nobody would dare take a picture of something like a mall. It was tough, but it was worth it.

It has now been nearly 19 years since this blog was founded as Georgia Retail Memories, and those memories now stretch from Texas to New England to the Midwest with a considerable backlog that I have yet to publish on this site. I took a long hiatus beginning in 2019 as this is not my sole interest or hobby. My life has changed significantly since this was founded meaning that it was difficult to prioritize. I am aware that many of your comments are still not published and that the posts still contain errors, outdated information, and poor wording: fixing that is a priority before I start adding new content. However, I do have help, and it is not a sole effort like it was in the beginning. I have begun correcting and updating older posts and will eventually add new content that I have collected all the way back to the late 2000's. If things can hold together, I will then take this site in new directions in the next few years and finally show you all that I've seen and all the information I compiled over these nearly two decades. This is why the name changed twice since it was started where I have shed any mention of a regional intent. 

It should be pointed out that I have a pretty broad umbrella for "retail history". This includes malls, strip shopping centers, downtowns, discount stores, department stores, big box stores, chain restaurants, drug stores, and others with an emphasis on pedestrian malls and dead retail chains. Banks, theaters, and gas stations are not really focused on as much, but they make regular appearances in the places I have visited.

Feel free to contribute any information, photographs, brochures, postcards, newspaper clippings, or anything else that would make this site more interesting or informative. You can send this to skycityretail@gmail.com. I will also eventually set up a Patreon, gofundme, or some other source for this work as I could use any of your generous contributions in order to continue updating and adding to this site to continue providing you with an in-depth source of information about retail history that you might not find anywhere else. To all of you who took the time to read this, thank you and I'm glad you enjoy this site!