With the writing on the wall, Irondequoit Mall quickly began to lose retailers. After the Eastview

We round out our Rochester features with the region sports tickets s newest mall, Irondequoit Mall .  Opened in 1990, Irondequoit Mall was located in Rochester s northeast suburb of the same name, Irondequoit, a town of 50,000 residents located sports tickets immediately northeast of the city.
When it opened, Irondequoit Mall had three anchors: Sears, JCPenney, and Pittsburgh-based Kaufmann s .  The Kaufmann s was originally slated to be Rochester-based department store Sibley s , but May Company decided to consolidate their nameplates and ousted Sibley s in favor of regional brand Kaufmann s.  This switch took place during Irondequoit Mall s construction. (Is this correct? A couple sports tickets sources say that Sibley s acutally opened here very briefly.)
Irondequoit Mall s design was a modified U shape, with Kaufmann s as the west anchor, JCPenney in the middle, and Sears on the north end.  The mall was two level, had two main courts, and contained space for 125 stores.  The food court was located on the upper level of the mall, in a court formed by the intersection of 3 hallways.  JCPenney had the best access of any of the anchor stores, having two exits into the mall: one at center court, and one to a hallway leading directly to the food court.  A scanned directory of the mall is located here.
Irondequoit Mall was built by Rochester-based retail developer Wilmorite , the same firm that developed three other malls in the Rochester market: Greece Towne Mall in Greece (1967), Eastview Mall in Victor (1971), sports tickets and Marketplace Mall in Henrietta (1982).  Irondequoit Mall was built in 1990 to complete a geographic trapezoid of sorts consisting of malls around the perimiter of the Rochester area, with downtown stalwart Midtown Plaza at the apex.
While only 2 miles from downtown Rochester, Irondequoit Mall was built with the intention to draw shoppers from middle and upper-middle suburban areas north and east of the city, like Irondequoit, Webster, sports tickets East Rochester, Pittsford and Fairport.  Instead, Irondequoit Mall failed and ultimately succumbed to an unintended set of circumstances.  However, its story is interesting and still in progress, and definitely worth sharing.
Irondequoit Mall enjoyed early success in its first years and even embarked on an expansion in 1993, adding Rochester-based McCurdy s as a fourth anchor.  This store didn t last very long, however, and was replaced with Bon Ton in 1994.  May Company, which already owned the Kaufmann s anchor in the mall, purchased the McCurdy s chain and didn t want to operate two stores in the same mall, so they divested McCurdy sports tickets s to Bon Ton.
The biggest changes for Irondequoit Mall came after 1995, and didn t even occur there at all.  That year, two other Rochester-area malls expanded dramatically.  Eastview Mall, located 15 miles away in Victor, added two anchors and upscaled to become the Rochester area s best mall.  Greece Ridge Mall, located 7 miles away in Greece, was a new mall created that year by sewing together 2 smaller adjacent malls, Long Ridge Mall and Greece Towne Center.  Ironically, both of these projects were Wilmorite s, the same company that built Irondequoit Mall only 5 years earlier.  The competition from these two expansions, combined with a perception of crime and dab of racism, would soon slide Irondequoit Mall into obsolescence.
During the mid-90s, about the same time Eastview expanded and Greece Ridge opened, Rochester s inner-city mall, Midtown Plaza, began to die.  Shoppers who used to go downtown began to shift their preferences toward suburban malls, and Irondequoit Mall was the closest mall to most of the city of Rochester.  Many residents of the city of Rochester, sports tickets especially the area closest to Irondequoit sports tickets Mall, are low income and minority.  In typical white flight sports tickets fashion, the more affluent suburban shoppers Irondequoit Mall so desperately wished to court began to avoid the mall, citing a perception of crime that ironically wasn t really there.  A whisper campaign about the mall and its shoppers began among the sheltered, white suburbanites in eastern Monroe County, despite sports tickets the fact that the perception of crime was mostly untrue, blown wildly out of proportion.
With the writing on the wall, Irondequoit Mall quickly began to lose retailers.  After the Eastview expansion was complete, shoppers in Fairport, Pittsford, and East Rochester had no reason to go up to Irondequoit at all.  Eastview was much better, and much closer to them.  In fact, Eastview quickly became super-regional, drawing shoppers from not only its home trade area, but from beyond the region as well.  Other Rochester malls retained shoppers for other reasons.  Greece Ridge held on mostly sports tickets due to largesse and a unique mix of big box and traditional anchors, and Marketplace Mall s success hinged on its location near Rochester sports tickets s undergraduate population of over 50,000 students.
By 2000, Irondequoit Mall was only 10 years old and already in dire straits.  The beautiful, modern, glassy two-level mall began to lose national chain stores, first at a trickle and then as a flood.
Rumors even began to surface sports tickets about a new mall to be constructed in Webster, the next town east of Irondequoit.  This would have certainly been a terrible idea, but I guess the idea was to keep the minority riff-raff from the city of Rochester out of the mix in order to retain wealthy white shoppers.  Not cool, but at least it never happened.
In 2005, Wilmorite finally threw in the towel on their dwindling investment and put Irondequoit Mall up for sale.  Their divestiture of Irondequoit was tantamount to an admission of failure, as their own efforts expanding Eastview and building Greece Ridge were probably the biggest reasons Irondequoit failed, combined sports tickets with changing shopper demographics and a misinformed perception of crime due to racism.
That same year, Adam Bersin, a Syracuse developer, purchased Irondequoit Mall for just $5 million and a wheelbarrow of tax incentives from the town of Irondequoit, whose coffers had been dry ever since the mall went downhill.  Bersin re-christened the mall with a new name, Medley Centre, and new promises, along with a new logo indicating the mall was New York s Shopping Spree .
One of Bersin s first changes was to install an anchor to the former JCPenney space, which he did by attracting fast-expanding fly-by-night retailer Steve and Barrys, sports tickets a warehouse of cut-rate, low-quality clothing, which opened in 2005.
In 2006, Bersin brought a large-scale Halloween event to Medley Centre , which attracted a healthy crowd and filled an entire wing of the mall, but who knows how many of them stayed to shop in the mostly sports tickets empty mall.  On October 8, 2006, Target opened outside in the mall s parking lot, but it isn t clear if Target helped the mall or just ciphoned from it, driving it even more into the ground.  If Target had opened IN the mall where Steve and Barry s was, using the former JCPenney anchor, it might have helped sports tickets more.  That fall, another anchor change occurred as Kaufmann s became Macy s when Macy s parent, Federated, purchased Kaufmann s parent, May, and consolidated all of the regional nameplates under the Macy s banner.
Despite the small victories in landing Target and Steve and Barry s, Bersin s tenure as Medley Centre s owner wasn t very successful overall.  Mall directories were woefully out of date, still displaying advertisements that were several years old and listing stores that had long departed; however, some progress occurred in the right direction, as the mall s upkeep became visible through rebuilt entrances, healthy plants, cosmetic repairs, and general maintenance.  Bersin also expanded the MedleyKids soft play area , so that it encompassed a huge space in the mall s western court, underneath the food court.
Mall occupancy, however, remained woefully low.  Most of the chain stores left, leaving a weird, eclectic mix of mom-and-pop stores and non-retail entities.  Some of the parcels sports tickets in the mall were given over to a dog obedience school, an english-as-a-second-language institute, a summer camp, and a town meeting space.  One former store became home to a model train track, and another store was used as a combination travel sports tickets agency and security guard training school.  So, after you were done riding the HO-scale rails, you could be sure you were extremely safe while planning your trip to Cancun.
Along with the cosmetic updates at Medley Centre, Bersin made a controversial sports tickets decision sports tickets regarding sports tickets the mall s patrons , issuing a divisive edict regarding who was welcome there.  Signs were posted throughout the mall, especially near the food court area, indicating that cards and chess games were prohibited, which was considered a low blow by many.  I saw the signs when I visited the mall in December 2007, and was puzzled by them, especially sports tickets considering there wasn t anybody in the large food court area at all.
Ever since the mall opened, the food court had been a gathering place for local seniors, who regularly got breakfast and loitered in the mall, using it as a social gathering place to chat and play games.  Bersin s new rules removed them in order to establish a family-friendly atmosphere in the mall.  They asserted the group of seniors, who played games and socialized, actively discouraged others from being there, which I find patently ridiculous.  The new rules created deep-seated resentment from a large customer base, and was probably not the greatest decision.  Who s to say these seniors didn t also shop at the mall?  I m sure many patronized at least Sears and Bon Ton?  Seniors are a strange group to alienate, considering their loyalty and purchasing power, and the grapevine effect probably alienated more people than Bersin expected.  Also, what if some of the food court vendors relied upon this group for breakfast or lunch revenues?
In addition to alienating seniors, mall security also became more vigilant against groups of kids in the mall, banning those who frequently loitered and were seen a