Many American enclosed malls built in the early 1980s have either been demolished, gutted for warehouses, or converted into something unrecognizable. Barton Creek Square, which opened in southwest Austin in 1981, is not one of those malls.
It is still doing what it was built to do, at nearly full occupancy, with a department-store anchor on every corner. There is no simple answer to what kept Barton Creek Square alive while comparable malls collapsed.
The tenants changed, the anchors changed, a theater was demolished and rebuilt, fountains and tropical plantings gave way to charging stations and fire pits. The place that exists now looks nothing like the place that opened…