Anchorage 5th Avenue Mall fills a downtown block at 320 W. 5th Avenue in Anchorage, Alaska. It’s a shopping center stacked several floors high, with JCPenney attached on its west side.
The mall opened in 1987 as the Fifth Avenue Mall, in the middle of Anchorage’s oil bust. So only about 10 of its planned 110 stores were open, and more than half the space sat empty.
It filled slowly. By 1996 the whole complex was 26 percent vacant, while Anchorage’s major shopping centers as a group sat at 13 percent. National chains filled much of it in the years after…