Burlington Center Mall

Usually the pieces I write for this blog are filled with tragedy and frustration. Sometimes the location has a sordid past; in other instances historic buildings are taken down despite more reasonable courses of action. This write up is nothing like that. The story of the Burlington Center Mall is a rather short and uneventful one.

The Maryland based Rouse Company constructed the 1.5 million square foot building in 1982. The main space of the mall had enough room for 100 stores. Though architecturally unremarkable, there was a small piece of art inside that made the mall unique.

The piece, entitled "The Watering Hole", depicts a young boy on the back of an elephant. The sculpture also included a fountain, a quintessential piece of mall design. According to the artist Zenos Frudakis, "I didn't want to create a taxidermy elephant, because it is poetry in a way you are creating. It is art. It wasn't a particular elephant, it was an abstracted, essential elephant. I wanted to create the form of elephant—an idealized elephant."

Over the next few decades the building became obsolete, as online shopping drew more and more business away from the mall. An entire section of the mall was eventually hidden behind a false wall, to keep the remaining portion as full as possible. Some storefronts also found new non retail use as offices. However it wasn't long before it was announced that the Burlington Center mall was going to be closed for good.

The main portion of the mall was set to be shuttered in March, but a burst water pipe accelerated the closure. The doors were finally shut on January 8th, 2018. The last anchor store closed its doors on September 2nd, and the property was sold. Moonbeam Capital, the new owners of the mall property, plan to demolish the building and replace it with a brand new development. A fundraiser had been set to remove "the Watering Hole" so that it could be donated to a charity. The piece was removed in February of 2019.