Indie businesses thrive as Lloyd Center mall reinvents itself — again

When Lloyd Center opened in Northeast Portland in August 1960, 700 homing pigeons were released to share news of the mall all over the Pacific Northwest. Nestled right in the heart of this new open-air shopping center was something unusual for a mall — a bustling ice rink.

Lloyd Center has undergone so many transformations in an attempt to stay relevant over the last 63 years, it would have required a lot of homing pigeons to announce each change. But one thing that has remained constant is the ice rink — which now sits at the center of a new group of independent local businesses.

For Cheryn Grant, Lloyd Center has been part of her routine since she moved to Portland in 1979. She ice dances with a group of adults in their 60s and older called the “Hooky Club” which has met weekly at the Lloyd Center ice rink since the mall’s opening.

In 2015, Lloyd Center’s new Texas-based owners financed a $177 million remodel to revitalize the mall. In addition to architectural upgrades and a new three-story spiral staircase, they made a controversial change to the ice rink, shrinking it and making it a different shape.

“They made a smaller rink that looks like an egg, versus a real ice rink,” Grant said. “So they lost customers. Lloyd Center lost people because a lot of skaters won’t come here anymore, because the rink is too small.”

And skaters weren’t the only loss for the Lloyd Center. As retail trends changed to shopping online, Lloyd Center’s anchor stores closed down one by one. Sears shuttered, followed by Nordstrom. The mall’s extended closure during COVID-19 lockdowns accelerated the downward spiral. In January 2021, the final remaining large department store in Lloyd Center, Macy’s, closed.

The shutdown of Macy’s, combined with $100 million of unpaid debt from the 2015 remodel, pushed the mall into foreclosure. KKR Real Estate Financial Trust took ownership of the mall in late 2021 and brought on Seattle-based developer Urban Renaissance Group to help revitalize the mall and plot its next act.

Art renaissance in a mall

Urban Renaissance Group’s Managing Director Tom Kilbane says they were still determining what would happen with Lloyd Center when they started working on the site in November 2021. But figuring out how to revitalize a space like the Lloyd Center is tough and time-consuming.

“It’s a 30-acre site. It’s very big,” Kilbane said. “There are over a hundred tenants in the mall right now. And it’s just a lot more complicated. It’s got an ice rink in the middle of it. That’s a first for our company for sure.”

Urban Renaissance Group has been intentional about bringing community into the mall, partly through hosting regular events. They invited artists to host gallery shows and paint murals in vacant storefronts. Hours-long queues formed for underground community events like Secret Roller Disco, an all-ages DJ’d skate night inside the old Marshalls department store. Events such as the Portland Film Festival brought in some of the foot traffic that was missing without big anchors.

Indie businesses instead of chains

This new atmosphere allowed the mall to lure small businesses by offering cheap rent, 24/7 security, and on-site maintenance. Prospective tenants had to be willing to accept a shorter lease while management plotted the mall’s long-term direction.

Many small businesses took them up on the offer. Tattoo artist Olivia Britz-Wheat used the opportunity to open up her shop, seeing the 18-month lease as an upside rather than a limit. Lloyd’s cheap rent made Britz-Wheat feel like building a business was possible despite the rising cost of living making life harder for Portland artists.

“In here, the sky’s the limit, and I wanted to go for it,” she said. “And there’s always the chance that maybe we won’t have to leave ever, and Lloyd Center will stay forever. But if not, it’s been an incredible opportunity to learn how to run a business. (..) So, even if I move out the day that my lease is up, I feel like this is an incredible experience.”

Across the way from her candy-colored tattoo shop is a row of geeky local businesses that moved in last year. Floating World Comics moved from a freestanding store in Portland’s Old Town.

“We had an opportunity to move in here for a great price.” said Rachel Andreas, a clerk at Floating World Comics. “We have all these great neighbors around, so we decided to give it a try, and it worked out so much better than any of us could have ever expected. There’s tons of people here on the weekends. It’s wild. It’s so much busier than it honestly ever was downtown.”

Next door at the Lego shop, Brickdiculous, manager Jared Jones said that the foot traffic was a big bonus when they decided to open their first brick-and-mortar location. “We’ll get people who are in for the ice skating, or people who are in to buy shoes or ... a birthday or Christmas present, or a book from the bookstore,” said Jones. He sees the mall as a significant advantage over a stand-alone store, “We’ll get people who didn’t know we existed.”

But the biggest surprise was the community feeling. Jones said that all the shops support and even know one another’s families, “It is as much a community … as a mall, at this point.”

Lloyd Center as it is today might not be what people expect from a huge shopping mall surrounded by parking garages, with its smaller, home-grown stores and lack of behemoth chains. Tom Kilbane, of Urban Renaissance Group, says that’s pretty special.

“There are a lot of malls in the country that are trying to reinvent themselves and to repurpose themselves,” he said, “but I feel like what’s happening here is pretty unique to Portland… I think it comes down to the sense of community. People like to gather. They like to mingle. And this is just a great opportunity to do that.”

A mall without anchors

But the mall can’t survive long-term without those anchor stores, no matter how many community events they put on, its developers say. Even with over 100 tenants in the mall right now, sections of the mall are pin-drop quiet, with roped-off escalators and rows of empty storefronts.

Kilbane says that anchors are essential to the mall’s business model. “They’re called anchors for a reason and, and they drive traffic, but the nature of retail is changing, and a lot of the traditional anchor tenants like Sears, Macy’s, Nordstrom that we had here aren’t doing as well as, as they used to,” said Kilbane. “But, there are other large format retailers that would definitely like to be here, in this close-in neighborhood.”

This summer, a unique anchor is moving into the mall: Trackers Earth, a wilderness kids camp. They focus on survival skills — everything from blacksmithing to foraging. When Trackers was looking to expand, founder Tony Deis was surprised that Lloyd Center was suggested as a possible location for his company’s nature-focused program, “I was like, no, we are not going to the mall.”

But after some reflection, Deis, who grew up in Oak Grove, thought about the cultural significance of the Lloyd Center he remembers from his childhood and read about how the mall is reinventing itself with a community focus. The massive parking lot didn’t hurt, either.

“Of course,” he said, “our parents love good parking.” As a camp with storytelling at its heart, he saw something unique in the department store’s empty spaces to “create something entirely new and novel. And we realized it’s actually the perfect fit.”

Trackers Earth is certainly big enough to fill the old Marshalls department store, with up to 1,200 families per week coming through. They’re outfitting the space with an archery range, a wrestling ring, and blacksmithing on the loading dock.

Will kids with bows and arrows save the Lloyd Center? No.

But while the developers plot the mall’s next act and try to lure new anchor stores, these young archers and foragers will be another part of breathing new life into this iconic Portland mall.

The long-term plans are still under wraps, but rumors of everything from a Home Depot to a Major League Baseball franchise have floated about.

And the only guarantee?

“The only decision that we have made and announced publicly about the future of Lloyd Center, is that there will be an ice rink,” said Kilbane.