Merry Xmas From the Dead Malls

Historically, the Santaland at Antioch Center has drawn crowds worthy of St. Nick. Gary Dull remembers days when a veteran mall Santa like himself would attract a line of children and parents that stretched clear to the food court.

On opening night this year, Dull donned the red suit in the office of the Northland mall and steeled himself for an evening of excited and frightened tots. As he walked the hallway leading from the office to Santaland, where oversized presents sit under artificial trees and synthetic snow is knee-high in places, Dull began to bellow the traditional "ho, ho, ho!" As he turned the corner, though, he saw only three children waiting on a bench to whisper in his ear.

A few nights later, Dull returns to Antioch Center wearing civilian attire. He is ready to talk about the days before the mall died. He brings his wife, Patricia, who wants to shop for clothes at C.J. Banks, one of Antioch's few remaining specialty shops. As his wife browses, 59-year-old Dull finds his way to Santaland, where the on-duty Santa, a guy named Bud, sits cross-legged.

Dull is something of a student of mall Kris Kringling. "At Christmastime, I've gotten into a terrible habit of going around and watching other Santas," he says.

Dull stepped into the boots for the first time in 1975. A former fire inspector, he was working as a private detective for Burlington Coat Factory, which clings to life at the dying mall. A master-class St. Nick named Ed Walters, a retired Kansas City police sergeant, approached him to ask a favor. Santa had showed up with booze on his breath.

Dull loved the role and has stuck with it. At 250 pounds, he has the belly for the part, and he has the blue-eyed twinkle. It didn't take him long to develop the tricks to being a successful Santa: Be jolly and don't promise anything. He coaxes reluctant children onto his lap by telling them he wants to measure their growth from last Christmas. And he tries to spend equal time with the kids whose parents do not pay the $10.69 for a photo. "I want a child to know that when they leave here, they had a real visit with Santa Claus," he says.

As Dull honed his skills — then took them on the road to hospitals and tree-lighting ceremonies at City Hall — Antioch crumbled around him. Chained-shut store entrances and smeared glass now trace the abandonment of the 50-year-old mall.

There may not be a Santaland at Antioch next year. The shopping center's Canadian owner, Eastbourne Investments, has an $80-million plan to replace the mall with a horseshoe of big-box retailers, specialty stores and restaurants. The proposal requires city leaders to give Eastbourne $40 million through tax-increment financing, which allows developers to skim from the new taxes that projects generate. If the Kansas City Council agrees to the deal, demolition crews will start at the southern end of the mall and work their way north. Dull will miss Antioch Center. He lives nearby, and he became the primary Santa in 1998 after Walters, his mentor, developed health problems. "I try not to think about it," Dull says when asked about the mall closing.

Once kings of the retail jungle, Antioch Center and malls like it have lost customers to the Internet and big-box retailers. Now shoppers flock to the latest "lifestyle center" to rise from the soybean fields and to sprout names like Zona Rosa. In Kansas City, where suburban sprawl underlies the economy, shopping centers in every direction harden into fossils. Their weedy parking lots and fading façades give them away. A dying mall is quite a thing: Unlike an animal, it cannot slink off into a cave and die. It just stands there, huge and vacant.

Even one-time national icons of the business have gone dark. The Galleria Mall in Sherman Oaks, California, where parts of the '80s classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High were filmed, closed in 1999. The Web site Deadmalls.com provides a state-by-state directory of failed shopping centers. By one count three years ago, 4,000 malls sat empty or abandoned.

Wrecking balls have begun to swing. Blue Ridge Mall, which opened alongside Interstate 70 in 1958, will give way to a new, tax-money-supported development anchored by a Wal-Mart. Kansas City needs another Wal-Mart the way it needs the Chiefs to make another quick exit in the playoffs. But given Blue Ridge Mall's unsightliness and worthlessness as a tax-revenue producer, one can begin to understand the decision to reach into taxpayers' pockets to help feed the world's largest corporation.

Malls have deprived communities. Critics of shopping centers lament the way they privatized the public realm and drove local merchants out of business. Yes, grieving for an aging mall is a little like feeling sad for a tyrannical starlet who loses her looks. But this is a season for forgiving and celebrating. In fact, we found that the yuletide spirit even touches those shopping malls with the bleakest of prospects. At Antioch, for instance, mall management expected Santaland's popularity to endure, this season at least, in spite of numerous empty storefronts. Each child who visits Santa receives a small toy. The mall ordered 10,000 units. At other aging malls, dreamy merchants, steadfast developers and a very special tennis shoe mark the holiday in their own way.