Southridge Mall
Dead Inside
1111 East Army Post Road, Des Moines, Iowa 50315
Southridge Mall is a busy shopping area outside
and a dead mall inside
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Southridge Mall opened October 15, 1975, a mere two months after Valley West mall in West Des Moines. After decades of booming business and eventual decline, changes had to be made. Renovation in 2006 and 2007 resulted in a new children’s play area in the food court, new seating areas, and remodeled restrooms.
Even this was not enough and major construction began in 2012 to re-work the mall. Construction included the demolition of the main entrance, food court, and main mall corridor (296,000 square feet of retail space) to make way for the new outdoor facing shops and parking. But, just a few years later, two anchor stores shut their doors. Sears closed in August of 2016 and Younkers permanently closed in August of 2018. With two of the four anchor stores closed and the JC Penny long gone, this has left Target as the remaining lone anchor store.
But what is left of the old mall? A lot remains, and yet hardly anything at all. Southridge Mall is a dead mall inside.
The West side entrance is left intact with grimy carpet in the entranceway and just inside a severe roof leak. A WIC office and a podiatrist office is left in this wing are closed and long gone. A center area with a stage still remains with a very 70’s mall feel to it. Down at the South end is the DMACC Southside campus (formerly JC Penny) and a Drake Head Start preschool. The candy machines and benches are gone and the stage is taped off and no plants. The ARL is closed as is all the other businesses that had their leases terminated in May of 2019. A new business has rented a space called Rez Blue Arena; a gaming center for 14 and up. This has also been closed and is now just an empty space.
Walking the quiet hall of an old vibrant mall you can still pick out the store fronts (jewelry store, Verizon, bookstore) and music still plays over the loud speaker. The only people I saw were some mall walkers and a few people charging their phones while sitting on the floor.
New hours have been posted for the mall, M-F 7-6 pm and closed on Saturday and Sunday.
There are also two new hallways running in front of the Younkers store with doors exiting to the back side of the mall. These were part of the new construction and are mostly used for employees as they only lead to the back parking lots. The south east wall of the old mall and the Ridge Sports Academy (which used to be the old movie theatre) are intact and were repurposed for the back south walls of the new shops.
The Sears building and the Younkers remain vacant but original to the mall and intact. Anything else that resembled the old mall has been removed and reworked to make way for the outdoor Shops at Southridge.
The Hydrotube
One curiosity of Southridge mall was at one time a water slide occupied space in the mall. The Hydrotube (February 1985- Nov 11 1985) was a modern water slide marvel and a dream come true for Iowa kids in the winter. Today everything is long gone, including the tower which was removed in the 2012 renovation. In the google maps snapshot from 2007 you can see the tower poking up above the roof by what was once the old movie theatre and Sears.
The Hydrotube was an innovative yet failed invention of the eighties (at least in Iowa). A bit too far ahead of its time perhaps, but a truly unique addition to the mall, if only for a short while.
The Des Moines Register, dated October 24, 1984, has a thorough article written about this new attraction at Southridge. The Hydrotube waterslides were two completely enclosed tubes attached to a 56 foot tower rising above the mall. The tubes curved around the roof of the mall and through holes in the roof and descended down plunging into a 4-foot-deep splash pool inside. The tube slides were each about 350 feet long and the entire Hydrotube store space occupied 7,000 square feet. The slides, which were built on the East end of the mall by Sears, had a snack bar, arcade and locker rooms.
A company out of Portland, OR, Nor-Pac Recreations, owned and operated the slides. Completion of the slides was slated for February 1985. The Hydrotube operated year round with water temps kept at 94-98 degrees, and employed about 25 certified life guard employees. To build the tall tower, the Des Moines zoning board of adjustment granted a variance to the mall to build the tower taller than 45 feet.
The spring and summer of 1985 was lucrative for the Hydrotube and thousands of kids rode the slides. Advertisements were run in the Des Moines Register as The Hydrotube was competing with other area waterslides, Smith’s Super Shoot (later renamed White Water University) and The Christian Center. (Register ad below)
On November 20, 1985, The Des Moines Register printed an article announcing the closure of the Hydrotube. The Hydrotube closed on November 11, 1985, after only 6 months of operation. Reason for the shutdown was not given. The mall was preparing a lawsuit against the slide operators and rumors swirled over a bond Nor-Pac posted to cover the cost of converting the space back to a rentable retail store if the business failed. A most likely reason for closure was liability insurance was too high or unobtainable for the Southridge Hydrotube.
The Carousel
Another unique attraction at Southridge Mall was a carousel. The main entrance used to have a nice food court with a grand carousel. A sit down restaurant across the way highlighted the main entrance (a Bishops (closing in 1997) a Garfields’s and later the China Buffet.) In 2012, the front entrance where the food court and carousel were, was demolished. The carousel was removed and moved to nearby Blank Park Zoo. The carousel spins again every day at the zoo for $2.00 a ride. ( I am not sure if the carousel was given to the zoo or purchased.)
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