Cermak Plaza Shopping Center, Illinois, United States

4Derrick M 5:00 PM Sep 5, 2017

Classic strip mall still busy but some charm lost to history
This is a classic strip mall, but one that remains relatively vibrant. It just lost Meier as one of the anchors, but I would expect it to get replaced. Fine as a strip mall, but its real charm is the public artwork the owner installs around the mall. Sadly, it has lost much of the original artwork and some of the charm of the original version of the mall during a facelift, in part because Berwyn had folks who felt it an eyesore. Particularly its iconic stack of cars on a pointed pole was a well-known landmark, as was the mall's neon sign, but when these needed to be replaced, modern notions of what was proper meant they could not put a similar "sculpture" in place and switched to cold-cathode lighting. Sometimes newer is not better.

3Allen21096 5:00 PM Apr 22, 2017

At best, an average shopping center
In some respects, the spindle of cars was this shopping center's 15 minutes (actually, 19 years) of fame. But now that the spindle has been removed, it is just a shopping center, that does nothing extraordinary. The car spindle, shown in the picture, was erected in 1989. It was a 50 foot high spike and it had eight cars. Over the years, debates ensued over whether the spindle was art, or was an eye sore. In 2000, the original owner of the mall and an art collector had died, and the new owners were not very keen on the spindle. By 2008, the eyesore proponents had won and the spindle was demolished, though the top two cars (a 1967 VW Beetle & a 1976 BMW) were saved for possible re-use in a new piece of art.