Where would you guess I am?

The other week, when my best friend and I were road-tripping around our hometown, we walked off Main Street and checked out the old Liberty Village site. Liberty Village opened in 1981 and is generally considered the nation’s first outlet mall. It’s currently slated for a new townhome development.

My friend and I were thinking about how we’d just about seen the entire lifecycle of this place. We didn’t see the site before it was built, but we grew up in Flemington in the ’90s, when the idea of outlet shopping was still hip and people came from other states and stayed overnight to shop here. In a lot of ways this outlet mall drove our town’s economy. We saw it decline and begin to empty out around the time we headed off to college. And with each visit back home, it would be a little emptier and a little more run down. Two years ago, nobody was left, and it had become simply a quiet place to take a stroll.

This time, demolition has begun. The brick walkways have been pulled up. Lots of windows and doors have been blown out and removed. The buildings have been stripped of anything valuable ahead of final demolition. There’s some vandalism mixed in here too, but it’s impossible to tell the difference. You could say vandalism is to demolition as murder is to war. That’s not an excuse, is it?

Believe me when I say nothing of value was left, anywhere. These buildings are just shells. But demolition, even in steps, isn’t like construction, and you could easily mistake the site for a massive post-apocalyptic movie set. Or a place that had been left to nature for decades.

I’m standing by the second-story window of the old Etienne Aigner outlet store, looking out at the main pathway through the outlet center. What a strange thing it is to stand there by a shattered window, looking at a bare pathway and a street of gutted buildings, and thinking that I probably squirmed by that window 20 years ago while my mother shopped for shoes. Maybe she still has a pair somewhere in the closet.

There was one little thing left to give a stranger an idea of where he might be:

This is one of the coolest walks and photo trips I’ve ever done, and I’m showing you these pictures partly because they’re just so surreal, but also because I and anyone who lived in Flemington before around 2010 remembers what this place was like when it was thriving and bustling. I haven’t seen pictures of this final step posted, and it’s neat as someone who grew up here to document the decline, and hopefully rebirth, of it.

This was an old clock, like the ones you see in lots of small towns. The clock was removed—hopefully saved—and the pedestal was pulled up and overturned.

Going down that street, you get to a couple of little dead-end areas, or the old duck pond, with grander stores clustered around, two of them also multistory.

Another movie-set shot:

Most of the doors were wide open or missing. We walked right in, and we did not see any signs telling us otherwise.

There’s nothing left of the directory except the frame and the old Liberty Village logo:

I suppose I would like it if the outlets had survived, or if there had been some adaptive reuse plan that preserved the site or at least the layout. But I also understand that these questions don’t just rest with localities. Outlet malls have moved on from this scale and format. The newer ones are much, much larger, have more indoor spaces, have large bathrooms and food courts and kiddie playgrounds. Maybe the whole “come visit this quaint small town for a day or two” thing isn’t the same draw it was in the ’90s. Things change.

It’s become a familiar sarcastic remark on the Flemington Facebook group I follow to say “Maybe they can build more apartments there?” every time a property goes up for sale. I understand the sense that development is happening everywhere and there’s too much of it, especially when farms and open space get paved over for sprawl. And yes, that is happening around here too.

But I want to show you the aerial view of Flemington:

The upper left is the Main Street corridor. The bottom right is Liberty Village. Given that an outlet mall is no longer a live option and the area has enough retail, what else are you supposed to do with this? It seems like a perfect place to add new housing, within the existing street grid near existing residential development, with connectivity to the historic town. It’s so cool to see that space, which really hasn’t been doing much for the town for at least 15 years, be used in a way that enlarges and builds what we already have. It’s okay to miss something without exactly wanting it back.

More to the point, very little in an old historic town is the first thing to be there. The perception that these places are “finished” is something we imposed on them looking back. So it’s fascinating to see in real life, in real time, that continuous process, arrested for at least half a century, creaking to life again.

Check out all the Liberty Village mid-demolition photos here.

Related Reading:

The End of America’s First Outlets

More on America’s First Outlet Mall

Construction In A Small Town

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