Very interesting mall lighting! The mall lights around here are nothing special, but I'm guessing the original lighting was more interesting, as usually the original lighting in architectural applications is usually more interesting than the lighting used in later renovations. I miss malls having plants in them like this one. It seems most malls don't have plants anymore. It's something that's changed in the last 10 years here.

Yeah I also find the the original lighting has a certain charm to it that's often lost during subsequent renovations. It's like that at my school too although they really missed the point of having those merc cans lol.

It's the same here with malls removing their plants during renovations, the same thing goes for water features like fountains. I guess they got rid of them since they probably felt they were dated or didn't want to pay to maintain them. During the last 10 years, a lot of 1970s era malls here also got renovated.

When the Warwick Mall here was renovated a few years ago, they removed the fountains, but they did keeps some larger trees inside as well as the fake bushes that are shaped like animals outside the food court. They replaced the gray and emerald green ceramic tiles with newer whitish tiles. The renovation was done after the historic March 2010 floods, where the mall was flooded with over a couple feet of water. The parking lot itself had up to six feet of water in parts. They also replaced the cobraheads in the parking lot with tall glare-bomb shoeboxes. I have to say though, the parking lot was poorly lit with the cobraheads, a trend I see with most cobrahead-lite parking lots. They left a few cobrahead poles up though, which is nice. I wonder if they'll continue to maintain the remaining few cobrahead poles. It's possible they plan to built a standalone building in the parking lot where the cobrahead poles are, so maybe they just didn't bother replacing the poles for that reason.

Here's a quad pole with four Model 13s. Most of the parking lot was lit with these, originally 250W HPS but converted to MH in the mid-2000s.

Then there are three poles witb factory-MH (400W) 125s. There's this quad pole and then you can see another quad and one double to the right.

Here's a doube RLG pole. These lights were originally 400W HPS but were converted to Mh as well. You can see that this pole was added later than the others, as there's a new strip of pavement connecting it to the shoebox pole in the back, which has the original square cobrahead base painted yellow.

And here's a double Model 13 pole. It's on a newer concrete base, but if you look at the pole's base flange, there's yellow paint on it, suggesting that the pole was relocated with a new base, probably when that Firestone Tire place was added. if you set the clock back to 2009 you can see the cobraheads in the lot, with the exception of the Target, which got the new lights first when they totally rebuilt that section of the lot for Target. The old lot was lit by 400W HPS 125s in that section. The Macy's parking lot (opposite end as Target) was lit by 400W HPS OVYs. Those OVYs were HPS all the way until the mall replaced the lights with shoeboxes. Everything else was retrofitted to MH in the early-mid 2000s.

Ahh, this area at Yorkdale Mall looks more or less like this now. Most of the wallwash fixtures are now dead and the original light fixtures that hung off the 'stalactites' have been replaced with more modern looking ones. The recessed fixtures have been covered up. I'm still glad they kept the original 1960s ceiling instead of covering it up or knocking it down and putting a new ceiling in. I wish they relamped and fixed up the wallwash lights though. I don't even mind a T8 conversion lol but it seems like fluorescents that high up are a maintainace nightmare which is probably why they got stopped maintaining them to begin with.

Here's another 1960s pic from that same area BTW

The original parking lot lighting was six 1kW MV cobras to a pole although I'm not sure if they were M-1000s or OV-50s. Somewhere along the line they got replaced with MH shoeboxes and cobras. Then in 2011 I believe they replaced the poles and installed BetaLED fixtures.

The subway station built in the late 70s to serve Yorkdale had some pretty neat lighting for it's time too. The stairways at each end of the platform was lite with round clear merc floods and fluorescents in the handrails. The platform itself was nothing special though just a continuous strip of 2x40w fluorescent surface mount troffers. What was special was the neon light art running along that skylight that pulsated in different colours based on the arriving and departing trains. The handrail lights and the merc floods are still there but time has taken it's toll on them. Most of the merc floods are dead and the remaining ones have been fitted with SBMVs probably since the original merc ballasts have died. The platform light is now T8 too.

Wow that's a really cool mall! None of the malls around here are that extravagant, but there's really not a ton of malls in RI. There's the Warwick Mall, the Rhode Island Mall (which is a ghost mall now; only the anchor stores remain), the Providence Place Mall, the Lincoln Mall (also a ghost mall now; only the anchor stores remain), and another "ghost mall" comes to mind in the Wickford area but I can't think of its name. Other than that, stores are just in strip malls or in their own complex.

Interesting subway station too. We don't have any subways here in RI but there are some in Massachusetts and maybe downtown parts of Connecticut (the part of CT bordering RI is mostly rural and suburban so I don't know if they have subways). We do have lots of train tracks though. Some are used and others not. One way to tell if they're used is if the tops of the rails are shiny or not. Rails that haven't been used in a while will be dull on top from rust but rails that are still used will be shiny on top from the wheels of the train rolling over them. A little tip I learned from my grandpa lol. Interesting that they opted to use SBMV lamps instead of just screwing CFLs at this point or even LEDs.