What are a couple more examples of towns making creative use of an empty big box?
When I give speeches, audiences always love to hear about the Spam museum, which is in a renovated Kmart building in Austin, Minnesota and also the story of the RPM Indoor Raceway which is a gokart track in a renovated Wal-Mart in Round Rock, Texas. Has the Spam museum been a civic success? It absolutely has, in fact. The Kart in that case was in the downtown area. When they wanted to expand they relocated to the outskirts of town, but a lot of surrounding businesses also vacated in order to follow Kmart’s traffic. So a huge hole was created in the downtown area and remained for several years until the local corporation Hormel Foods decided to create a museum about their famous meat product that would draw people into downtown Austin. They had a design competition and the firm that won–Paulsen Architects out of Mankato, Minnesota–is LEED-certified and they tried to implement sustainable elements into the structure as they repurposed it. So many levels of irony here: a sustainably-built
