This is a very competitive category, with so much abandoned retail space in Central Florida, but Fashion Square is easily the most photogenic of them all with its weedy parking lots, chain-link-fenced demolition site, leak-stained cavernous interior emptiness and general air of vanished grandeur. (Plus a creepy clown ride, because you gotta have a creepy clown ride.) A few non-retail businesses seem to be clinging to life, but between the lone jewelry kiosk and Macy's there's an eerie post-apocalyptic calm. While Italian artists and architects had the magnificent Roman ruins to jumpstart the Renaissance, we get dead malls — so let's make the most of them before an overpriced Baldwin Park expansion district kicks in. We're taking alternative conversion proposals. Anyone for a grow house collective? (Corner of Colonial and Maguire, orlandofashionsquare.com)
