What can you do with an empty department store?

Make it a one-stop day visit. Have a permanent immersive exhibition, think TeamLabs or something like instagram-museum, a place to take selfies and post them in social media to keep visitors coming, give a Hanau twist, use the Grimm brothers tales and folklore but make it modern. This could be on the first floor, on the ground places restaurants, bakeries, ice cream parlors for the hungry visitors, underground can be supermarkets for the locals (this is popular im cities like tokio and london), make use of the roof as a 360° deck platform with a garden/greenery, a place to hang out, maybe even a roof top bar. If there is more levels to this building then one could think of cinema/gym or stores.
In order to make such places lively there's gotta be a reason to go there.

Personally, I would try to renovate everything into apartments and coffee shops, but this is not that easy with most department store or mall spaces left over in this time of re-imagination of our city centres. Although not for everybody, many people want to live in a central location. With the money available, turn it into a great public space: **A MODERN LIBRARY** with great public facilities for the people in the city centre to enjoy a non commercial space. I don't know whether Hanau has a city centre library, but I would Imagine a mall could supply with great wide spaces, just punch in some windows for more natural light. Inspiration for it could be something like the Oodi library in Helsinki. Although a new build and not in the most central spot, it creates pull because it offers more than books, it has reading and study spaces, 3D printing capabilities, textile work stations, recording studios for sound and video… it creates a real community space. I think that is what these city centres could use instead of department stores no one uses.

6:06 HU is the abbreviation for Hauptuntersuchung (general inspection), the legally required biennial* technical inspection of motor vehicles and trailers. How could one come up with the idea of proposing this abbreviation as a name for a multi-use house?
(* there are exceptions)

They should invite Rabarber-Barbara to open a bar.

Turn it into a datacenter. Department Stores generally have decent-ish fire suppression and okay-ish air conditioning and pretty OK power grid connections. Now all they need is some thick fiber runs to Frankfurt am Main, which is right next door, and they can open a decent data center for low cost.

I'm pretty sure more of my money has gone to Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof Quelle Hertie in the form of tax-funded subsidies* than through purchases. I really hope we can at least find a eusocial use for their husk now that they're gone.
*Well, loans technically, but it's not like they can actually pay them back.

The insane thing is they still don't lower the rents on shop store fronts. I know a restaurant in a pretty dead shopping street that had to pay 50% more rent from one month to the next, so they just moved to another place.

Okay, from some of the comments here I can take that the situation must be similar in parts of the UK. But, when I visit there, as a German I am still puzzled by the number of department store chains that can still be found in London. Sure, there is the playground of the rich and wealthy, plus thousands of tourists, but I am still wondering how so many different chains can keep up their department stores – and they must have branches in other British cities, too. Germany has basically no other department store chain left other than Galeria Karstadt / Kaufhof (and aligned KaDeWe group), which is now victim of the Signa bankruptcy.

Super interesting and great from a German perspective. When I lived in Frankfurt, there were two department stores, a Galleria and Kaufhof. The Kaufhof has closed (and replaced with a budget clothes store) and whilst the Galleria, I think, is still open (and expanded in the last years), it has become less of a department store over the years. You used to be able to buy electronics there, CDs etc, but it's pretty much now mostly a clothes store with extra departments for kitchen, linen, cosmetics and baggage – but at least some departments. (oh and the wonderful food sections)

When I moved to Manchester in 2016 there were 5 department city centre stores compared to Frankfurt's 2. Selfridges, House of Fraser, BHS, Debenhams and Harvey Nicholes. Of that Selfridges, BHS and Harvey Nicholes didn't have many departments either, but at least Debenhams and House of Fraser still had a few extras including electronics & furniture. There were of course plenty earlier department stores like Lewis's and such that are long gone, and the Lewis's building is now the Primark I think, so no longer a department store but a bit clothing one.

Now we've lost BHS and Debenhams. The BHS store may still be empty… who knows, it was in a weird almost underground location. The Debenhams is being renovated, keeping it's wonderful art deco look into small retail shops on the lower floors with offices on the rest. House of Fraser is supposed to be converted to offices as well, which probably means it will lose it's amazing glass brick walls since offices will need real windows.

Just a pity we don't have a John Lewis in the city centre. We have two in the suburbs of Manchester, but John Lewis is a real, proper department store with a lot of departments. You can still get all the stuff from say Galleria, but they also have a TV, HiFi, Computer departments, as well as furniture department where you can pretty much fit out your house, including white goods department and even kitchen design. You can find an outdoor department with BBQ's and garden stuff including gazebos and summer houses, or a blinds department. It's really quite staggering in today's "department store" equivalents… although, John Lewis are also having problems, so maybe this will change too… 🙁

As a city planning student, I'm actually currently writing a paper about this 😀

Community Centres. Libraries, gyms, swimming pools, Climbing gyms, something for the community.

Same situation in Iserlohn: An old, abandoned Karstadt building adjacent to a central square. The city bought the building even before Karstadt decided to leave. The city decided to completely tear it down, so we just have an empty lot there now. There are ideas to put a new multistory building there, with shops, restaurants, a media library, living, and probably rooms for the city. Right across this lot, there is the new town hall, which is going to be demolished in the near future (as all workers will temporarily move to an old school, and some point to a "new new town hall" which will be built somewhere, sometime.
However, the city is not at all bathing in money, so we will see when any of these building projects will actually start in the future.

these names are awful wtf

Many cities are confronted with the same problem. Not only Kaufhof is going to die, but the belief to just go on in the shopping aereas as always, will fail due to Internet shopping. Only very attractive cities and cities with innovative ideas will succeed. Btw already having a name for a place before knowing what exactly is going to happen there is not a bad sign. It is quite common because the Project needs a name and a concept to attract partners, stores, and so on. I’m sure there are other signs for the typical Stadtrat-thinking. 🙂

One influencing factor is probably how much money the customers spend on purchases and services. For example, in Finland, consumer spending dropped significantly during the pandemic and has fallen rapidly since then, so that the Finnish government has asked Finnish citizens to spend more money to keep the economy and economic growth going. However, time will tell whether consumption will increase when prices and living costs have risen and will continue to rise due to inflation, but people's incomes will not and they state that they don't have more money to spend than what they already have.

Arschaffenburg

As a town planner here in the uk, this is very interesting to me – thank you 🙂

In the uk of course, there are great piles of Debenhams department stores languishing in big towns and there’s a lot of thought going in by local councils as what can be done…

So a human-sized Croydon m/

Fine Arts all the way. Permanent expositions, auctions, selected venues to serve culinary needs, probably shows or events (though pricier to set-up and with often risky but low reward instead of just loaning some space to an artist).

When struggling goes down, capacity to create inherently obsolete but enjoyable stuff arises. And so is the number of people who value those efforts and I'll prefer those class of people over a bunch of tourists trying to fulfil their hedonistic needs as much as possible in the pseudonimity of a strange place all the time! Exalted artsy people flocked in a spacious empty building for most of their visit is a thing even a small city could handle without startling the natives too much.

I'm favoured, $22K every week! I can now give back to the locals in my community and also support God's work and the church. God bless America.❤❤❤

Also miss the Imbiss! How much is the property worth? What, roughly, are the taxes for that size of floor space?

The old BHS in Glasgow is now a multiplex cinema plus several eateries alongside several other entertainment venues like an arcade and bowling alley. Unfortunately, the even larger Debenhams just next to it is now also empty with little prospect of such a future.

It's a similar situation in my corner of the UK. The town has lost all three department stores, the grey concrete shopping centre is empty. Being England everyone blames the council for everything including spending money trying to make the place better.