- Hudson Yards - a pretty good destination with a small kid on a rainy day and easy to get to via the subway. Big and open, has a Camp store (with slide and play area), good sit down and take-away food options, and surrounded by some fun outdoor city stuff (my son LOVES watching the train yard across the street, and the highline is right there).
- American Dream in NJ - More like an indoor collection of amusement parks, we use the Legoland Experience and the Aquarium reasonably often and when my son is a little older we'll likely use the Nickelodeon theme park and the indoor water park which looks pretty fun. This poor place opened right at the start of the pandemic, hope it survives.
- Ridge Hill in Yonkers - Sort of an outdoor mall... has another Legoland experience, but also a pretty good mini golf and arcade (it's really hard to find a good arcade for little kids in NYC) and a trampoline park we might get to try one day.
What really makes these malls work is they have unique and fun experiences rather than just the typical department-store-anchored "get your daily errands done like it's 1980 and amazon doesn't exist" experiences.
I do miss the malls of my youth (RIP South Square [1]), but economically most of those stores don't make any sense anymore and I don't see why they'd come back. I'm sure not going to start driving to a mall to go to a Radio Shack anymore.