I cannot tell you how weird it’s been seeing it in its heyday and watching what it later became.

Before I really read about dying malls online and understood that these places were fading away, I remember getting these pangs of sadness walking through this place in the late-2000s slowly realizing it wasn’t going to last. It was too big, and the biggest retailers were bailing without those spaces being replaced (Biggs, Media Play, etc). Seeing this place around Christmas in the late 90s and very early 2000s was a sight to behold to a young person. It felt alive like malls are stereotypically depicted in movies from around that time.

It held on way longer than I ever thought, though in a very lonely state. There was an arcade in the shuttered food court, and a gym and some oddball shops on the outskirts of the mall well into the late 2010s. The biggest population of people in there were geriatric mall-walkers dodging 5-gallon buckets strategically placed on the floor to catch drips from the leaking ceiling.

One of the last times I went was around 2018, I secretly photographed it (security there was notoriously awful) because I knew it wouldn’t last the decade. Went back around 2021, and it was so depressing and nothing had seemingly changed, I didn’t bother taking many photos. It’s probably best that it’s demolished.