In my birthday post, I mentioned the mall I was working at ten years before. The destruction of the mall has begun, as evidenced in the photo above.
The anchor store, Carson's is still open for business.
The other side of the mall wasn't torn down at the time of the photos, and I tried to get a peek in and capture what was left of the hangout of my youth.
Of course, near the end, it was merely a shadow of its former self. At the time of closing, there were only five stores other than Carson's. It started a swift plunge down in 1996 when Walgreens closed. Walgreens was removing all of its mall store and going toward free standing buildings to further expand its twenty four hour/seven day a week store base. Instead of replacing it with a comparable store, it was rented to "Bargain Books", which didn't even bother to make the store look different. It used the racks and cases Walgreens left behind. It was a disaster. First, one restaurant in the food court left and was never replaced. Then another. Then big chain stores like KayBee toys and Lerner New York left. They were replaced with cheap dollar stores of the "fell off the truck" variety. Like dominoes, they all fell down.
A WalMart was built right behind Woodmar, and a grocery store right next to that. A Home Depot just down the block opened earlier this year. Woodmar Mall is set to be replaced by some sort of strip mall sort of thing. Sure, it's only a mall, a building; but to me, it was a memento of my coming of age. When we moved here when I was 11, I would walk to the mall with my friends, no parents. That was where we hung out, took photos in the photo booth, met boys, got to buy what we wanted and learned how to be the people we would become. Its destruction is a painful reminder, that like Woodmar, my childhood is now just a memory.
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