If you considered our downtowns to once be the gathering places for our cities and towns, then you could consider your local mall to be America’s second gathering place. That’s appropriate, because malls largely killed off downtowns.
Downtowns across the country have staged and are staging something of a comeback. They entered a steep decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s as malls were built and first retailers and then customers moved away from downtowns to the new gathering places, the mall.
In my hometown of Muncie, the mall – Muncie Mall – opened, more or less, in 1970, years later than the first U.S. mall, Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, which opened in 1956. Big department stores left Muncie’s downtown, with Sears being the first anchor store to open at the mall. Downtown was, in a decade or less, pretty hollowed out and storefronts along Walnut Street were left empty or occupied by small businesses and, in one instance, an adult bookstore.
Like a lot of cities and a lot of malls, Muncie and Muncie Mall struggled mightily in the first decade of the 21st century. I was covering business at the time and retailers – some with problems nationally, like Sears – closed their doors.
I was back in Muncie over the weekend and we had to check out the mall, which has been the scene of a lot of demolition work in the past year. The three-screen movie theater, where I spent a lot of time as a young movie fan, was razed. More recently, the wings that had been occupied by Sears and J.C. Penney have been or are being demoed.
The photo above is one I took this weekend and it shows that one empty third of the mall is roped off.
There’s still a few tenants in the mall, most notably Books-A-Million, which supposedly has a five-year lease. Does that mean the rest of the structure will be pulled down around and behind it, or will BAM find a spot elsewhere or leave the city entirely? I don’t know.
If you’re interested in the lifetime of a Midwestern mall, you’ll be interested in the timeline by Robin Gibson in The Star Press newspaper that I’ll link to at the end.
I won’t wax on about what malls meant to us or Muncie Mall meant to me. You can probably find my writing about that elsewhere, including as a chapter of our third true crime book, THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS. Our book covers a still-unsolved double killing of two teenagers in 1985 and I included a chapter about Muncie Mall because the mall was a big place for us back then.
Here’s that Muncie Mall timeline:
https://www.thestarpress.com/story/news/local/2020/02/12/muncie-mall-50-years-timeline/4466975002
You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.
