Recently I saw a slideshow online of two abandoned
malls in Ohio. The pictures were pretty creepy. I wonder how the person inside
taking the pictures felt!
I was never much of a mall person. I really only
wanted to go to Mall of America to see LegoLand and ride the indoor
rollercoasters, which I finally got to do for my 28th birthday.
There weren’t really any malls very close to where I
grew up. We had to go to Wisconsin Rapids (about 40 miles north) or Madison
(about 70 miles south) to get to any malls. Going to the Rapids on a Saturday
was an all-day affair for us.
We would usually start at the Rapids Mall, which had
Wal-Mart, an arcade where we would send my brother off to, the Tea Shoppe,
which was this neat little store I loved that was kind of like a mild version
of Spencer’s, but they had Jelly Belly’s. Actually, one of the first years I
lived in La Crosse, my roommate and I took a road trip to the Rapids because
she wanted to see the place. That was the last time I remember being there. At
the moment I don’t really remember any other specific stores that were in the
Rapids Mall. Wal-Mart left and built a Super Center on the south end of the
city and everything has seemed to follow. There are all kinds of little plazas
and mini-strips and new buildings going in all around Wal-Mart on the south
side.
Then there was the ShopKo Plaza mall. This mall had
ShopKo, of course, and a Radio Shack where we would usually lose my Dad and my
brother, a Christian bookstore called The Lighthouse where we would usually
lose Mom, and I would usually wander back and forth between those two places
and The Aquarium pet shop, where I would engage in conversation with the
gigantic $2,000 African parrot. If I got really bored, I would find a piece of
paper and pen and write down the titles and authors of all the books I wanted
to read and then at a later time, go see if the library had them.
As it sits today, the Rapids Mall still has a few
stores remaining. A thrift shop, Subway, Dollar Tree, some insanely
outrageously priced clothing stores, but the anchor ex-Wal-Mart still sits
empty. The ShopKo mall is now a church but ShopKo remains. The Aquarium moved
into a strip mall across the parking lot, and most of the other stores have
followed to the area of the new Wal-Mart. The old K-Mart, which was across the
highway from the new Wal-Mart, is now a car dealership, with The Lighthouse in
a little spot around the side of their building.
In high school Marketing class, my partner and I
actually drafted a business plan to purchase the old Wal-Mart building in the
Rapids and convert it to the most awesome gigantic toy store in central WI,
since there are like… none. And yes, me being the hoarder that I am, still have
it. We got an A-.
