I doubt there was a place I visited more frequently during my high school years than the Florence Mall. The town where I grew up had a population of less than 2000, with (very) limited shopping and entertainment opportunities; Florence, ten miles to the north on I-75, had begun to boom in the 70s as the metro Cincinnati population expanded its radius. The Mall, with four anchor stores, opened fully in 1976 and quickly became a destination. Located on a newly built mile-long drive parallel to the interstate, it drove a gigantic wave of commercial construction up and down Mall Road.
(Adjacent to the Mall property is a large water tower that reads "Florence Y'all," a landmark well-known to I-75 travelers for a half-century now. The story behind how that came to be can be found at its Wikipedia page. The man responsible for the "Y'all" was Florence's then-mayor 'Hop' Ewing, the husband of my mother's older sister.)
Well, times change, and between the rise of online shopping and continuous development of the surrounding acreage, the Florence Mall may be reaching the end of its lifecycle. The anchors are all either closed (Sears) or under stress (Penney's and Macy's--the latter took over the fourth big space for a Macy's Home location some years ago). Occupancy percentage has dropped from the upper-eighties to the mid-fifties over the last five years. Here's an article from a couple of months ago, outlining the issues and more than hinting at a Mall-less future on the site.
At the beginning of my spring break two weeks ago, I visited the Mall for the first time in a good long while after running to Florence for an errand. Yes, it was a weekday early afternoon, but I was still taken aback by the sheer emptiness of the place. Above is a photo of the entrance I used, the same one I went in virtually every time between 1977 and 1982. Back then you had to look hard for a parking spot; this time there were just a couple dozen vehicles in the lot.
I went down the short hallway and quickly reached the northern tip of the main body of the mall. To my left was the walled-up entrance to the former Sears, where I purchased my first 45s.
The reason I'd always used this entrance was to my right: what had been the location of Recordland, the store that had helped feed my AT40 addiction by posting a copy of each week's Hot 100 on top of its rack of singles. It's no exaggeration to say I was in there an average of a couple of times a week after I got my license. Now there's just another empty front, the remains of whatever its last incarnation had been. It's the nearest one on the left. Sniff.
You get a sense of how desolate the Sears end is now, but also check out the sign on the (also empty) adjacent location: "job & talent."
The Mall's layout consists of two stories of shops with a central atrium from which four spokes emanate to the anchors. This week I've found apicture from the Mall's early days in several spots online--that colorful mobile sculpture always comes to mind when I think of the Mall. Note you can see Sears down the way at top right.
What does the atrium look like now? This shot is taken from roughly in front of where The Bottom Half was.
I wasn't trying to exclude people from my shots--there just were hardly any around.
There were two record stores in the Mall back then; on the lower level, close to directly below where this last picture was taken, was Musicland, where I purchased my copies of Year of the Cat and Silk Degrees. Shoe Dept. Encore occupies its spot (along with that of what used to be two other stores). I like the little slide inside the water tower base in the play area.
This shot of empty kiosks in the atrium with the half burned-out J. C. Penney's sign in the background says something, even if I don't quite know what that might be.
Maybe the most depressing thing about my visit is coming upon what passes for a record store nowadays.
fye appears to focus on the "more" part these days, including pop culture apparel, candy, and Funko Pop! figures. Here's the entirety of their CD selection:
There was also a rack of expensive vinyl off to my left. (As much as I enjoy Weezer's Blue Album, I'm not willing to shell out $43 for it.) A couple of college-age guys--maybe they were on break too--were goofing around the vinyl section while I took this picture. I guess it was the closest I came to interacting with anyone.
If you look closely above, you can see through the fye's window the one shop that appeared unchanged to me.
When I showed Martha these pictures, she recalled going into this Hallmark in the early years of our marriage. It was nice to find one connection to my memory of the place.
The Hallmark store is on the lower level toward the southern end of the Mall, near the entrance to Macy's. I next went up the escalator and found that, since Macy's is still a going concern, the corridor leading to it is much more populated.
I didn't take any pictures of the Food Court, but it was more crowded than anywhere else in the place, such as that was. I also briefly walked into Macy's long enough to determine it looked essentially devoid of customers.
On my way back to where I'd entered, I dropped back down to the lower level near the Sears entrance, to investigate something that had caught my eye looking down through one of the many openings between levels. Several store fronts had now been converted to a place called Bargain Bins. To my regret now I didn't go in, but I did snap a photo of the many rules of the place. One does get a sense not only of previous customers' behavior but also of the sort of stuff that may be on offer within.
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Of course, they're still piping popular music into the Mall while one ostensibly strolls from store to store. The one song I knew, from a decade ago, was "Pretty Pimpin'" by Kurt Vile (yes, I know) and I've been looking these past two weeks for a connection between its lyrics and my experience. Granted, it was a Monday, but I wasn't literally holding up a mirror to either the Will Harris or the Mall of now or yesteryear. I do think the early 80s version of me would recognize the man it saw today; I'm not so sure about the Mall.
My experience in visiting this important place from my past was not edifying, but it wasn't terribly surprising, either. Two of the three malls that existed in Lexington during my college days have been wiped from the map, and the remaining one has some of the same issues I saw on display in Florence. I'll carry the hundreds of visits I made to Recordland and Musicland, along with the records I heard and bought there, in my head until the end, and that will have to do.
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