Just realized I was wrong about the old lady at the food court fountain

I used to roll my eyes every time I passed this one senior citizen who was always sitting by the dried up fountain in the middle of our local dead mall, the Crystal Run Galleria in Ohio. She'd be there for hours with a little notebook, and I figured she was just napping or people watching. One day I was taking photos of some collapsed ceiling tiles and she waved me over. She told me she'd been a cashier at the JCPenney that used to anchor the mall, back in '87 when it first opened. She said she comes back because the echo in the empty food court sounds exactly like the crowd noise she remembers from Black Fridays. I sat with her for maybe 20 minutes and she just wanted someone to know that the mall wasn't always like this, that it had a life. That totally changed how I look at these places now, not just as ruins but as spaces that still hold people's actual memories. Has anyone else met someone who used to work at a mall you've explored?

2 comments

2 Comments

oscarb7710d ago

87 and she's still hung up on it?

thomas2759d ago

Oh man, that hits hard! I met this old guy at a dead mall in San Antonio who used to run the arcade there. He still had the key to the place after like 30 years and showed me some old photos of the whole place packed with kids. It was wild hearing him talk about how it used to be the spot to be.