Having seen the video/ photos of it abandon and smashed up, it interesting to see this video from January 2003 where it may have already been in decline, but the mall still had its anchors and and doesn't seem it have lost it pride yet. A very clean, tidy, well presented Mall (with the fountains working, and well kept plants) Shame to think within five years it was all gone. The final shot of the food court was kind of cool, There is the video of the food court on the day they cut power to the mall completely abandon, all the retailer long gone, yet hear five year earlier almost all the retailer (in the food court) were still there and people were eating lunch there. It a reminder of how quickly the world can change.
There were two shots that really hit me. The food court shot you mentioned, as well as the shot right before it at 12:54. The same person who uploaded the video of the food court on the last day also uploaded a video of him walking from the food court to the closed Macy's (still Kaufman's when this video was done). He actually walked past the kiddie rides seen at 12:54. The "Health Wise Center" was also still up. It really is bittersweet seeing this footage for the first time, knowing that just five years later, this fairly busy and almost fully occupied mall would be nearly abandoned and forced to shut down, with just a few reminders of what it once was left behind, including the kiddie rides and the "Health Wise Center" and "Picnic Place" signs. And of course that was just the beginning, ten years after this video the mall was ravaged by vandals and mother nature, rendering it entirely unrecognizable and unusable :(
Scroll down in the comments, and look up the comment from JAYuhasz HDV Productions. He was actually hired by the mall owners to make this video to be sent to prospective buyers. I think you might be right though, this was a few years after the original owners sold the mall for more than $30 million. The second owners in turn only managed to sell it for $2 million, and it just kept changing owners, selling for less and less until the bitter end. While the mall still appeared to be busy in this video, its rapidly declining value and the apparent desperation of its owners to sell does suggest that they knew the mall was about to collapse.
I think I saw at least 9 stores closed in this vid. So it was the beginning of the end. I didn't recognize where the Dollar General was though? I was a bit confused at that part. Also would have been nice to see the big fountain running.
Awesome footage. Very evocative. I've never been to this mall, or even the US but I am fascinated by the culture of the mall and its decline, especially massive ones like this. In the UK we're seeing the collapse of one department store after another, and these stores are usually the anchors for our malls, so I guess we'll be seeing more dead malls over here sadly. On another note, it's becoming really creepy to see footage from 2003 and the noughties and realising how long ago that is now becoming, 2003 is far away enough now see footage like this and it have a legitimately vintage feel. I remember 2003 like it was absolutely just a couple of years ago. 2003 felt so modern, we had gone through the millennium, broadband internet was around, mp3 players...and yet....the year looks so quaint now. Wow. I feel old.
I am from NE Ohio by the time this video was made the mall was already on it's way out. (Although it "survived" until the late 00's technically) This mall was actually at the time of its opening considered one of the best malls in the United States unfortunately the Akron area lost a great deal of its industrial jobs in the late 70s and early 80s which set the city in a decline. Rolling Acres was a bit before my time but the Mall I grew up going to was Chapel Hill Mall and it faced the same fate ultimately and closed within the last couple years.
bryant rockwell man this place was a dying husk even in the late nineties, all of the surrounding area was falling apart back then too; I’m honestly surprised it took so long for the mall to finally give up the ghost when it did
After they fired off-duty police officers and replaced them with cheaper mall security, that leads to an infamous fight that occurred in 1991 just outside of the movie theater. During the fight, many people inside the cinema mistook the sound of a metal sign falling down for a gunshot. This rumor of the “shooting” in the mall made its reputation VERY BAD as this later lead to fewer people going to the mall as some people feared of a possible other shooting. The mall went downhill in the 90s and did worse in the 2000s. Even when Target opened its store in the mall after being bought by another company in hopes of reviving and getting the mall back on its feet, it didn’t do any better as more stores and the movie theater began to close, and JCPenney and Dillard’s were downgraded to outlet/clearance stores. 2006 was when the mall went through a massive downfall as Dillard’s closed and Target was relocated to Wadsworth. 2007 and 2008 were when the mall died as due to teen gangs breaking into the mall, the economic crisis, and with the mall losing even more stores, including Macy’s, and not being able to afford power anymore with the eight remaining tenants being forced to close and shut down, except for JCPenney and Sears.
I know it’s weird saying this but this was my mall I hung out at almost every single weekend. I’d grab my posse of misfit weird kids including myself a gallon of gas and we’d head up from our preppy suburb of Tallmadge to rolling acres mall. My friends drove until I got my permit and license in mid 2003-2004. It started declining around 2005-2006. Dillard’s was once an outlet store when it evolved into the clearance center it went downhill. Then Macy’s took over Kaufmanns and Target moved to Wadsworth. It became unsafe to go and I rarely went by 2007, but I still went to the JC Penney outlet I bought my wedding dress there in early 2009. I left the Akron area for good in 2010 with my husband and I haven’t been back. But seeing this reminded me of how much fun teenage me had there. Chapel Hill was closer but we never fit in there so rolling acres it was! I loved this video I keep watching it because I can place the store and previous stores that were gone by then.
This was a beautiful mall. Only seen the videos of when it was shut down and destroyed. So glad you uploaded this so I can see the mall as it once was, alive.
Yes, there aren't a lot of people shopping in this video, but considering that it was taken a couple weeks after Christmas I kind of expected the mall to be quiet. Still I agree that this video shows the beginning of the end.
Little did the employees know 1/07/03 would be an important day. John was like, "Ugh, my turn to clean this fountain AGAIN. Thanks for calling out Steve."
I've never been to this mall before but seeing this footage has me longing for the 90's and early 2000's ... How time flies. Soon no malls will be left.
Very important video, must be preserved at all costs. This is evidence that the world's most infamous dead mall was once a thriving hub for business. RIP Rolling Acres
This is Rolling Acres Mall in Akron Ohio, which was constructed in 1975. The mall has been rotting since October 31, 2008. The mall's management eventually ran out of money for the mall's budget after failing to save the non-profitable mall. Issues began in 1991 when the mall fired the off duty police officers from working in there. Instead they hired cheap security guards. During a showing of a movie in the cinema, a fight broke out between two patrons. Shoppers thought that they heard a gunshot and tore through the mall. Afterwards, many people avoided the mall in fear of encounters with more dangerous people. Gang activity became a problem at Rolling Acres. In 1995, the mall made a last-ditch effort to keep people in the doors by adding on a Target. This did not work. The mall lost business and began it's decline. After target was added two of it's most successful anchor stores downgraded to clearance centers. The mall had lost its shiny, new, upscale feel that it had when it had opened. In 2000 the mall was sold to an investor who attempted to rescue Rolling Acres. The efforts failed, and Rolling Acres plunged farther and farther into debt, at an accelerating rate due to its loss of stores. On October 31st, 2008, the mall's power was cut due to nonpayment, not affecting Sears or JCPenney Outlet. Rolling Acres Mall was shuttered, but that did not stop Urban Explorers from wandering in and taking photographs. These photographs eventually made it on the internet, where they intrigued viewers and gave interest to the site of the dead Rolling Acres Mall. The mall went viral. Photographs of snow filled corridors were displayed on the news, attracting vandals and explorers alike. The mall was battered by guns and baseball bats. It was no longer salvageable... As of late October in 2016, demolition has begun on the former Rolling Acres mall.
This video is so amazing!!! Just to see all the anchors occupied, the escalators all running heck even the fountain running in the JCP court. This is a great piece of history
The last time that i was at Rolling Acres was during the closing sale at the JCP outlet. The mall was deserted when I walked up and down the main concourse for the lat time. Most of the lights were shut off. It was sad to see.
There is another video you can see- Rolling Acres Mall 1988 if you want to check it out. It is not mine but I ran across it. It's only about 5 minutes long.
Wow! It's incredible to see Rolling Acres like that. I'm so glad someone took the time to document it in it's former glory. Especially now that it is gone.
It’s fascinating to see Rolling Acres when it was still open, when you look at the abandoned videos on this place, it look totally different and apocalyptic.
I'm guessing that the owners at the time were trying to attract more major business to the mall and this video was part of a presentation to show the mall's potential
The owners at that time were a realty group based in Raleigh NC that is known for buying malls and then flipping them... sadly, these were the last owners who kept the property taxes current...
You're really close, scroll down and find the comment from JAYuhasz HDV Productions. He was the one who was actually hired to make this by the owners. Apparently they wanted to sell the mall, and so this video was part of a presentation to show it off to potential buyers.
Glamour Girl 212, was this the same group that had bought the mall from the original owners for over $30 million, only to sell it a few years later for $2 million?
Forest City Enterprises, Rolling Acres Mall's original owners, sold the mall to Bankers Trust of New York in 2000 for over $30 million. Bankers Trust gave the mall the now-famous green hills and yellow sun logo and a website, and then two years later THEY sold the mall to the Whichards for $2 million. After four years of having a hard time finding a new buyer for the mall, the Whichards finally sold it to the first of the two "fraudulent" California owners (I call them this because the last two owners both failed to pay property taxes on the mall) for $1.6 million in 2006. The mall then closed altogether in 2008, and finally late in 2010 the mall was sold to Premier Ventures for $3 million. Premier let the mall sit and rot while they fought the city tooth and nail over the unpaid property taxes, until Summit County OH finally succeeded in foreclosing on the mall in June 2016, thus deeding the abandoned mall over to the city of Akron. Demolition then began last October and is slated to be completed later this month... #RIPRollingAcresMall
Ah yes, thanks for the recap. It's a shame that those two fraudulent owners screwed the mall over so much, especially Premier. Rolling Acres troubles began well before they came into the picture, and by 2006 there was certainly doubt over whether it was even possible for the mall to survive in the form seen here, but they just sat by and let it waste away. Premier Ventures especially, not only did they fail to pay property taxes, but I recall they even stopped paying for security, which let vandals have free reign to trash the place. You probably saw the video from 2009 of the kid riding his bike around the abandoned mall. Despite being closed for about a year at that point, it was still in decent shape and could have been repurposed. Had a responsible owner bought the mall, who knows, they may have been able to repurpose Rolling Acres into something else while keeping the building intact. Instead Premier fought to keep hold of a corpse of a building they were neglecting and allowing vandals and mother nature to destroy to the point where the City of Akron had no choice but to demolish it.
WOW...Where did you find this? I was hired to create this video so the owners, at the time, could send it to a prospective buyer, which i dont know if it helped or not. I went through my archives to see if I could find the original master tape or DVD...still looking. It even motivated me to go through my old computer hard drives, which would even be better...no luck there either... However I did find the raw footage on Mini DV tape and I still have the camera I used that day. But I am curious how you obtained this copy...
Jeffrey Yuhasz Trolling RU-vid comments finally pays off. I see you have the extended cuts on your channel! Was the fountain just shut off for cleaning that day?
It's just terrible that this particular shopping mall suffered the fate that it suffered. This particular shopping mall looked like it was a very nice shopping mall in it's heyday, but sank. The abandoned mall building had some potential to become a new and improved shopping mall if it weren't for the punks, vandals and street gangs doing the damage that it did to it and after that, all the decay that it suffered as a result of that and then, faced the wrecking ball. Rolling Acres Mall could have been saved and made into a newer and improved shopping mall, but vandals and gangs ruined the interior and as a result of them doing that, it suffered that decay that led to it's demolition. If I had the money, I would've bought this abandoned and transformed it into a newer and improved shopping experience, which would have included modernization of the mall's interior to make people want to come and shop there. Sadly, it's potential died alongside the decay and vandalism that caused the decay.
1867Phoenix I think you are exaggerating the circumstances a bit. The police there would have never arrested him unless he was actually committing a crime or posing a threat or danger to them. Since he willingly went with the police they had no problem with just letting him go. It was simply never the case that they would have arrested him or that he was close to being arrested.
I’m very happy to see this amazing footage taken then! It’s amazing to see it “thriving” at one time in the 2000s! Music makes it better too! This was taken 1 year 1 month and 13 days before I was born so I know what 2003 was like now 😂. Thanks so much for uploading
Wow! So I had visited this mall when I was a little kid back in 1990 when my mother stopped off at the Sears Auto Center to have new tires put on our 89 Camry. We had just moved to Mentor which was not too far from here and it was the first snowfall we head ever endured since moving from Miami Beach. While on Interstate 90 the car started to slide so that's why we pulled into Sears 4 winter tires. I remember making a lap to kill time through the mall and stopping off at the Coconuts to pick up a new Wilson Phillips tape. looking at the mall as it was in 2003 shocks me and how dated it looked. Even so it didn't deserve the treatment it received after it's closed. I could see why so many people we're heartbroken who had shopped and loved this mall wer after watching it get vandalized and deteriorating so much before finally tearing it down.
Watchin this after watching all of the videos of it after it became abandoned and destroyed is like watching part of history, this is and always will be one of the most iconic malls in US history, it's so sad that thirty two years after it opened , it would close forever and be pretty much erased except for this video and all the others here on RU-vid, a Huge Thank you for sharing this here, Liked and have watched this video a number of times already
I have never been to this mall. Only seeing it in abandoned mall videos. First time seeing it open and active. Now I read that it’s demolished. It’s sad to know that everything in this video is all scrapped away somewhere.
I bought a used laptop from a fly-by-night computer store in there that year. (I was 15 and one of the only ones at school to have one, we watched Trailer Park Boys on the bus, which was kind of nuts at that time.) I was hoping to see that store, but don't think it's in here. If you want to have a bit of a laugh, I remember it was about $300 for a IBM Thinkpad 600X- 450Mhz P3, upgraded to 256MB RAM, ran XP fine. I loved that machine. It's a random memory, I remember the guy working there telling me that I needed at least a 800Mhz processor to burn DVDs. I didn't put this to the test as I didn't get a burner until a couple years later, at which point affordable tech was much faster.
@@mallwalkers2529 It's hard to recall, really, but I'm pretty sure it was down a smaller corridor, by an entrance. Does that sound familiar? I also remembered the stairs opposite the main entrance, across from the fountain- faceplanted down them, hands in pockets, on my 4th birthday : P Broke my front teeth. lol
Online retail killed malls. Now the equivalent of your Electronics Boutique employee is an order picker in a massive warehouse doing mostly mindless and solitary work. Was it worth the sake of convenience? I don’t think so.
strafer Don’t blame everything on the internet! Another huge downfall for malls in america was gun violence.. how come in my country In 2019 malls are still doing well when in the United States everything has died in the ass? Because everyone’s too scared to leave their HOUSE
Yes!!!! I'm looking for more videos like this for my tribute playlist... keep these coming! Also, if anybody has any other vids from the mall's heyday in the '70s to '90s, share them to me so I can add them to my playlist! :)
Did you see the video Rolling Acres Mall 1988 ? It's only about 5 minutes long and is a bit fuzzy but cool to see. Looks like Chapel Hill Mall is also getting ready to close.
Man…SO many memories here. I started going back in the 80s. I remember my mom buying gifts and going to the little tables that they had set up on the bottom floor next to the escalators to get them wrapped for free. So many weekends with my grandma getting lemonade and the best fries doused in vinegar. We didn’t have cell phones…our selfies were in the little photo booth next to Picnic Place. We lived in the moment…not after the fact. Telling my mom (the one and only time) that I hated her because she wouldn’t buy me a Cure t-shirt from the music store upstairs next to Kauffman’s. I can’t remember which store it was. Man…in the 90s…every weekend was spent here. I remember a little girl falling in the fountain & everyone panicking. I bought my wedding ring at the J.B Robinson next to the fountain. So many integral parts of my life were spent there. For people that say “it’s just a mall”….it wasn’t just a mall to those of us that spent our weekends there, shopped with our grandmas that we no longer have, kissed our first love there in the glass elevator, & even got to take our first child to. It’s a piece of our history that’s gone and that’s sad. Kinda wondering if we should be filming Summit Mall now. It’s definitely a different dynamic there but wondering how many years before it closes up.
Rolling Acres Mall: At one time a popular, successful and beautiful mall. Now, it's infamous for it's abandonment, financial trouble, and beaten up heavily.
My mother used to work as a portrait photographer in the Vallco Shopping Mall. She shot a photo of her husband who graduated from the University of San Luis Obispo back in the 90s. It was demolished back in November 2019.
I hope more people will upload old footage of old places, like this video of Rolling Acres Mall, all over RU-vid. Great to see what Rolling Acres looked like before it sat abandoned for many years.
It's really crazy how Malls have fallen off. When I was a kid in the 90s and teen in the 2000s we loved going to the mall. Even when you didn't have money. I loved the little arcade and going in the gaming stores. I remember the Mall in Zanesville Ohio during the 90s early 2000s you couldn't find a parking spot on the weekends, now you can pick your spot lol. It's pretty much empty. Then years back I was taking my Girlfriend to the Airport in Akron Canton in 08 and we stopped at the mall and I couldn't believe how empty it was. When you grew up in the 90s its kinda sad to see how far retail has fallen lol.
I have been following the demolition of the Rolling Acres mall for about a year now on youtube . I'm not from Ohio but from neighboring state Pennsylvania. There have been several malls in my area that have closed and been torn down or have been converted into useful space like medical centers or marketplaces. It's sad to see the decline of the American shopping mall. As a child in the 1970's and a teenager in the 1980's I grew up going to places like this. Maybe it was just meant to be, as nothing is forever? The shopping malls killed the downtown "mom and pop" business when they started popping up across the suburbs of America in the 1960's. Now online shopping and also a poor economy are killing the malls of America.Too bad this place couldn't have been saved or at least converted into something useful! Malls like this were a nice, clean and pleasant atmosphere to shop in or just a place to take the family on a Saturday afternoon and maybe have a meal or catch a movie. Sad to see. Such a waste!
Copyright bullshit... the two songs in the video were both by Pat Metheny: "James" and "Cross the Heartland"; for some reason, someone cried foul over the music and had it muted :(
@HCE "James" was the first song and then "Cross the Heartland" was on the second half of the video... and for some reason we can't even play the videos on the official Pat Metheny channel without paying $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ for a premium subscription; the two songs are on a Rolling Acres soundtrack playlist on our sister channel Glamour Girl 212 and they are now both flagged "Premium Subscription Required" :(
What a beautiful mall this was! Makes knowing what's become of the place since then even more sad. Thank you so much for uploading this footage! Loved seeing some of the old school store fronts like the Bath & Body Works. Also, I've really missed Waldenbooks!
my local mall has the old school bath and bodyworks storefront but sadly the entire inside is falling apart and mall is dying but will upload footage of the mall in the future. :D
@@jscountrygirl85_326 only footage of it i have at the moment is during the christmas season of 2019 but its not really the appropriate time to post it now lol, and the Coronavirus is NOT helping it either.
@@bigburgerboi2005 Ooh, I love Christmas decorations at malls. :) I agree about the Coronavirus. :( I think most malls in the country are either closed or are closing very early. I definitely don't recommend going there at this time.
Jesus, it looked dead even back in 03. But the date listed in the video is on a Tuesday so I’m sure if it was during the day, that might partly explain the lack of foot traffic.
I recognize some of these store fronts with or without names from Ace Adventures such as Master Cuts, Pinic Place, Health Wise Center which those few still had names up. Interesting video of your mall.
