Just recently EB Company closed and JoAnn Fabrics is gone as well. I think there was a Footlocker or sports/athletic ware store too! There was a Carousel by the corridor where the Theater was and the mall kiosk for lottery,strollers and gift certificates was in that hallway. It's pretty abandoned! I also had worked around the demolished Euclid Mall and Randall Park Mall. I shopped at the old Richmond Mall(Richmond Town Center) which should now be demolished and Severance Center which isn't what it was. Retail apocalypse in Northeast Ohio and there are many, many more empty or demolished malls all over Ohio😢😢😢
Where the UH Urgent Care used to be Sears, and Dillard's was another anchor. Steve and Barry's was in the Pharmor store. There was a Vitamin World which h was Ritz Camera Centers. I worked almost 20 years for them and 2,000 store's and online all closed. There was a Kings Jewelers down by where Super KMART was and Christian Book Store. Neal's Shoes was in that corner. There was a Claire's somewhere and Christopher Banks closed years ago. There was a bookstore where you thought it was, Walden's. There was an Old Navy and piercing place in a kiosk. Toy store and there was an anchor across from J.C.Penny's. In the food court there was a Chinese restaurant and a Mr. Hero. There was a few cookie type store's like Original Cookie Co. I loved The Ruby Tuesdays at the end of the food court! There was a kitchen type store down past the shoe dept years ago.
Sad to see, I remember my local mall being the place to hang out on weekends and even after school. We have 4 malls near me where I live. The closest one was remodeled into a strip mall. A portion of the actual mall can be walked through. There's like 2 businesses inside and the rest is a derelict. Two of the other malls are dying. One stays open I think because it has a movie/theatre restaurant combo attached to it, the other is literally so dead tumbleweeds roll by when you're walking through it. The last and newest one is still standing but I've heard that it's running on a deficit. It seems as though online shopping (Amazon) is putting the final nail in the coffin of the shopping mall. A sad state of affairs. It would seem we as humans are losing the intimate connections we once had due to unstoppable advance of technology.
That mall once hosted a meet and great with Billy Mitchell, back around the time of King of Kong, that sealed the deal and the bad gugugu energy left has lead to its ever so slow but never ending rot. It’s end is nigh and it all starts with Billy
Thank you so much for posting this! I live about an hour west of Ashtabula but come up occasionally to go to the Ashtabula Harbor area or Walnut Beach. A friend I met in college, and another friend I met through her, both grew up in Ashtabula; both their mothers still live there. Both talk about the general sadness and decline of the city. Anyways, the last time I was at Ashtabula Mall, I couldn't get over how empty it was. Or how there was now a GUN shop in the mall (which as you showed has now moved). I remember going into one of the stores that sold items on deep discount; this was junk that even the OTHER deep discount stores didn't want. I overheard one woman complaining that the $5 set of sheets she was looking at were "too much". I also overheard a couple people talking about Five Guys Burgers and Fries being WAY too expensive, and while I agree it's more expensive than, say, McDonald's (though the gap seems to be narrowing), the way the couple was talking, you would've thought Five Guys was charging $200 for a burger. That just proves how economically depressed Ashtabula is and how poor the residents were...and this was BEFORE current inflation.
What a trip. Had no idea you were also a NE Ohio dude. Never been to Ashtabula mall down there but Cleveland has had a few malls fall into disrepair the same way. Real neat to see dude.
That scaffolding in the ceiling is pretty ugly, but I'm LOVING the 60s/70s style lighting in the centre. Something about having a hospital in a mall is incredibly sad to me, though. Like sure, why not buy a kayak while waiting to get your bullet wound sewn up? 😂
I saw some pics a year or two ago of a mall I used to visit every Friday as a kid/early teenage years (as part of my town's youth group we'd go to the mall to watch a movie and play in the arcade every week), and the mall barely exists in its current state. It was sad to see. It seems someone bought the property during the pandemic and will likely turn it into another apartment complex.
