That Day, We Had the Mall

Finding common ground in an old arcade

From the moment I learned I was going to become a parent some twenty years ago, I couldn’t wait to share the great things from my childhood with my own children. I wanted my kids to play Atari and love Star Wars and build stuff with LEGO and sure, that stuff works for a little while, until they find their own interests. It was no different with my parents. My dad loved 50s sci-fi and those classic Universal monster flicks, and who had time for black and white movies when we had Star Wars and Indiana Jones and Tron? It took me a long time to realize the only reason I liked those movies was because my parents took me to them, and today I love 50s sci-fi and those classic Universal monster flicks, but it took a long time. Full circle and all that.

A month before my son was born Cartoon Network aired a 24-hour marathon of classic Scooby Doo episodes. This was way before streaming and at least five years before the original series was released on DVD and so I recorded the entire marathon across four 6-hour VHS tapes. I had some old hard clamshell cases that came from Blockbuster’s garbage bin after they closed and I made custom covers for the tapes. I just knew someday he would enjoy watching those cartoons and let me tell you… those tapes sat in their cases gathering dust for years. Nobody in our house (except maybe me) ever watched them. By the time my kids were old enough to watch television, SpongeBob SquarePants was in heavy rotation on Nickelodeon. Scooby Doo was Scooby Done.

Now for me as a kid, there was always something magical about going to the mall. Everything you’ve heard about growing up Gen X is true. My mom and grandma would take my sister and I to the mall and tell us things like, “meet us back here in two hours.” Neither my sister nor I ever wore a watch; somehow we just knew. I have no idea how old we were back then when we started roaming the mall on our own. I’m sure I was in grade school and my sister is three years younger than me. This wasn’t like getting to roam the grocery store unsupervised. It was like being turned loose in a village. The mall we frequented, Crossroads Mall, had like 50 stores, maybe more.

It’s hard to divorce my memories of the mall from my feelings of the mall. My memories of the mall involve hanging out at the arcade, and going to the hobby shop, and visiting the oriental treasures store that sold ninja swords and throwing stars to kids, and going the the pet store to see the fish and hamsters, and, if we were lucky, buying a slice of pizza or a corndog to eat. My feelings of the mall are so much more. It was freedom, and fear, and excitement, and adventure, all rolled into a single excursion. It’s like the difference between the color yellow and biting into a lemon.

Crossroads Mall changed a lot in the 30-some years since I first started going there. It’s an old tale; people fled to the suburbs and over time the nice part of town that got left behind turned not-so-nice. Gang members actively roamed the mall and even if you locked your car doors while shopping there was a greater-than-zero chance you might return to the parking lot and find a busted window and missing stereo. The earliest gang-related shooting I remember taking place at the mall was in 1990, back when I was still in high school.

Still, my mind could not reconcile these changes. I loved hanging out at the mall so, so much as a kid that even in a time when malls were dying, I wanted my son to experience what it was like. I wanted him to bite in the lemon.

And so, in January of 2006, I took him.

Many of the reasons I had enjoyed visiting the mall had been replaced over time. Nobody went to the mall to buy a hamster in 2006; our town had a PetSmart by then. Crossroads Mall was already struggling in 2006, but the arcade — the same arcade I had visited a thousand times in my youth — was still there: Bally’s Le Mans.

It was at Bally’s Le Mans that I saw Dragon’s Lair for the first time. It was the first arcade in town to get Gauntlet, the only place I ever saw Krull, and where I beat Double Dragon every time we went. Even when my pockets were empty I would roam that arcade, alternating between watching other kids play games and looking under the corners of every single machine in hopes of finding a lone token that had escaped.

The games at Le Mans had changed since the last time I had visited, but so much was the same. The movie marquee-style light bulbs, that deliciously busy carpet, the dark bathrooms that made you feat for your life… all still there. Sure, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II had been replaced by large Dance Dance Revolution machines and the old Outrun cabinet had been swapped for full-size race cars kids could sit in and race while looking at projector screens, but if you closed your eyes it didn’t require much imagination to go back to my own childhood.

When I was a kid, arcades had versions of games we thought we would never see at home. Arcades had Pac-Man, and at home on the Atari 2600 we had “Pac-Man”, kind of. My friends and I joked that in Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600, the barrels resembled rolling chocolate chip cookies. Games looked slightly better on our Apple II computer, but it only had an amber monitor and no matter how good your imagination was, black and yellow was still just black and yellow.

But to a kid in 2006, how impressive is Pac-Man in the arcade when you have an iPad waiting for you in the car?

My son and I finished our trip to the mall that day in the food court, eating slices of Sbarro’s pizza. If I thought it would have made him as happy as the mall once made me, I would have bought him an entire pizza. Hell, I would have bought him his own franchise.

Four months after our visit, a gunfight broke out inside the mall between two groups of teens. During the scuffle one teen was shot, and moments later a mall security guard and off-duty sheriff leaned over the second floor railing and shot the original gunman who was standing on the first floor, still holding his pistol. The teen fell over and died about twenty feet from the entrance to the arcade.

And that, as they say, was that. The mall was already dying when a few months later, a road rage incident culminated with another fatal shooting in the parking lot. You couldn’t pay people to visit the mall after that. It closed shortly after and despite multiple attempts to reboot the space, it’s never taken off.

While my son and I both liked Star Wars, I grew up with Kenner action figures and he had Jar Jar Binks. It was hard to get a kid interested in NES games when the earliest console they remember playing is the Nintendo Wii.

But for one visit, our worlds overlapped. That day, we had the mall.

UPDATE: In February of 2025 it was announced Crossroads Mall had been purchased by new owners who plan to turn it into a complete shopping center with “everything people need,” from clothing and grocery stories to a YMCA. Hopefully the property will spring to life once again.