Published: December 9th 2024, 7:00:09 pm
It was called Sleepy Pines Mall. A few miles off an interstate in America’s northeast, at the center of several small towns. It was a single story and only had two anchor stores, but it was sprawling considering its almost rural location. Built in 1973, it was one of the older shopping malls, and opened before there were long-term strategies on mall viability. Popular for a time, its occupancy dwindled in the late ’90s, and it lost its movie theater and Sears by 2003 before becoming a neglected, poorly maintained, and sometimes dangerous commercial plaza that was outdone by nearby rivals, and doomed by surrounding negative growth trends of the towns that kept it fed. The food court closed in 2006, and the last stores followed a year later. Sleepy Pines had its fans and grown adults who had gone there as children paying it nostalgic visits, as all malls do, but by 2010, it had become a mostly-forgotten derelict with a parking lot full of weeds.
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