Amazon Fulfillment Centers have moved into what was once the largest shopping mall in the world, known as the Randall Park Mall, as well as into Euclid Square Mall and Rolling Acres Mall, which have all been abandoned for years.
In 1976, Randall Park Mall opened as the largest shopping mall in the world. Located in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, the mall played a pivotal role in my childhood, but like most American shopping malls, it has become isolated and abandoned over the last several years. This is so common, in fact, that I started an entire career just documenting these once-thriving colossal shopping malls. I filmed a television show inside an abandoned mall, and I was interviewed on NBC’s The Today Show inside the abandoned Euclid Square mall.
Over the years, several of my abandoned mall images have gone viral, creating thousands of news stories relating to the rise and demise of shopping malls across the United States. The general public’s response to my work has always been nostalgic. Most have pondered what can be done to repurpose these spaces.
Amazon has an answer to that much-asked question and plans to use these abandoned mall sites for new Amazon Fulfillment Centers. The irony is overwhelming because online shopping has played a huge role in how American consumers shop today. To think that my published books about this mall are currently being sold on Amazon. com, and therefore would be stocked here, inside the former mall itself, seems almost a mockery. It goes well beyond irony. It is paradoxical, even mildly contemptuous, but can this be the future of these once-thriving American shopping malls? It just might be.
—Seph Lawless (Author and Huffpost Journalist)
The carpets were blood red—at least that’s how I remember the M. C. Escher-style set-up of rolling walkways and stairwells in the main atrium of the late, great Randall Park Mall.
Once one of the largest malls in the United States, Edward J. DeBartolo’s dream on Cleveland’s east side didn’t last and began a slow glidepath of decline.
Crime and better, nicer options quickly made the cavernous mall an albatross. The quality of the inner stores declined, and it was at Christmastime that most Clevelanders would patronize the crippled mall. Not for a visit with Santa—every mall in the area had a Santa—but for the amazing Christmas train ride.
As a young lad obsessed with trains, riding around the mall on the train was a yearly highlight. Until one year, my parents stopped taking us. And I never went back to Randall Park Mall. I drove by it many a time on my way home from college, but never stopped.
When it was announced, in 2014, that it was to be demolished, I drove by to pay my respects that snowy December. But the interior was long off-limits to the public. I reached out to see if I could get a brick of the old gal, to remember her by. Those tasked with its destruction never wrote back.
Thankfully, the childhood memories are preserved in Seph’s photos. I can imagine the Randall Park Mall I fondly remember and picture the train. I can even hear its bells and whistles, beckoning from the beyond.
—Jim Swift (Deputy online editor of the Weekly Standard, and a native of Shaker Heights, Ohio)