Requiem For Madison Square Mall

Of all the ridiculous things that have made me go all sentimentally nostalgic and cry, this is perhaps the most ridiculous. I’m tearing up over them tearing up a mall. I don’t even like malls, and I honestly can’t recall the last time I actually went to a mall, and yet, here I am. Today I was scrolling through Facebook and came across a video, drone footage, of the now demolished Madison Square Mall in Huntsville, Alabama.

For a child of the 80’s, the mall was a significant part of your adolescence, and for me that mall was the Madison Square Mall. I was just shy of nine years old when this mall opened in August of 1984. This was where my mamma brought me to get cool school clothes that the other kids, whose moms only bought their clothes in town, wouldn’t have. Bugle Boy, Duck Head, British Knights, Body Glove, Members Only, brands they didn’t carry at Morris Harwell & Sons or Wal Mart.

A lot of my culinary firsts took place in that food court located between the arcade and the KayBee Toys, just outside of the Sears (I use the definite article “the” as an homage to the way my elders spoke in those days when referring to corporate “box” stores, “I need to stop by THE Wal Mart” or “THE Belk” or “THE Sears”). At that time in Pulaski our eating choices pretty much consisted of: home, McDonald’s, Hardees, Pizza Hut, and Chew-n-Chat. But at the Madison Square Mall I was exposed to Chik-Fil-A, Sbarro’s Pizza, Arby’s, and the Japanese place that served Terriyaki Chicken. To this day Sbarro’s is still my favorite pizza. Once, when I was sixteen, me and my friends Rok and Brad got a large Sbarro’s pizza to go and were able to sneak it into the theater to watch the movie Singles. But that’s a story for another day. On a Friday night or Saturday afternoon, the food court would be so packed that it was hard to find an empty table, so we developed a technique where one person would wait in line for the food while another roamed the room looking for a place to sit.

Until I was around sixteen I rarely went deeper into the mall than the food court and the Timeout Arcade. Between the two of them they had almost everything I needed. Back in those days the hardest decisions I had to make were where I was going to eat and what video game I was going to play first. In many ways the arcade was the heart of the mall because it kept otherwise impatient children occupied and content so moms could spend hours shopping (the benches and cushioned chairs and couches did the same to placate the dads).

Living in Pulaski you really only had one option for books, magazines, and music...Wal Mart, and in those days their selection wouldn’t be described as a section, but more like a few shelves. But at the Waldenbooks in the mall I had access to magazines I’d never even heard of, like Hit Parader, Rolling Stone, Circus, Fangoria, Sports Illustrated, and Beckett Baseball Card Monthly. As a budding reader I became enthralled by rack after rack of books in every imaginable genre, though, admittedly, I rarely ventured beyond Sci-Fi and Horror.

As I grew older my time hanging out with my mamma on the weekends diminished, but my trips to the mall actually became more frequent as my interests began to expand. Upon turning sixteen and getting a drivers license and being entrusted by my parents to leave town for the first time, there was really only one place to go....the Madison Square Mall. It was only an hour away, it was easy to get to, and, because of regular trips through the years, I was familiar with the area. Not to mention it had everything I was interested in: food, video games, books, music, and girls...but mainly girls.

Most weekends from 1992 to 1994 I would make the fifty-three mile drive from my house in Pulaski to the Madison Square Mall with any number of combinations of my friends: Brandon, Bryan, Caleb, Rob, Herbie, Brad, Rok, Geoff, John, Sims. Our routine was pretty consistent: find a place to park, eat at the food court, make a lap through the mall looking for girls, go to the arcade without having spoken to any girls, make another lap around the mall, go back to the food court and then go to the movie theater behind the mall with some girls that we met, if we were lucky. I think we were lucky maybe one time.

Halfway through our mall lap was a record store. I probably single handedly paid the salary of a couple of employees with the number of CD’s I purchased on a near weekly basis. I would buy a CD, play it nonstop for a week or two, and then return to buy another and repeat. This is how I ended up with hundreds of CD’s by the time I got married. At the far end of the mall was a fascinating and unique little store called Frank’s Imports. The store was so packed with merchandise that you could barely move, but you didn’t care because virtually everything they carried was interesting. They had African drums, Samuri swords, ninja throwing stars, Rastafarian knitted caps, strange glass “tobacco” pipes, black light posters, and the thing that brought me in, imported t-shirts. In those days my standard uniform was baggy skater pants, Airwalk sneakers, a long sleeve t-shirt topped with a short sleeved t-shirt, and a flannel shirt on top of all of that. This ensemble required me to purchase a great many t-shirts, so, like the CD’s, I’d pick up a t-shirt most weeks as well. Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, Alice In Chains, Nirvana, Dr. Dre, Ministry. If I owned the CD, I likely also owned the bands t-shirt too. I might have even owned a Chronic hat or two. It would be many years later that I would learn the incense scented store was what they call a “head shop.” Oh to be naive again. Of course a visit to the slightly, and sometimes not so slightly naughty novelty store Spencer’s, was always good for a few laughs.

By the time I met my future wife at age seventeen (whom I first saw in this mall in a dream, and then saw in this mall in person, again, another story for another day), and stopped going to the mall as frequently, I had started to notice that a lot of people had stopped going to the mall as frequently. Where once you couldn’t even find a parking spot from Black Friday to New Year’s Day, now you could find a good parking spot at any time. You could also find a number of empty stores or stores that had been abandoned by their original tenants and were now filled with non-chain stores. Sports memorabilia shops, cheap imported novelty toy stores, niche clothing stores, glow in the dark mini golf, and the like began to populate the slowly dying mall. It was a bad omen when the once thriving movie theater behind the mall was relegated to a dollar discount cinema, showing movies that were months past their original run. In time the mall faced stiff competition from the newly renovated Parkway City Mall across town, and from the brand new, reinvented version of the mall that was Bridgestreet Town Center, an outdoor mall. It became apparent that Madison Square Mall was showing it’s age. Efforts were made to keep it relevant (a climbing wall was added, Buffalo Wild Wings opened a location there, the record store was replaced with a multi media store that sold DVD’s as well as music), but the world was changing in ways the mall couldn’t. Huge corporate box stores like Best Buy and Toys R Us and Books A Million and Kohl’s began to choke the life out of the smaller Radio Shacks, KB Toys, and Waldenbooks, that resided in the mall. Ultimately online shopping would bring all of the above to the brink of extinction. 

Inevitably the death knell for malls began to ring at Madison Square.....they started opening early for “mall walkers.” Once your mall’s primary demographic is octogenarians who are looking for a place to get out of the weather to get their exercise without having to pay for a gym membership, my friend, your days are numbered. And for Madison Square Mall that number was January 29, 2017, the day the mall officially closed forever. On February 6th demolition began. The mall that was once such a big deal that Miss America attended it’s grand opening, was now lost to history and memories. I haven’t been to Huntsville since I moved to Florida several years ago, so I haven’t seen the empty space that was the sight of so many of my happiest memories growing up. I honestly don’t know if I ever want to. I haven’t seen the empty space with my own eyes, but tonight, I’m feeling it in my heart.