News You Can Bruise for 2003 January 9

Greg on my Sherman Oaks despair (qv.):

I lived a half-mile from the site during the work, and they completely gutted it. Tore out everything, even the walls, and turned it into office space, mostly. There are a few restaurants and a movie theatre and a record store there now, but it's unrecognizable.

Before the work began, they stopped re-newing leases, so the number of stores kept dwindling. It was a ghost mall, with only the movie theatre open at the end. It had endless parking and you could show up just a few minutes before the show and if you didn't mind the possibility of being set upon by refugee Sunglasses Hut employees, it was great.

I was only there once, in my mid-teens, and it was utterly deserted. I remember my sisters and I getting running starts and sliding across the slippery tile floor on our stomachs in a mad act of pointless, consequenceless mall-hogging. It was like the mall in Rock 'n' Roll Rebellion after the humorless owner and his reactionary security guards abandon it to the plucky gang of high-school stereotypes.