Memory-lane talk highlights shopping malls of yesteryear
As she reminisced about the grandeur and wonder of the Columbus shopping malls of old, Hannah Brevoort said she understands that the Easter Bunny visits, the giant Christmas tree displays, and even a replica of Pinocchio’s house all made sense as attractions to draw in shoppers.
But the limousine that once belonged to Russian dictator Joseph Stalin that was displayed at Northland Mall in October 1967? Well, that one’s a real head-scratcher.
So, too, was the one-time display featuring Eva Braun’s gold Mercedes.
“I mean, Eva Braun was Hitler’s mistress. And that’s somehow supposed to get you in the shopping mood?” Brevoort said with a laugh as she explained that and other oddities as part of a lecture titled “Lost Columbus Malls” to about 40 visitors at the Ohio History Center on Saturday.
Brevoort, unit manager for museum interpretation at the Ohio History Connection, said her presentation, which ran through the history of the now-defunct Northland, Westland and Columbus City Center malls, came from a purely personal interest.
The 29-year-old grew up in Columbus. She visited Northland Mall often as a child and, later, City Center Downtown.
Northland, which opened at Morse and Karl roads in 1964, seemed to host more odd attractions than the malls that came after it, she said.
“They had very random things, things that were unusual, to get people to come see what else is there,” she said.
When Westland Mall opened in 1969 on Broad Street on the West Side (as an open-air mall, then enclosed in 1982) what it had going for it was its size, at more than 860,000 square feet.
But the granddaddy of them all was Columbus City Center (on what is now the site of Columbus Commons) that opened in 1989. ThenOhio Gov. Richard F. Celeste spoke at the grand opening, and national recording star Marilyn McCoo (Google The 5th Dimension, kids) performed the national anthem. More than 100,000 people packed the mall that August day.
Janet Ingraham Dwyer, of Berwick, was among those at Saturday’s presentation who said the local malls were an important part of her life. She and her sister both landed in Columbus post-college and knew City Center from the time it was a shiny new gem.
Dwyer, 54, said her sister got her first job in the mall and Dwyer said the man who still today is her hairstylist — and styled her hair for her wedding, way back when — worked at a salon there when she first went to him.
“We have so much tied up in the possibilities of what we can find at malls,” Dwyer explained. “You’re off work, off school, on your leisure time, and you enter those doors with dreams of everything you might find.”
Plus, she said, malls were once just cool places to hang out with family and friends.
“It’s where memories are made,” she said.
But, alas, Brevoort said, with each new mall that was constructed in the area — Easton Town Center, Tuttle Mall and Polaris — it squeezed a little bit of life out of the old standbys.
Northland closed in 2002, City Center in 2007 and Westland finally gave up its ghost when Sears closed in June 2017.
“We’re only talking about these malls,” Brevoort said with a touch of melancholy, “because they don’t exist anymore.”