Fall
In early 1993, with attendance declining, Kirven's went out of business leaving one of the mall's three primary stores vacant and beginning a slow but steady process of store closings in the rear wing of the building. The entire rear wing was eventually closed-off, and the few remaining tenants were relocated to the front of the mall.
The mall soon began to fall into a state of disrepair, and the facility began to be perceived as a place of crime and violence among local residents, further reducing attendance. J. C. Penney relocated to Peachtree Mall the following year, leaving the mall with only a single anchor store. In 1999, the city of Columbus bought the facility, with the exception of the Sears building, and soon demolished the structure. Sears remained open as a stand-alone store, its former mall entrance walled-in, until the mid-2000s when a new Sears store opened in Columbus Park Crossing in North Columbus.
The site is now home to the Columbus Public Library which opened January 3, 2005. In January 2008, the Sears building was demolished to make room for a new Muscogee County School District administration building. This event put an end to the final chapter of the mall's history.
Read more about this topic: Columbus Square Mall
Famous quotes containing the word fall:
“Anyone who is kind to man knows the fragmentariness of most men, and wants to arrange a society of power in which men fall naturally into a collective wholeness, since they cannot have an individual wholeness. In this collective wholeness they will be fulfilled. But if they make efforts at individual fulfilment, they must fail for they are by nature fragmentary.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“They be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”
—Bible: New Testament Matthew 15:14.