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:
“I see His blood upon the rose,
And in the stars the glory of His eyes
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.”
—Joseph Mary Plunkett (1887–1916)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“I never heard a single expression of fondness for him fall from the lips of any of those who knew him well.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)