Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Who Knew?

Prompted by a comment to yesterday's post, I decided to try and find out what happened to another Rockford mall, Colonial Village. Turns out there's a whole website devoted to those dinosaurs of youthful shopping pleasure, Deadmalls.com ! This cool site features personal reminisces of malls, lists of locations and stores, what led to their demise, ultimate fates, etc.
(Check out the Dictionary for a definition of Mallmanac). They also have a Machesney Park listing, perhaps I'll submit a little something for them as well!


For example:

Colonial Village Mall was sold to a church last year. Its two big stores were JC Penneys and Bergners. JC Penneys left a few years ago to a brand new addition at the CherryVale Mall in Rockford (about 5 miles away), and Bergners finally closed down this year.

It was a smaller mall with probably about 10 stores inside, and a few more stores attached outside. It also had a three or four screen theater separate from the mall. There was a large parking garage attached to the Bergners store. When I was a kid around 1977, My mother used to take us kids to see Santa there. I can remember Bergners, Penney's, Striderite, Fashion Bug, Swiss Colony, and an ice cream shop inside. (among a few other stores).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A tear came to my eye when I saw on the list of defunct stores the name Marshall Fields. sob! sob!

Anonymous said...

With all of that open real estate you would think someone would turn it in to something useful like housing, schools, or hospitals or something. Interesting sites!