I put up a gallery of photographs I took this afternoon over at Eastgate mall, now abandoned to the elements.
Eastgate was a social center of my formative years; it was THE shopping mall on our side of town forever and ever. In many ways, it marked a boundary as well, the city seemed to end at Eastgate- the land beyond was definitely terra incognito at that time.
Eastgate is where my brothers and sisters had their first jobs, where I bought my first girlfriend the first present I had ever purchased for anyone outside my family; the destination for informal dates; it was where we went back-to-school and Christmas shopping.
I’ve been driving by it daily, oblivious, for the most part, to it’s gradual decay, my mind seeing it as it always was, camouflaging the stark reality of its decomposition. I think I last shopped there about July of 2003, and I think it closed finally in 2004.
The outlots are thriving in their own way, and serve to hide the central decay from Washington street and Shadeland Avenue. Driving up Shortridge road, however, becomes a little like driving past a graveyard, the bare parking lots with weeds poking through every few feet like a vast grey-and-green sward, the yellowed walls of the shopping center becoming its own mausoleum.
I poked my face up to the locked doors to the food court looking through all the way to the other side, remembering chasing my son through the game arcade that used to be here when he was maybe 8 or 9 years old, the echoes of the little kiddie train that ran on the mall at Christmastime; the record store where a girl I had a crush on in high school worked; and wandering the Christmas-decorated stores with my first sweetheart.
The stores eventually scattered to other venues, as did my siblings and I. Still, I felt a pang of longing and sadness for the innocence of those times, now gone, like the very life of the mall.