June 7, 2011

Abandoned Places, Forgotten Spaces: Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio





An excellent article about Rolling Acres from the personal experiences of a former patron who loved it there.

5 comments:

  1. We had a two "malls" by us - one was your typical late 50s, early 60s shopping center, all entrances from the parking lots and names of the stores hung above their doors. It's death knell rang when the newest "mall" opened a mile away.

    For a while, the new mall was great, but both went the way of the wrecker. That guy said it perfectly...they killed my youth.

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  2. I found the first essay to be particularly good. I loved his final observation: we save things in the name of "history," but whose history gets saved, and who makes that decision?

    I went back to Ohio, but the city was gone...

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  3. I spent a good deal of my teen years carousing Rolling Acres.
    I find these photos very ghostly indeed....

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  4. I really feel that some of these treasures should be saved, especially in their 1970s state, for historic interest. There is clearly more than one history, and it is probably a kind of arbitrary elitism that considers something a landmark merely because it was built in the 19th century or under the WPA in the 1930s.

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