This past Friday night, my girlfriend Cailin went out, so I had our son Jack all alone. I wasn’t wild about the prospect of watching Thomas the Train on repeat, so I thought of things to do. I am devastated that I couldn’t make my friend Rita Marley’s going away/wig out party, but I was thinking that showing up with a raucous, manic, wild(almost)three year old might not be a good idea. Then again, Rita is one of my brother Patrick’s best friends, so it may not have been so bad after all. But I hit the open South Jersey road with Jack, and while he played Angry Birds on my itouch, I thought about a place we could wander around and explore. I was having a comically bad day on Friday, and the place I decided to visit certainly didn’t help matters. I took Jack to the Voorhees Town Center, the shopping destination formerly known as the Echelon Mall. Instead of a fun night out, I wound up depressed over a once glorious shopping mall.

The Echelon Mall wasn’t always a ghost town with tumbleweeds drifting down its empty corridors, in fact, it once was a bustling, active, happening place to go. It was always a welcome refuge for me, I liked it more than any other area mall. My closest mall, the Deptford Mall, always seemed to be home to some of the worst stores. Like Chess King, Merry Go Round, Denim Country, Denim Empire, Denim World, and Denim Universe. On top of that, in high school, we were warned that as Gloucester Catholic students, Deptford kids would kill us if we dared walk in. Well, they may not kill us, but would give us a miserable retail experience and possibly knock your tasty Cinna-Bon right out of your hands. I never understood the animosity these kids with flat top mullets and ugly black and yellow varsity football jackets had towards us. But I shyed away from that mall for the reasons of avoiding a beat down, and that I already owned enough denim.

When I was a young kid in the 80’s, my parents would take us to “art lessons” there. They had a place in the mall that was sort of a babysitting service run by these two older folks named Mr. and Mrs. Micelli. For a few bucks you could leave your kids there, and they had all sorts of drawing materials to use and Mr. Micelli would teach everyone how to draw things from time to time. We loved going, but we also loved trying to sneak out to escape to the arcade or the Wall to Wall Sound and Video music shop. The arcade was such a forbidden place, but I could usually convince my parents to let me browse the record store for a few minutes after the art lessons. I was fascinated by all the new cassettes and albums, all the posters on the wall of rock bands, and by the eight foot tall hair of the teenage girls in there.  

The Echelon Mall’s heyday, in my opinion, was smack dab in my high school years in 1993. They had a second run movie theater that cost $1.50 a ticket and two bucks for a bottomless tub of greasy buttery delicious popcorn. To name a few I saw “Reality Bites” and  ”Ace Ventura” there, and the $1.50 price is the only way I can explain that I saw “Cool Runnings” five times in the theaters. That theater alone was host to quite a bit of history for me, back in my childhood I saw “Christmas Story” there when it was out in 1983, and I saw “The Goonies” there in 1985 (still, after all these years, one of the greatest days of my life). My friends and I would harass the pimply wise cracking dude who worked the concession stands, then go into the movie and make stupid comments out loud throughout the picture. There was also an indoor roller coaster and arcade in a place called “Exhilarama”. To this day, I don’t know how that place didn’t last – it was awesome. There was also a restaurant semi detached from the mall called “The Modern Rock Café”, and yes, it was a half-assed Hard Rock Café. But it was a cool place, played great music, and with the movie theater and Exhilarama next door, that area was always abuzz on a weekend night. I clearly remember standing outside on a cool spring night in 1993, looking around at all the people, and hearing the Gin Blossoms “Hey Jealousy”. For some reason, I told myself it was a moment and scene I always want to remember, and it still plays vividly in my memory.

It wasn’t like we hung out there every weekend or anything like that, but for me it was a fun place to go. I once took my parent’s 1971 Ford Maverick out for a spin with my friends JoJo and Burks. It was an exhilarating trip because I did not yet legally have my license. And where did we decide to joyride to? The Echelon Mall. I always marveled at the opportunity to meet girls from exotic, faraway towns like Startford, Somerdale, or Voorhees and getting shot down by girls in this “New World” was somehow not as upsetting as getting shot down by girls I went to school with.

But then we started the ritual of underage drinking and going to parties, and our trips were more and more seldom. This next statement will be very hard to believe if you know me personally, but I actually had more fun doing innocent things like stealing my parents car and going to see Cool Runnings for 1.50. Plus, going to a party where there was 50 guys and 5 girls (who were girlfriends of 5 of the 50 guys) and paying some weaselly guy in my class 5 bucks for a few warm Busch Lights wasn’t really my idea of a good time.   

The years went by and I was away at college in Maryland drinking all the warm Milwaukee Best’s I could get my hands on. And while we did occasionally go the Mall on breaks, the Modern Rock Café and Exhilarama both closed, and the movie theater was now a whopping two dollars per show. But then, in 2000 I worked very close to the Mall and went for lunch almost every day. Even then, the Mall was doing OK. There was a new Sears, and I can remember a few new stores coming in but these would be the last good days of the Echelon Mall. A year later, the fancy pants upscale Promenade shops opened a few miles away, filled with a Gap, J Crew, and other high end stores like LL Bean for the granola munching crowd. According to who you ask, this was the downfall of the mall. It also didn’t help that the mall was on no major road, it is kind of nestled in an area that is a mile or two from any major road or highway.

Shops started shuttering their doors left and right, and every time I visited, there would be fewer and fewer stores. At one point, an entire wing was basically deserted. You can see some pictures of that and read about the mall more here. Soon, the movie theater closed, 75% of the mall was vacant, and the Sears that was built only a few years prior was demolished. It was in dire circumstance. There were rumors that a Walmart would be built there to help things out, but that idea was fought against and shot down. Then, the company that owns the mall changed the name to the Voorhees Town Center. I can just imagine the synergy and buzzwords thrown around the corporate boardroom that surely contained some “consultant” cradling a Starbucks cup with a blue tooth lodged in his ear. They announced that there would be condos built, a neighborhood feel in the air to be created, and that half the mall and the JC Penney’s was being chopped off. This was now leaving the mall at less than half of its former self and with a new name, chopping off the memory of Echelon Mall.       

I had a foolish sense of optimism that good things were happening now. Boy was I wrong. In my few trips back since the adoption of the new name, stores are still leaving. On a day off about a year ago, I let Jack out of his stroller (normally that brings on instant chaos) and let him run wild through the mall, we practically had the whole place to ourselves. Even the food court, which seemed to weather the storm thanks to the lunch crowd from local businesses, has lost a bunch of eateries. There was a new place called “Krazy City”, (you know it’s really crazy when they spell it with a K) that was kind of like a Dave and Busters for kids that has since closed and is now renamed Tilt. On Friday night, there were about 10 people in the place. As Jack and I walked around, I may have counted 30 people in the entire mall, I gave the cherubic faced security guard a knowing smile that said “dude, you have the easiest job on earth”.  Instead of new stores coming in, places are still closing! There was an Aeropastale when I visited a few months ago, and that is now gone. The Spencer’s Gift store is also closing and was advertising 90% off everything in the store, so one could purchase chocolate panties, furry handcuffs, and Slipknot t-shirts for mere pennies.

We left the mall and headed down the road to what is know known as Cooper Town Center that was previously a dying shopping center called Lion’s Head Plaza. Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s it was at full capacity with a movie theater and a Caldor where I purchased NWA “Straight Outta Compton” and Eazy-E “Eazy Duz It” in 1988. The movie theater hung on, but the rest of the place was practically empty. When we went to see the opening midnight showing of “Pineapple Express” a few summers back, we literally had a rock concert tailgate going, and were not the only ones doing that. The place was so empty, cops didn’t bother to check on almost a hundred dudes chugging beers in a movie theater parking lot. Now it’s a different story, to add insult to injury to the Echelon Mall, the Lion’s Head Plaza brought in a WalMart and a name change. And Friday night, when I pulled into the lot, I hadn’t seen the place that rocking in about fifteen years. It is all redone, and new stores are filling in the blanks. I guess here is where I am supposed to take a political stance and say that WalMart is evil, but I won’t because my brother-in-law works for their government affairs office, and also WalMart saves me tons of money. And besides the fact that I am not political, I don’t have the money or time to “take a stand” against anything. You can argue with me on this, but I will take the same action as I do when people tell me Sammy Haggar was better than David Lee Roth in Van Halen, I am just not going to hear it.    

So yes, for some odd reason it is upsetting for me to see the decline of the Echelon Mall and another piece of my history withering away. Maybe it would have been a fun place for Jack to go when he gets older. Then again, by the time he is a teenager, kids may be teleporting themselves to Mars or maybe hanging out with robots. But I guess I just miss the good ol’ days of seeing “Cool Runnings” in a rundown movie theater for a buck fifty.

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