Farewell, I guess.

I can't decide whether the Rhode Island Mall is a monument to survival or a place where commerce goes to die. It's been a ghost town since I moved here, with only the GNC, one of those stores that sell chain mail shirts and amulets, and that one DMV branch that was open for about 20 minutes on Saturdays, in addition to the anchors (Sears, Wal-Mart, and Kohl's). I'm told that back in the day, it was a bustling 80s-type mall with your Claire's, your Gap, and your Chess King, but today it's just a place for a few old people to walk. The escalators still work, even though they don't really lead to anything, there are photo booths for some reason, and it's church-silent because everything echoes deafeningly. But still, it's there. Last year's floods didn't touch it, while the Warwick Mall next door got hammered.

And now Stop & Shop, who's been quietly buying up all of the leases of the remaining stores, is kicking everyone but the anchors out, and the anchors won't even open up into the mall anymore. So what the hell is Stop & Shop going to do with it? Apparently, they don't even know yet, according to a waaaaaay too sappily nostalgic article about it in today's ProJo, which not only opens with a dumb non-question:

Who knew that footsteps could echo down Memory Lane inside a two-story enclosed mall.

but also calls old people out as liars:

While doing his 6 or 7 laps Thursday, Emelio DeFazio, 80, pretended not to care that the interior would be closed to walkers in less than two months.

“I’m going to buy a treadmill, anyway,” he said.

I say we seal it off for twenty years and then see what grows inside, like that abandoned book depository in Detroit.