The soon-to-be-demolished former Rolling Acres Mall today is a far cry from the mall when it first opened and flourished.
Beacon Journal photo archives show packed parking lots with no room for cars and the more than 1 million-square-foot mall’s corridors filled with shoppers.
A newspaper advertisement touting the mall’s grand opening on Aug. 6, 1975, invited shoppers to “discover how 95 acres of Simon Perkins territory has been converted into a shopping center that will be unrivalled [sic] in all this country: with 5 department stores and, as presently programmed, a total of 120 shops geared to your needs and desires.”
It would be Northeast Ohio’s second-largest indoor mall.
Ron Tichon Sr. remembers being a young adult when the mall opened.
“We would pick up my grandpa and head over and have dinner there at the York Steak House with the family. We would all walk through the mall and window shop and do some shopping there,” said Tichon, now 61, who grew up in Tallmadge and now lives in Akron.
“That was the mall to be at. It was fresh, it was very vibrant. A lot of people were there. It was just the place to be ... You went through the mall and enjoyed the fact of being there and the beautiful fountain in the center,” Tichon said.
Greg Torre, Jr., 30, has many memories at the mall as a little kid and teen.
“I went there with family, I went there by myself. We watched movies, we went to the candy store and arcade,” said Torre, an Akron resident who has been filming the decline of the mall for documentaries he’s produced. Torre recently was featured in the TV network Viceland’s “Ghostland” episode of a new series called Abandoned.
Torre said when he was a student at Kenmore High School, he and other students would skip school and go hang out at the Aladdin’s Castle arcade.
But Rolling Acres gradually began to suffer and decline — some say unfairly — amid a mix of urban legend and crime.
Tichon, who later would regularly take his children to Montgomery Ward and the mall and movie theater in the early 1980s, said he stopped feeling the mall was safe for his kids and went instead to Chapel Hill and Summit malls.
Torre said he continued going, but watched the decline of people going to the mall and the physical deterioration of its interior even before it officially closed in October 2008.
“From 2000 until it closed in 2008, it was terrible. It was dilapidated,” he said.
String of owners
After Forest City Enterprises built and owned the mall for 25 years, it has had a long string of owners.
Forest City Enterprises first sold the mall for $33.5 million to Bankers Trust Corp. of New York in 2000.
The Whichard Group, a mall developer from Raleigh, N.C., bought the mall in 2002 for a startling fraction of the first purchase price: $2.75 million.
Invest Commercial of Beverly Hills, Calif., bought the mall for $1.7 million in 2006. Within four months, the property was back on the market for $4.9 million. The firm failed to get any bids for a listed opening price of $2.5 million at auction in 2009.
Premier Ventures bought the inside of the mall and the surrounding nearly 50 acres for $3 million in 2010.
But by the time Premier bought the mall, it was already closed and behind in taxes.
The inside of Rolling Acres closed in 2008 when electricity was about to be turned off for nonpayment. A man died in 2011 when he attempted to steal copper wiring.
Premier would never pay property taxes on the mall.
The city of Akron became the owner of the interior of the mall and about 50 acres around it in June after Summit County foreclosed on the mall owner after eight years of legal maneuvering.
In his first tour of the closed mall, full of glass, debris and mold, Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan said it was clear the mall with the “apocalyptic feel” needed to be demolished.
Demolition pending
That demolition will begin soon, said Brad Beckert, city development engineering manager in the mayor’s office of economic development.
Asbestos first needed to be removed from the interior of the mall and that is complete, said Beckert.
He anticipates that Eslich Wrecking Co. of Louisville will begin demolition in mid- to late October.
But don’t expect any dramatic use of wrecking balls or dynamite for the demolition.
That’s because there are still four former department stores now owned privately with businesses occupying the space that need to be preserved, said Beckert. The former J.C. Penney building has been donated to the city by the retailer and will be demolished, Beckert said.
Eslich, which is being paid $300,000 for the demolition, needs to separate the former department stores from the main building. Eslich crews successfully separated and demolished the former Stage Left building next to the Akron Civic Theatre earlier this year.
“They have to be like a surgeon. They have to really go in and do it meticulously. They’ll start in the back and work their way and separate the building and keep going down and pull the debris as they go,” Beckert said.
Construction fences will be put up around the demolition and Beckert said “anybody caught after hours when the contractor is not working can be arrested.”
Beckert said there is a possibility that the concrete could be ground on site and used to fill in the lower level.
“We’ll see how good it is and how it separates and how much rebar there is. That would be the perfect storm for the concrete to be recycled and fill in the void,” he said.
Crews will also probably break up the floor in the basement food-court level and tear out the stores “so it doesn’t hold water and become a swimming pool, then they’d fill it in with some concrete,” he said.
The demolition itself will probably take three weeks, but Beckert anticipates it will take a total of eight to 10 weeks to finish the job.
The city is still open to proposals for what’s next for the Rolling Acres land, Beckert said, acknowledging that many have discussed an industrial park, though there have been other proposals, such as a massive youth sports complex. “We really haven’t gotten too many proposals yet.”
The former department store owners “are thrilled we’re taking the mall down. None of them want to leave,” said Beckert. The city is not interested in buying any of their facilities and “some of them have asked about expanding. That’s an idea,” he said.
Thinking of the once-bustling mall’s decline and impending demolition is “just depressing,” Tichon said. “It’s so sad. It was such a vibrant area.”
Torre said he’ll be a little sad when the mall comes down, “but what I realize is that where the emotions come from, where everyone has their attachment, including me, too, is not the brick and mortar building itself. It’s what you’ve taken from there mentally, your experiences there. That’s what people are attached to. The brick and mortar can come down. That’s inevitable.”
Betty Lin-Fisher can be reached at 330-996-3724 or blinfisher@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her @blinfisherABJ on Twitter or www.facebook.com/BettyLinFisherABJ.