There’s really not a whole lot to do anymore, these days. If I don’t already have something to do, some chore, some engagement, or some task that already needs to be done, I’m typically crippled by boredom and not knowing what to do with my day.
This epidemic seems to be three times as bad up in Northern Virginia, in my old stomping grounds. There really isn’t anything to do up here, like at all. Maybe I’m at the age where there doesn’t feel like there’s anything to do outside of the house or work these days in general, but it seems compounded while I’m up here. So Huzzard and I decided to go talk a walk through Springfield Mall, which was the place to go throughout our teenage years.
I mean we all saw it happen, and we know how it happened and that it was happening, but damn, words can’t really express just how much the place has died. Thankfully, there are pictures. The fact that it’s still open at all is pretty amazing in its own right, but at this point, it would probably best if the place were humanely euthanized than go through existence like this.
Keep in mind, today’s date is December 10th, two weeks a day, fifteen days away from the most commercial occasion in the world, Christmas. In spite of the craze of holiday shopping throughout our capitalist society, here we have a shopping mall whose parking lot is as deserted as the Sahara Desert.
When I worked at Springfield Mall back in like 1998, and during the Christmas season, finding any parking at all was like trying to find a legitimate Tickle-Me Elmo doll in Hong Kong. Seriously, there were shouting matches, physical threats, and although I didn’t witness/partake in any myself, probably physical violence over the parking situation in this exact area during the holidays 10+ years ago.
Upon entering Springfield Mall, this is what I was greeted with – absolutely nothing. Literally, this is the exact view my eyes saw as my camera was able to capture upon entering the mall. There is absolutely zero stores even visible upon entering. And I’m not talking about stores that aren’t open, I’m talking about stores that even exist.
These long corridors of plain white walls are even a development from back two years ago, when the last time I was at Springfield Mall. Back then, all the store fronts were covered by crude sheets of plywood, and they were covered in posters, construction signage, and other miscellaneous coverings that made it look like an indoor alleyway than a shopping mall.
Upon reaching the very first intersection in the mall, I ran into the first glimpses of actual commerce commencing in real time. Up ahead is the back entrance to Time Out, the arcade that has amazingly managed to survive in spite of pretty much absolutely everything else withering away and dying in this dismal place. Not pictured in this photograph behind me is Modells, a sporting goods store, and one of six documented stores in Springfield Mall where someone could buy Air Jordans.
Being the holiday season, there was question on whether or not Springfield Mall would manage to have a mall Santa at all, given the fact that it was Springfield Mall. To answer the question is that yes, they sort of have a mall Santa. I say sort of, because looking at Santa from above, it’s evident that he’s one of the Santas that’s not really doing it because he’s in the spirit of the holidays and likes children, he’s more like the Santa that’s doing it, because he really really needs the paycheck, and the fact that he’s at Springfield Mall instead of Fair Oaks or Tysons, means that as far as mall Santas are concerned, he’s definitely hit rock bottom.
To the eleven o’clock positioning of this photo, used to be a Sports Authority, one of the four anchor stores of Springfield Mall. And I use the term anchor store loosely, because this particular location was always somewhat of a conundrum. It was the very center of the entire mall, accessible from three different routes, but for some reason, it was always the worst anchor of the entire place. Once it was a Borders, only accessible from the outside, and then it became a Sports Authority, only accessible from the inside. But unlike the JcPenney, Macy’s, or Mongtomery Ward-now-Target, was this anchor ever accessible from both.
But the fact that an anchor closed down is pretty sad in its own right.
It was tricky to accomplish, but I managed to get a picture of Springfield Mall, where it actually still looked like a functional place of business and life, instead of the drab shell of a commercial zone it really is. Regardless of the fact that there are stores visible as far as the eye can see in this picture, it’s still December, and pretty much any shopping mall in America this time of year has about 100 times the human bodies moving about than in this picture.
Never mind the fact that I had to strategically use one of the columns in the background to partially obscure the one dead store that still made the shot, because in truth, I think there’s not a single place here that can be made to look like there’s not a single dead store visible.
This creepily narrow long corridor once used to have at least anywhere from 4-8 stores down it back in Springfield Mall’s heydays. Towards the end of it was one of the Suncoast/Sam Goody’s media stores, and the start of the second food court. There was a redcorn store where I got my earrings I used for my Tasuki costume way back in the day.
There was also a maternity store on the left wall at some point in history; and the fact that it’s not there anymore, kills half of the Chris Rock joke of what makes a mall a black mall – baby clothes and shoe stores. Springfield Mall still has six shoe stores (more if you include the fact that Target, JcPenney and Macy’s sell shoes too), but even the baby clothes stores couldn’t survive in this kind of environment.
I wonder how many rapes have happened at the end of this corridor?
Springfield Mall used to be such a bustling place at one point, where they could justify having a second food court that was once here. There was an actual sit down restaurant at the right side of the end of his hallway which is naturally no longer there, and the old laser tag/arcade Planet Play used to be on the end of the left side. It turned into Q-ZAR, and was technically the third arcade on the premises, but it too, died eventually.
Jokingly, I said that I wanted to take one of the mall maps with me. Tear that shit right off the wall, and keep as a big sticky-backed vinyl keepsake of what was a big part of my teenage adolescence. At closer inspection, I couldn’t help but notice that throughout the last few years, Springfield Mall simply just covered up the previous iteration of the mall map, complete with updated (dwindling) rosters of stores. Currently, we were at map #6, to show just how few stores really were left.
There’s something romantically poetic about Springfield Mall having a Things Remembered store inside of it. Because I remembered when Springfield Mall was a pretty baller place where I spent countless hours of my life, and was possibly the epicenter of my social life before I moved to Atlanta.
I don’t know why I really took this picture, but it just seemed funny to me. “VABAG” is a funny, sort of dirty looking word that suffered the perils of poor kerning in sign placement. I guess the owners cheaped out, and despite having more than enough space to have written out “VIRGINIA BAG,” I guess the extra six lighting letters was too much an expense.
At one point, Springfield Mall used to have two movie theaters in it. One of which used to be here, where this gigantic wall was covering. The fact that both are dead is kind of sad to me, because I remember so many of the movies I saw in this place. Office Space, Star Wars: Episode I, Bride of Chucky, 8mm, John Carpenter’s Vampires, Apt Pupil, and countless others. I remembered how awesome I felt when I was 17, and was able to get my own damn R-rated tickets, without having someone get them for me.
If I recall correctly, the last ever flick I ever saw here was an employee’s only screening of Silent Hill. Way to end on such a “high” note.
The significance of this picture is to show that down TWO straight corridors is a stretch where there was absolutely zero stores visible, save for the aforementioned Modell’s. To my immediate right used to be a Kemp Mill music store where they overcharged for pretty much everything, but they were a Ticketmaster outlet, and for some reason, managed to get occasional celebrities to appear there.
A long time ago, during the wrestling craze, Kemp Mill also managed to get Sting and Lex Luger to appear there, where I heard that Luger was a monumental douchebag, but Sting was as gracious as could be with the fans. Strange to know that the two of them are such great friends regardless of their treatment of the fans.
It just seems so appropriate that there’s a police precinct in Springfield Mall itself now. Kind of ironic too, considering I would have figured it would have been necessary when people actually came to this mall. But I guess when the place is such a ghetto that champions such degenerate nature, it’s important to have the fuzz nearby on site when the shit gets real.
For some unknown reason, there’s a stretch of the mall that has about 25 feet of nice flooring. On the other side of this hallway is an Express store, but it’s kind of puzzling that one store would go through the trouble, or be worthy enough to get their own style of flooring directly in front of it, while the rest of the mall remains with the dated, fast-food chain style of tiled flooring.
Even more puzzling is the fact that supposedly Springfield Mall will be ultimately restructured/rebuilt as “Springfield Town Center,” to which I have no idea how that’s going to play out. Amazing how terms like “Town Center,” “Towne Center,” “Towne Centre,” and “Station” have come to simply replace “mall,” as if the word mall has become something taboo and embarrassing that it’s being phased out at every opportunity.
THIS IS NOT AN EXIT. One of my favorite lines from Bret Easton Ellis’ work. But these two doors are in a location where when I worked directly adjacent to this area, was only one door, and it was not even an exit at all. It led to a really shitty bathroom, that always smelled like piss, because people are fucking retards and don’t know how to use the bathroom without getting it all over the place like an animal marking its territory.
That door might have not been an exit, but on that note, it was time for us to get the fuck out of such a dismal, depressing place. For the last few years, we had talked about how we should go there at some point, but we never actually took the effort to do so until today. And man, we knew the place was a dying property, but even still, it is still amazing to see just how far the once mighty had fallen.
Even on a Saturday afternoon two weeks before Christmas, the place was absolutely a ghost town. Online shopping has to do with a lot of the dwindling numbers actually physically shopping, but the truth of the matter is that Springfield Mall simply doesn’t have anything worth coming out for anymore. No toy stores left at all, no unique dining, and very few notable stores at name’s worth.
It was an amusing and entertaining way to pass a few hours on a boring Northern Virginia afternoon, but I still can’t help but feel a little bit melancholy at seeing what a major part of my adolescence has become.
