They tore down the mall in my hometown. It was done in a matter of days, which didn’t seem possible for a place once so central to my community and my life. Back in the 1980s and 90s it was the epicenter of youth culture, the agora, the only place where anything was “happening” in that small Nebraska town. In my youth I could imagine its destruction only coming about as a calamity or crime like the burning of the Library of Alexandria. That this edifice of teenage delights could die by simply falling into ruins like the Roman Colosseum would have seemed impossible.
The thus aptly named Imperial Mall was where lawn mowing money got converted into baseball cards and hard summer labor detasseling in the corn fields became CDs from Musicland and games of NBA Jam at the Fun Factory arcade. As I grew older it was where I bought the books that defined my teenage identity. (I still remember the nod and sweet smile of recognition from the store owner when I requested that he order Kerouac’s On The Road for me. Rest in peace, Bernie Tushaus.) It’s where I made awkward conversations with girls I had crushes on outside of Herberger’s clothing store.
My cinematic education began at Video Kingdom, whose VHS tapes allowed me to see films that never played at the mall’s staid multiplex. But those three screens too were a theater of memory, of seeing Yoda die, my first rated R movie, of openly heckling the George Clooney Batman movie. It’s where I got my hair cut and bought my clothes when I no longer had to accept what was purchased for me by my mom at Kmart. Or just where I killed time with the smell of sweet popcorn from the Karmelkorn store ever in my nostrils, wandering about looking for some action, or what passed for action in the mind of a gawky altar boy.
By the time the wrecking ball came the Imperial Mall had long gone into decline and inevitable fall like so many once mighty empires. I registered the downfall with each passing year. Whenever I came back to my hometown to visit my family I always made sure to stop into the mall and get a contact high from my memories. Each time I returned that got harder and harder. For years the lights were dimmed to save money and more people treated it as an exercise track than a shopping center. A storefront church and weirdly the only credible Italian restaurant between Omaha and Denver stayed open to the bitter end, and little else. Like my hometown itself it was hard to believe the place had ever mattered.