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Randall Park Mall's most loyal patrons arrive hours before its stores even open. By 7:30 AM, dozens of mall walkers stride past the broken escalators and empty fountains and reminisce about the mall's better days -- years ago.
Dolores Rucker: This used to make pretzels here. That's been gone. This nail shop here this was here for a while, it's gone.
70-year-old Dolores Rucker has been walking the tiled floors of Randall Park Mall six days a week, nearly every week, since she retired 20 years ago.
Dolores Rucker: Business was booming 20 years ago. But now, look at it. If you've never been here to this mall, you would think there was never any stores.
When Randall Park opened in 1976, its developer claimed it was the world's biggest mall. At the opening night party, thousands of Clevelanders packed in, danced to the music of the Tommy Dorsey orchestra, drank champagne, and feasted on spinach and cheese crepes and 1,200 pounds of shrimp. Urban planner Jim Kastellic says with room for six department stores, and a hotel and race track nearby, Randall Park was a hot destination, at least for a while.
Jim Kastellic: It was truly a place that was well publicized, well marketed, tremendous dollars behind it and as a result it was a very successful endeavor. But as most retail establishments find, it's good for now, but eventually there will be someplace else to go.
Randall Park struggled with a reputation -- deserved or not -- as a hot place for car theft. Kastellic says that didn't help the mall compete with newer malls in outer suburbs.
Jim Kastellic: We are left with the shells of what was formerly a major success story as we develop more and more shopping centers further and further out.
But walking around Randall Park on the weekends, there is still life. A three piece band plays jazz that echoes across the nearly million square foot mall concourse. The musicians sit in a former clothing store, now a makeshift church.
C. Jay Matthews: Wherever you are in the building I want you to get up on your feet -- this is church in the mall, get up this is not your grandmother's church.
Reverend C. Jay Matthews opened Church N' The Mall to reach young adults. His main church, Mt. Sinai Baptist Ministries, sits a few miles away, in one of Cleveland's most crime-ridden neighborhoods. After presiding over funerals of young gun shot victims from local gang violence, he wanted to find a way to give young people a safe place to go.
C. Jay Matthews: We would love to purchase the mall if we could put together the resources, and we've had many people praying to that end.
Matthews says he and a group of investors are in talks with the mall's owner. Raleigh-based investor Hayword Whichard -- who bought the mall in 2004 for just under $6.4 million -- did not return calls to confirm. Matthew is mum on his plans, but did say if he gets the mall, he wants more unusual tenants like the vocational school that recently moved in. It trains students to fix boats and snowmobiles. Mathews says history has shown that stores don't work here anymore.
C. Jay Matthews: This is a resurrection. This is not redevelopment, this is resurrection. (laughs)
It's a resurrection mall walkers say they are eagerly awaiting. 87-year-old Otis Walker worked for one of the companies that built the mall forty years ago. On his daily morning walk, he watches one store after another disappear.
Otis Walker: After they finished the mall I thought it was the most beautiful thing. Boy, I tell you. And now it's just... nothing.
Walker hopes something will stop the downward slide. The mall manager now only comes in twice a week. The last escalator stopped working earlier this year, and no one's trying to fix it anymore. I'm Mhari Saito, 90.3.
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