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A mall no more
By CURTIS KRUEGER, Times Staff Writer CLEARWATER -- For Tom and Catherine Davis and everyone else who loved Clearwater Mall, Thursday was the day the Muzak died. At noon, workers taped up green fliers announcing the mall had officially closed. Only a few minutes before, the Davises finished their last daily walk around the mall, looking wistful as they passed a hundred empty stores and strolled down cavernous, silent, white-tiled corridors. "It's sad, and it's a complete waste of money," said Tom Davis, 85, who has been visiting the mall with his wife for 21 years on their winter stays in Clearwater. "It's killing me," said security guard Armando Villarreal, as he locked the front doors for the last time. Opened in 1973 at the corner of U.S. 19 and Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard, Clearwater Mall became one of the first big enclosed malls in the Tampa Bay area. Its opening brought a wave of excitement into Clearwater. For teenagers and older folks, the smaller Sunshine Mall on Missouri Avenue in Clearwater already had become a hangout, but Clearwater Mall offered more stores and higher-end wares. "At that time it was the greatest thing that ever happened because there was no Countryside Mall or anything like that," said Michael Proia, whose beauty salon Michael Anthony's opened in the first phase of the mall, a separate building that also housed the movie theaters. "Everyone was just wild about getting in there. I was excited about it." "It was like finally, little Clearwater coming of age," said Charles LeCher, Clearwater's mayor in the late 1970s and early '80s. "This made us look like we really were becoming a cosmopolitan area and we were all proud of it." In addition to the stores and the food court, promotional directors dreamed up dozens of community events to pack in customers even tighter than normal. "They'd have "Meet the Candidates' night and it was packed," said LeCher. He also remembers the mall's annual Florida Strawberry Festival preview, and winning a contest by eating 28 pieces of strawberry shortcake. Hundreds streamed inside in 1980 to see television personality Bob Eubanks stage a version of The Newlywed Game, a popular show of the time. Growing up in the 1970s, Sandra Hancock remembers when "that was the only place to go." And later, the mall became the spot for the annual visit to Santa Claus with her children, who are 12, 8 and 4. The mall was built long before there was a U.S. 19 flyover at Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard, before the string of chain restaurants appeared across the street and before the owners of another Clearwater landmark, Hooters, opened their first restaurant nearby. The big stores in the early days included Gayfers and Burdines. As Clearwater Mall thrived, along with others around the country, malls began to get blamed for killing downtowns, robbing business away from the old center city department stores and smaller shops. These days, malls are killing each other, as the Clearwater Mall saga shows. Sunshine Mall is long gone. When Clearwater Mall lost two of its anchor stores, Gayfers and Dillard's, in 1998 and 1999 shoppers dwindled and dozens more stores exited. Countryside Mall, about 5 miles north at the corner of U.S. 19 and State Road 580, won the mall battle of northern Pinellas County. Now Clearwater Mall will be torn down and developed into some sort of new retail complex, probably "more of an open-air shopping village," says Lisa Brock, spokeswoman for the Sembler Co., which is developing the property. No leases have been signed, but it's possible the new facility could open as early as the summer of 2003. But the memories of a bustling Clearwater mall still are fresh for many, who find it hard to understand why a large, air-conditioned, well-maintained building now must be torn down. "It's like somebody dying almost. Not as emotional, but kind of like that," said Joanna Daskal, who spent Thursday morning cleaning out her former jewelry store, Gianni's. She has been a business owner at the mall for three years and a shopper there for 22. Now she has opened a new store in International Plaza "but this is home." "There's so many people in this world that could use the money that they're wasting," said Davis, the man who took his final Clearwater Mall walk Thursday, and who is a retired department store carpet salesman from Ohio. "It's like losing a child," said Frank Mudano, 73, an architect who designed Clearwater Mall, Sunshine Mall, Countryside Mall and Seminole Mall. As he sees it, "I think it was simply a matter of the thing self destructing without anyone really making an honest effort to revitalize it with a new tenant lineup." Designing all those malls as he did, he did not expect to see some of them torn down at a relatively young age. He understands the shifting demands of consumer tastes, and said he's confident the Sembler Co. will build a first-rate complex to replace the old mall. Nonetheless, he said, "as each of these things has been blown away, it just made me sick." "It's like the auto industry -- each year's got to be bigger and better, with new colors."
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