The Northland Mall in Columbus, Ohio: End of the Line

Background

          There are a lot of cities and towns in America... anyone knows this, yet there are only a few that commonly come into context on Trip to the Mall, Chicago, Indianapolis, Detroit, St. Louis, and Columbus, Ohio just to name a few, basically I cover an extensive retail history of the Mid-West and Northeast. That being said, I love the city of Columbus, Ohio, being central Ohio, and the capital of the state, containing the headquarters of Wendy's and Ohio State, there is a lot of stuff to be proud of living in Franklin County.

          There are a lot of shopping possibilities, the Easton Plaza, and Polaris Fashion Place, some of the newest and most popular shopping destinations, not to mention other regional malls thought the city and around the Jack Nicklaus Freeway.

          A mall I know well from stories of my Dad during his time living and working around the city, knows the malls well, and I find it to be great, hearing tales of shopping at Lazarus and Gold Circle, going to Hechinger and Child World, this would be any family outing of the 90's.

          These amazing pictures are provided by TallGeorge, which also had a great collection of Big Bear grocery store photos of the locations, which was a local chain that closed in 2004 and the famous Graceland Shopping Center, both of which I will post about in a short time.

(Forgive me if some of the same pictures appeared more than once, I tried to get all of them in order from before and after demo.)

As the story goes

          Northland Mall was the first enclosed shopping mall in the area, opening in 1964, and coming to a close around 2002. TallGeorge says "the mall enclosed mall in the nation", which isn't correct, but really, when was the first mall, in Kansas City in 1933, or Edina, Minnesota, in 1951, isn't any cluster of stores, open air or enclosed, a mall? Anyway, These pictures are from 2003, and early 2004, when demolition took place.

There was the fixture sale going on when the pictures were taken.

Former Lazarus, never got to become Macy's...thank god:)

Retro looking old Sears entrance

Old bank building

Old cinema

Mall map

Waldenbooks

Check out After Thoughts in the back.

Food Court

Do not know when Sears closed, or if and when they received a new logo, but the scar can be seen on the far left of the picture.

Here comes the demolition

Seen in the back is Kohl's (originally Gold Circle) and Kroger, I have driven here before in 2013, always wanted to go back, but the Kohl's has closed, there was a Staples, also closed, and the Kroger seemed to expand some time ago.

Here is the aerial view of the mall before it closed.

          Definitely some great pictures and a great time looking at them and writing about them with the information provided by TallGeorge and my Dad, and putting my spin on what I think of the mall, and for the most part, how the retail part of Columbus has ultimately changed over the decades, and I'm sure will make for a rather interesting post or even aired podcast soon, what do you think?

Thank you for reading and remember to check out Trip to the Mall on Facebook.