To quote a great American philosopher,
“Oops...I did it again”.
Sigh.
All this year I've been writing about a
strange habit I've picked up, the habit of writing newspaper articles
for the History Center, turning them in, and then promptly forgetting
about them until weeks later when I open the paper and am shocked by
what I see.
I'm thinking that maybe I should just
stop reading the Mining Journal. That way I won't be shocked by
myself.
8-)
So I'll once again re-purpose something
I wrote weeks ago and then totally put out of my mind. This time of
the year, we can always consider it the gift that keeps on giving.
That's okay. You can thank me later.
(jim@wmqt.com)
*****
Let’s Go To The Mall
By Jim Koski
Marquette Regional History Center
Up
until the early 1970s downtown was the center of Marquette commerce.
From national chain stores
to mom & pop outlets, from banks to grocery stores, when you
needed to buy something, including
all the holiday shopping one usually does this time of the year,
you went “downtown”.
That
all changed when the Marquette Mall opened.
In
1971 three developers announced plans to build one of the UP's first
enclosed shopping malls on the city's west side. That area of
Marquette
was being rapidly developed, and in the previous few years had seen
the building of several major projects, including a Holiday Inn and a
ShopKo store. The Marquette Mall, sitting right alongside
US-41, was
set to cost four point six million dollars, and in promotional
materials was
being labeled “a park under a roof” with plans for up to 40
stores inside
and free parking for almost 2,000 vehicles outside.
Construction
started on the Mall in
early
1973. Just a few
months
later, several stores had
already opened,
while the
Mall itself held a grand opening November 7th,
1973, set to coincide
with the public
unveiling of
its main anchor store, Woolworth's. To reinforce the “park”
theme of the new facility, palm trees from Florida were flown in for
the event, while live music was offered while shoppers explored what
the mall had to offer.
Woolworth's,
which took up almost
40% of the project’s
total square footage,
was just one of the businesses
that relocated from downtown Marquette.
The other mall anchor, Angeli's Super Valu, also made the move west,
as did other
stores ranging from Stern & Fields Clothing and Jean’s Jewelry
to The Sound Center.
The
opening of the mall had an immediate impact on local shopping habits.
With so many stores under one roof consumers no longer had to make
their way through bad weather or traffic going from store to store on
Washington and Front Streets.
That soon led to an exodus of department and grocery stores and
other shops from the downtown area. The mall's center court also
offered a gathering place for many different community activities,
ranging from exhibitions by the Boy Scouts and radio fundraising
telethons to a visit in 1978
by
then Vice President Walter Mondale.
However, the
heyday of the Marquette Mall didn't last for long. The
Mall didn't
have the high ceilings and wide aisles of most malls, and the store
that took up almost
half the space of
the building, Woolworth's, only had about half the sales per square
foot of other area department stores like ShopKo or K-Mart. When the
Westwood Plaza
expanded into the Westwood Mall
in
the late 1980s many Marquette
Mall stores
and shoppers migrated there. It was just a few years later that
both
original Marquette Mall anchor stores–Woolworth’s
and Angeli’s–closed,
and traffic in the facility fell drastically.
By
the turn of the 21st century the mall had undergone several ownership
changes, and large sections of it
were closed
off to the public. In fact, the biggest tenant remaining in the
building was a car dealership run by the mall’s
then-owners.
Once that dealership relocated to Marquette Township, most of the
original mall building was torn down. All that's left today is an
empty space in
the section of the building that used to be Woolworth's, along with
an empty restaurant building
and a still functioning car wash in
what’s left
of the
parking lot. But during its
heyday in the 70s and 80s,
the Marquette Mall had a big impact. For the most part, Marquette
area shoppers no longer went downtown to do your Christmas shopping
or pick up whatever
essentials you
needed. Instead, you just hopped into your car, and you “went to
the mall”.
