Just before Christmas I came in to work at Remains Theatre–in the mall at 1800 N. Clybourn–and standing on the edge of the wishing well outside Goose Island Brewing was an exasperated maintenance man. He was leaning forward perilously over the water, rounding up pennies with a squeegee the size of a push broom. When he had a big enough pile he’d reach in and grab a handful of pennies and drop them in a bucket.
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All a lot of us knew about the new owner, a Mr. Charles Malk, was what we read in the newspapers. He wanted to buy the Ghost Town Shopping Mall, and he wanted all the tenants out. Or most of us. The papers said he wanted to tear half the place down. Maybe he’d learned in business school that if you have a mall that’s chronically half empty, all you have to do is tear half of it down to make it full.
Even the day after Thanksgiving, traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year, there seemed to be more employees than shoppers. After five years of operation, all the empty stores made the mall look like it was still under construction. The out-of-date store directories read like the Vietnam wall, listing casualties like State of the Mind Center and Scoop-de-do.
The deal went through right around Christmas. Rick Eckert, owner of Spare Parts, a women’s accessories store, had rented in the mall for five years. He says he never saw or talked to Malk and didn’t know what the plans were for his store until he got a written notice on Christmas Eve telling him to vacate immediately. He got out on New Year’s Eve. He’d been planning to get out then anyway because business had fallen off so badly since word got out that the mall was being demolished. A lot of people told him they thought it already had been demolished.
“It’s like a desert,” said one disgusted employee, adding that you can hear the drilling and hammering from the reconstruction inside Remains echoing through the cavernous atrium. Another employee complained that there’s no maintenance staff anymore and sometimes he finds himself picking up around the men’s room.
