The end of North Hills Mall

Okay, so it is not the end of North Hills Mall, since that happened a number of years ago. But tonight on the news they said it was actually going to be torn down. It is in violation of some code, it's a hazard of some sort, and the owners have about two months to have it demolished.

The building has only been totally vacant for about two years. I don't remember how long ago the mall closed, but they kept trying to do something else with it for a while. I think for a time part of the movie theater was converted to have live plays, but I never went there to see any. I can't imagine that the place is falling down or anything like that already, and I think the building is only thirty years old anyway. It seems so wasteful to tear it down. Surely it could be fixed up and made into something else.

The really odd thing about the whole North Hills Mall thing, is that it is about a mile away from the North East Mall, which is so busy that about ten years ago they evicted people from their homes to add on to the mall and make more parking spaces and two new shopping centers.

Both malls are located right where three freeways converge. North Hills Mall is in North Richland Hills, and North East Mall is in Hurst. If it were not for all of the bridges and overpasses in the way, you could probably see one mall while standing in front of the other. And I believe that they were both built at about the same time. The North East Mall was the larger mall, with the standard anchor stores such as Sears and Wards and Dillard's, while the North Hills Mall had some less familiar anchor stores that were maybe supposed to be a bit more high-scale. And the North Hills Mall had a Luby's Cafeteria and a food court right near the main entrance, while the North East Mall originally sold food throughout the mall. Both originally had movie theaters, though not of the same company.

Funny thing, but when I was a kid, I never realized that the two malls were right next to each other like that. I mean, they are not actually on the same freeway, and you can't see one while you are in the parking lot of the other one. And when I was a kid going to the mall, I was too busy talking in the back seat to pay attention to where were were driving. And we never went to both malls on the same day, so it was about ten years before I knew where they were in relation to each other. When I was younger, I preferred the smaller mall, since both had movie theaters, but only the smaller one had the food court. And I didn't care one way or the other about the anchor stores. I liked the smaller stores and candle shops, and things of that kind were in both malls.

But the North East Mall, the one that was larger to start with, continued to grow despite the closing of Wards and later the United Artists movie theater. The North Hills Mall also lost one of its anchor stores, and it seemed to be in rapid decline after that.

Anyway, it just never made sense to me why the people at the North East Mall didn't just buy out the smaller mall and fix that up rather than evict people from their homes to add on the mall they already had. So the little mall is about to be demolished, and the stores nearby are also losing business and closing, while the larger mall just gets larger and the traffic becomes more of a hassle. I just don't get it.