Tom Barlow’s Blogging Ohio has a great post “Dead Ohio Malls Remembered“, in which he 
laments how even as a non-shopper the list has changed. And I’m sure Mr. Barlow read the same article as we did on the fate of Columbus’ City Center Mall in the Christmas Eve edition of the Columbus Dispatch and collected the list from DeadMalls.com.
Barlow makes a great point that the second-half of the 20th century may go down as the era of the shopping mall.
We saw it develop with the residential shopping malls entering the suburbs to replace the community markets, and then the emergence of the downtown “showplaces” and we’ve now come full-circle to malls the resemble community markets.
And Columbus has seen this as well as any of the other local communities. Northland Mall “was the place to be” for the longest time, but then it was replaced by City Center and both of them have been made obsolete by Polaris Fashion Place and Easton Town Center malls. And recently, Polaris announced that it will make some changes to become more “Eastonesque” in its appearance.
But what does this all have to do with Delaware, Ohio?
Well, we are only miles away from the big-city malls in Columbus. But, Toby did a lot of his Christmas shopping in downtown Delaware. Why do we have to spend millions of dollars to “create” a downtown presence when an authentic one is located in downtown Delaware?
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