Goodbye Oakdale Mall (and Good Riddance!)

They were the golden years of the Oakdale Mall. Well, that may be an overstatement, but it was a new space, albeit modest, with indoor hallways for long months of winter retail therapy.

It became home to a bridal shop, a computer center, a gathering place for a bridge club, a few ma and pa businesses, some clothing stores. A couple of schools lived there, one for business and one for cosmetology. Other such occupants came and went.

In the season of ice and cold, I took up walking the Oakdale Mall with friends. It was a four-minute ride from my house, and afforded a free place for light exercise as well as a spot to sit afterwards, sip coffee and eat back any calories burned beforehand.

As the years passed the walks became less interesting as window displays, along with their disgruntled tenants, moved out one by one. Each year we noticed more vacated shops and heard stories about a difficult, absent owner. For city residents who have not seen this slow decline, the mall is known only as a giant eyesore in a prominent local retail and business area. And to those outside Oakdale, it is seen as the identity of our town, a kind of mascot. But not the rah-rah kind.

My walks took to other places, but one day a neighbor asked me back to our old walled and windowed track. I was amazed and disheartened to see entire halls taped off, water dripping from the ceiling and the place all but abandoned. This was the result of bursting water pipes unleashing 600,000 gallons of water, a catastrophe that can happen when a California landlord decides to turn off the heat of a Minnesota building in deep winter.

After years of negotiations and legal wrangling by a persevering, visionary city council, city administration and mayor, Oakdale residents finally can be done with this beacon of decay and begin a new chapter with the mall’s “symbolic demolition” on Wednesday, June 15. This may be the first time there is open celebration at a funeral  (accompanied, in fact, by the customary light refreshments!) We can say goodbye to a source of civic embarrassment and hello to another cause for pride in our own hometown.