Before we even enter The Mall, we need to touch on the outer rim. On three sides of The Mall were minor shopping excursions.
There was a strip mall that was dedicated to everything you need for the home. The biggest store there was Hechinger's, a home improvement store that had everything the average person needed to do basic handy-man work around your house. To help customers see products in a real-life setting, there was a house built behind that shopping center. Customers could walk through and pick everything out that they liked, then go buy it from one of the stores. It was an incredible concept that I have yet to see replicated to this day.
The Outer Rim also saw the original movie theater. The GCC Franklin Mills 10 opened with movies such as “Another 48 Hours”, “Pretty Woman”, “Back To The Future III”, “Driving Miss Daisy”, “The Hunt For Red October” and my personal favorite, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”. 10 years later, they built a newer, state-of-the-art AMC 14 that was attached to The Mall. The original theater has become Bethal Church. The new and current AMC 14 opened in 1997 with movies such as “Home Alone 3”, “Flubber” and “Titanic”. Some of the features in their advertisement were “THX Sound”, “Starbucks Coffee” and “Love Seats”. Although the original theater had a few arcade games, the new AMC now features two side wings full of arcade games. Times have changed and now that I’m grown up with a family of my own, that theater still holds a place in my heart. One of my daughter’s first jobs was working at the AMC.
The biggest and most exciting attraction in the Outer Rim was Carrefour, a French owned store. Not a lot of people remember this because it was the first store to leave the Franklin Mills area. When the race track closed, there was only one building left standing, which became Carrefour. This store was THEE place to shop. The only way I could describe it was that it was a Walmart… Superstore …on steroids. Carrefour occupied the ENTIRE building. They offered customers everything from groceries, to furniture to automobile tires and everything in between. There were 61 check-out lanes. The space was so huge that employees would be on roller skates to get from one place to another. As a kids, we couldn’t wait until we were old enough to work there just so we could get paid to roller skate. After 5 years of occurring debt, Carrefour closed and marked the end of the first era of Franklin Mills Mall. The building then housed a number of smaller businesses that divided the space up. Walmart took up the largest portion until it moved to a bigger space in The Mall. Dick’s Sporting Goods remains there at the time of publishing this.
While we are on the subject of the original Walmart location, my family and I shopped there all the time. There was a line of store-front shops in the front. I never went into any of them but I think one was a Karate Dojo. I have a very fond memory (and video) of my daughter as a toddler in a Walmart shopping cart. She and I were waiting out front for my wife. We were right in front of the mailbox that stood there. I taught her how to make the mailbox talk. Then she made it say “MY…NAME…IS…MAIL…BOX”. I will never forget that. She is now 13-years-old and still laughs over that memory.
