Quote Originally Posted by SoonerDave View Post
This slow, agonizing death for Crossroads is really, really painful to watch for someone who remembers when it was first built and opened. It was awesome. It was a first of its kind in Oklahoma, and its unique location along two major interstates made it all the more compelling.

My son advised me the other day that Subway is gone, and Sbarro's has checked it in as well.

Going to Crossroads when I was a kid was almost like going to a theme park. Orange Juliuses and hotdogs, a trip to LeMans to ride the bumper cars (though they were gone by the time I was old enough to ride them), Toys By Roy (one of the last "real" toy shops you'll ever see), the two-story Emmer Brothers clothing store, John A. Brown's, the annual MDA Telethon in center court, July 4th fireworks, it was all incredible. Part of its demise is its owner(s)' own doing over the years, and part of it is lousy circumstance.

There's very little that Crossroads can do about the deterioration of the area north and northeast. That just crept up around them. And the addition of a movie theater was about a decade too late (remember that the AMC wasn't the first one - that General Cinema was). What Crossroads' owners failed to do over the years was keep the interior fresh and inviting - I think the interior has been renovated once, maybe twice in 34 years. Now its just a matter of atrophy.

I know the open-air "supersized" stripmalls are the wave of the future, but I'm not crazy about them. I don't like JCPenny's in Moore, because its too big, sprawling out over a single story. I used to like to run through to see if they were running sales on Dockers, but now I just let my wife go by herself...but I digress...

Crossroads was a site with a host of potential that was just never realized. And that's truly a shame.

-sd

Opening Subway in the mall was a stupid move because there is a Subway just across the mall