My Town

Back in 1961, a fantastic new shopping mall opened.

It was called Chris-Town.

I was two years old.

This was no ordinary shopping mall: it was the biggest in the Phoenix-metro area, the brightest, the swankiest, the funnest, the neatest of all malls to be found -- as well as the only place you could go to buy better-than-middle-class items without going to the fancy stores where the upper crust would shop.

It was the height of style, too, complete with huge arrangements of George Nelson Bubble Lamps, an area with live birds in moderne cages -- even a fountain.

For some reason, my parents told me that this grand mall was named after me. And, being only two, I believed them.

Whenever you needed to shop for something special, you went to Chris-Town. I spent my Saturday mornings at the Fox Chris-Town Cinema at the "Wallace and Ladmo Show" with the hosts of the after-school television program where we saw cartoons and movies (usually B-list programmers, serials, and the occasional sci-fi film).

Chris-Town was so much a part of my life that my first job out of school was working at the Broadway Department Store -- in the location that was originally Korrick's (pictured), a swanky store indeed.

By then, however, Chris-Town was already beginning its inexorable decline into the second rate which came swiftly starting in the 1980s. Since then, the fancy stores have made way for the common (Wal-Mart, Costco, etc); in 2001 the name was changed to (get this) Spectrum Mall; in 2006 a huge chunk of the middle of the mall was removed to allow construction of the coming-soon metro rail system. (The rail construction also spelled the end of the building where I spent so many Saturday mornings: the cinema was torn down just two weeks ago.)

Sigh. It's been a sad time.

However, there is at least a little good news to report: It was announced today that the owners of the mall were changing the name (again) to Christown Spectrum Mall -- bowing, I would hope, to the thousands who protested the name change in the first place, to those of us who never called it "Spectrum Mall" and, perhaps, to the fact that numerous businesses in the areas still had the old name in theirs: Chris-Town Dry Cleaners, Chris-Town Bowling, etc.

More about the new old name will be found here.