For a mall whose opening day in 1973 was so ceremonious, the DeSoto Square Mall had a quiet death.
On Friday, its last day in business, only four stores were open, and a handful of shoppers walked the halls – honestly, not too different from any other day at the Bradenton shopping center in the 21st century.
My colleague, Jesse Mendoza, who was there for its last day in my absence, found a lot of those same familiar sights – empty hallways, boarded-up storefronts and a handful of shoppers. There wasn’t even a formal announcement about the end of DeSoto Square, just a sign posted at the door that said “MALL CLOSING FRIDAY 4/30/2021.”
How many times in American history has a sitting president of the United States said words of that magnitude? It’s difficult to grasp, even now, 20 years later. And to think, they were said right here, at the airport in Sarasota.
Still, it was essentially a fluke that Sarasota has any connection to 9/11.
That’s because Osama bin Laden wanted to strike America in May, not September. Had that happened, the 20th anniversary of a terrorist attack that left nearly 3,000 people dead would have been commemorated this month instead.
According to the report, bin Laden had grown so anxious that he set the date of May 12 to attack. He stated the planes didn’t even have to hit their intended targets. They could have been flown into the ground instead.
Oddly, unexpectedly, it was sad to stroll through the empty shopping cemetery. The place was the internet before the internet, our source of entertainment. It was where babies spit up on Santa, girls had their ears pierced for the first time, boys with wispy Orange Julius mustaches ogled the Farah Fawcett poster at Spencer Gifts, and parents ignored the organ demonstration at Fletcher’s Music on their way to Sears.
The mall in its glory was where Friday night football heroes were even bigger on Saturdays, Pat Benatar look-alikes morphed into Madonna-wannabes and hair styles went from feathered to fades like cassettes to CDs at Camelot Music. Indeed, who wasn’t cool at the mall?
Longtime customers returned to the DeSoto Square Mall on Friday to take one last stroll around what once was Bradenton’s retail gem.
Only four shops remained open on the mall’s final day. The mall’s owners, DeSoto Owners LLC, gave tenants 30 days’ notice at the beginning of the month.
The 60-acre mall opened in 1973, during the heyday of indoor malls. But in recent years, the mall has faced the same challenges that have plagued its peers, with stalwart anchor stores closing and once-robust chains leaving the smaller boxes empty. It has spent at least the past decade in protracted decline, punctuated by occasional hopes of revival that never came to fruition.