Today is Midtown Mall’s final day before getting leveled for the new office building.  It’s hard letting this place go, but it seems like the right choice.

I used to go down to Midtown every Christmas time to go shopping.  But all the places I used to go to, both in Midtown and out on Main Street, have long-since vanished and there seems to be no particular will to get them back again.  This feels a little like when a long-suffering, sick family member dies, when everybody agrees that the fight probably wasn’t worth it any more, even if you’re going to miss them.

On the bright side, bringing low-to-mid-grade wage earners in the white collar service industry back downtown on a regular basis is precisely what Rochester needs.  It’s this demographic unit that is primarily responsible for the flight to the suburbs and more importantly, the alienation of relatively wealthy people from our urban center.  So if we can convince these people that there’s things to do downtown (we’re working on the “things to do” bit), maybe we can get the community to reinvest in it’s center again.

But I’m still going to miss that dear old, stinky mall.