Mercury Plaza vs. Coliseum Mall (April, 2002)

Scanned directly from my journal back in 2002, hence the spiral in the middle. This was either right before or right after Circuit City closed at Mercury Plaza, and when Barnes & Noble just opened at Coliseum Mall.

Now both of them are torn down and replaced. The Burlington Coat Factory at Mercury Plaza moved to the mall around 2003, and when the mall was torn down, it moved back to the ground the Mercury Plaza was back on.

Coliseum Mall went on to be the Peninsula Town Center.

(Here is a big version so you can read the captions

Mercury Plaza –Hampton, VA (demolished-2004)

{picture taken March 27, 2003}
According to my mom, this was originally THE mall in Hampton, VA in the 1960’s/early 1970’s. The Mall part was in the middle of the shopping center, and my mom said that whenever you walked in there, you could smell hotdogs. There was a Montgomery Ward in the mall, and a Roses (a poor mans’ K-Mart) When Coliseum Mall opened in the 70’s, this area turned into a shopping center with Burlington Coat Factory in the middle. I used to go to the Roses with my parents up until I was 5 or 6 I think. Then I think the Roses had a fire, and then a year later the store closed down. There was a Farm Fresh in a strip mall next to the Roses, and I’m sure it did pretty well until it succumbed to a fire in the summer of 1997 or 1998. Then the HQ (a local version of a Lowes or a Home Depot) shut down (it was two doors down from the Burlington) and then in 2002 the Circut City (which was next door to Burlington) shut down due to poor sales. All that was left was the Burlington–until Wards closed down at the Coliseum Mall in which they moved in, and the shopping center was torn down.

I drove by again in June of 2005 with a friend, and this is what is there now:

We were in the car, we couldn’t stop.