Behold the vast emptiness of the Global Mall

Once upon a time the mall in Antioch was the hip shit. I know because I purchased basically every Christmas present there between 2000 and 2004. At some point after I graduated and moved to Memphis, the mall fell into some hard times and reported gang activity, and it closed down. Which is pretty surprising; it was a bustling area back in the day.

The mall is open again, and it’s rebranded as Global Mall at the Crossings. The whole idea is that it’s a melting pot of Latin, Asian, and Middle Eastern cultures, which is pretty brilliant given Nashville’s changing demographics. It hasn’t been open very long and they are currently trying to fill up the empty shops.

We stopped by the other day to explore and so I could take a trip down memory lane, since I hadn’t been in that mall in nearly a decade.

It was incredible. Huge areas of the mall are still completely empty but you can walk around like it’s no big thing. It’s unsettling. Almost like you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing. I let my kiddo run around like the whole place was a playground. He found the shop that used to be a Gymboree or some such and had a blast making faces at himself in the kid-sized mirrors. I, on the other hand, tried hard to remember which stores had been where. To try to tie together my foggy memories of the place with the actual echoing building I stood in that day.

All I could think about, really, was how amazing it would be to shoot some archetypal zombie footage in that place.

I hope it grows and thrives and that they get all the vacant shops filled up, but if you get a chance to go see the mall while it’s still relatively empty, you absolutely must. Because how often do you really get to be inside a dead mall that’s taking its first post-resuscitation breaths?

Here are some (crappy iPhone) pictures of how it looks now.