The other day I drove over to the Hanford Mall to buy a couple of baseball shirts for my son, and ended up accidentally taking a trip back in time ... or maybe to the future. I'm not sure which. Either way, it was disconcerting.

As I walked through the doors closest to Big 5 Sporting Goods, my ultimate and only destination that day, I was shocked by what I saw. Standing at the hub of what was previously the busy, northernmost end of the "L" shaped mall, I found myself looking out over what was a virtual ghost town compared to what it had been only a few months ago.

Mervyn's was, of course, gone. I was expecting that. But so was Amigo's Mexican restaurant. And Carlton Cards. And the Verizon store. Fashions 2000. And as I stood there among the chain link pull-down doors and empty storefronts, you know what it felt like? It was almost like being back at the old Kings Mall, circa 1992.

As malls go, the Kings Mall wasn't much, although many of you who have lived here longer than I probably remember it in its heyday. By the time I moved here, the Kings Mall was a narrow, dim, partially occupied corridor of shops, with two brightly lit anchors -- JCPenney at one end and a drug store at the other. It wasn't much, but I liked it.

The reasons I liked it were probably the same reasons which were causing it to be considered a failed retail enterprise. Due to its lack of customers, it always had lots of parking, in good spots really close to the main entrance. Once inside, you could expect wander around and browse in relative peace and solitude.

Kind of like when I visited the Hanford Mall last week. Close parking. Just a few shoppers here and there. Not much revenue being generated. It was kind of eerie how familiar it all looked.

And it made me wonder exactly how far have we come since the final days of the Kings Mall?

The Hanford Mall seems to have always had store vacancies, but I don't recall anytime before this when it seemed to lose so many stores, so quickly. And it all happened within a few months of Mervyn's biting the dust, and Fresno-based Gottschalks doing the Bankruptcy Dance.

Sears and J.C. Penney, the other two anchor stores, both have strong and well-established ties to the Hanford area and seem solvent, but in the era of corporate downsizing, a pull-out by either would certainly not come as a surprise to anyone.

So what happens when a mall ends up with rental space to spare and anchored by (in a worst cast scenario) only one major department store? Well, it might look a lot like the old Kings Mall did towards the end of its life, but on the opposite side of the economic merry-go-round.

You see, unlike the Kings Mall, any mall which fails in our nation today will probably not be razed so that a bunch of newer and bigger businesses can rise from the same ground a year or two later. Most struggling malls will hang on as long as it's financially viable to do so, and when that's no longer possible, they will simply shut their doors, as many have done over the last year or two, and remain standing, empty and boarded up.

And there's no doubt that if the American mall is becoming an endangered species, an entire way of life that goes along with it, where folks do some weekend shopping, catch a movie, and grab a bite to eat all in the same climate-controlled building, is also endangered -- or is at least changing.

How might that affect the towns we live in? Will smaller businesses move out of the big malls to the strip malls around the perimeter of town, or maybe even back to the downtown storefronts they so quickly vacated when the mall first opened and the rush to move there was The Thing To Do?

And what becomes of the giant concrete mall-boxes themselves? Will they survive by way of reinvention, where one mall becomes a neighborhood indoor flea market, while yet another lacks open stores, but has its parking lot used by corporate carpoolers, traveling carnivals, and the weekly farmer's market?

Exactly what the new retail landscape might look like is anyone's guess; the only thing we can say with any degree of certainty is that it will be different than it was just a year or two ago, just like the Hanford Mall looks different than it did a couple of years ago.

Will the American mall survive, at least in some form? I hope so. Will it continue to be the central community gathering place, as it was back in the days when people had more expendable income and shopping purely for pleasure was a common pastime?

I don't know, but when the Hanford Mall starts to look more and more like the latter days of the Kings Mall, it's something we probably should all start thinking about.

Diane Sayre is a freelance writer living in Hanford. Her column appears weekly in the Sentinel. Readers can write to her at The Hanford Sentinel, P.O. Box 9, Hanford, CA 93232.

(March 9, 2009)