Have you ever been somewhere that later closed down?

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Lately I have been interested in abandoned places or places that don't exist anymore and I was looking online and saw some movie theaters I had been to shut down or theaters I saw in real life that were no longer movie theaters.

In Vancouver, WA there is a movie theater there called The Cascade and it's now some church.

At the Vancouver Mall, the theater there shut down and it got converted into a business building or they tore it down and built it.

In Missoula, MT, the theater on Higgins ave. shut down and now it's just empty when I last saw it.

In Portland, OR we went to some movie theater I think was on 82nd and I saw Jingle All the Way there, online I saw a movie theater on that road was shut down and I think that may have been the theater I went to.

We went to a drive in somewhere here and it shut down and got torn down. I am not sure which drive in it was, I think along 82nd.

Missoula, MT Big Lots shut down there. It used to be a Safeway and then they built the new store across the street and moved there, the building was vacant and then Big Lots moved in. Now mom told me back in March it shut down. Now it's vacant again.

There is a hotel at Janzten Beach here in Portland and it's shut down. There is a fence around it and it was The Red Lion when I was a kid and then something else and now it's vacant. I saw online it was once the Thunderbird Motor Inn. My family and I used to have Sunday brunch there when I was eight. They have a table with coloring pages and crayons for kids to take to the table and color. I guess it was to keep the busy so they wouldn't get loud and upset other people and to make parents jobs easier.

Eastport Plaza on 82nd ave. I remember eating there at King Table and sometimes being at the mall there. Then it was a dead mall when I was 10 or 11 and they tore it down. Now it has other stores there like Wal-Mart, movie theater, JOAnn's Faberic which was a GI Joe and that is what they left when they tore down the mall. It also has The Dollar Tree and GameStop and a PGE place and other shops.

Mall 205, I remember seeing Robocop 3 there when I was eight and they tore down the theater there and built the Home Depot. In fact they gave the whole mall a makeover and now it looks like a strip mall.

Newberrys, Lloyd center, I remember going there once when I was six and it's where mom bought me my Barbie roller skates and Barbie shoes. Now it's shut down and it's a Dollar Tree while below it was vacant for a while with the words still on the wall and it looked so 1960's down there. Now it has been stripped and rebuilt and it's some fitness place, it now has a swimming pool with windows.

Polson, MT Regatta Pizza I ate there once when I was 16 during choir for lunch time and it shut down after I moved because they couldn't make money anymore because Montana passed a new law about gambling so they had to get rid of their machines and it made them go bankrupt. People went there just to gamble and when they couldn't anymore, they stopped coming. So they closed.

The thrift store there I used to work at when I was 18 and 19, it shut down after I moved and now it's some natural food place. The whole thing has a make over and the inside was re done and rebuilt and now the building looks brand new.

The brick school building in Ronan, MT. I remember being in that building in middle school and then they had a pipe burst and the health department condemned it when they found lot of mold. So they tore it down in 2002 and building a whole new middle school.

The old high school there that was a middle school I attended when I was 13 and 14, torn down in 2003 and made into a parking lot. They left the new addition that was added in 1998 and connected that part to the new middle school they built. They even tore down the gym and the choir room that was added to the brick building that was added in the 1930's and now it has the new middle school.

There was a thrift store there on the highway and they burned it to the ground in 2003 and now it is a parking lot for the new pharmacy they built.

I remember the old hospital in Polson, MT and I only walked in it once when i was 13. It was a 1910 building and the walls were narrow and the rooms were small. They tore it down shortly after we moved to Montana because it was considered unsafe and outdated so they had no need for it. They even built a whole new hospital since the current one was outdated because it was a 1950's hospital and they needed bigger rooms because the hospital rooms were too small. Now the old 1950's hospital is used as a building like the health department that sits behind the new hospital.

Interesting. The hospital I was born in has been knocked down now.
I do take a little bit of an interest in abandoned and derelict buildings.

The Syria Mosque was a great live music venue, which is now a parking lot.

The Denis Theater used to play indie films. I used to go there by myself in the summer to watch cheap movies in air conditioning. I just looked it up though and apparently they are trying to re-open it. Yay!

There was a toy store in Vancouver Gastown that sold a lot of neat stuff. I went there three times. The third time, it was closed down. I used to go to a couple of flea markets in Langley. They both closed down. I used to go to the Famous Players Cinema 6 in Langley close to Willobrook Mall and that was closed down and demolished.

I've been to lots of places that are now closed down. Movie theaters, malls, grocery stores, video rental stores...

Increasingly I find that not only have places I loved been torn down, but the replacements have been torn down also and now there are plans for something very much like what was there to begin with.

My primary school - Monkseaton Village First School.
It was a small school so not enough children went to keep it open, I think after it closed as a primary school it may have been a special education school for a while, but it ended-up sitting empty for a long time. The old caretaker still lived in the cottage on the site so in high-school after running into him he let me go inside, all the old school equipment I used to play on was still there stacked-up, it was like a time-warp, totally brilliant to see. Now it's been torn down, it's strange too that there is very little record of the school ever existing.

Newcastle's largest rock club - The Mayfair
This was my first taste of the rock scene, it was great in there, back when music was good. It closed in 1999, it was knocked-down and turned into The Gate which is a big place in Newcastle with a cinema, casino, restaurants and bars. The Mayfair was a major music venue, in fact the largest and longest running rock venue in Europe which saw a hell of a lot of really important and influential bands pass through it's doors, since its demise the rock and live music scene here has gone to hell, which is such a shame.

The Spanish City in Whitley Bay.
This was a fairground and amusements in my home town, back when I was in middle school they had a night once a week where the rides were free for an hour so myself and a few friends would always go down to go on the rides, then play in the amusements before trading in prize tickets for cheap bangles. The town is suffering a bit, the dome of the Spanish City still exists but the amusements parts if shut - many of the surrounding amusements have shut too along with the flea market that used to be down there which I went to every Sunday with my mother and my best friend. Some of the area has been regenerated now (was there a few weeks ago), although the fairground of the Spanish City is now a primary school.

There are probably a lot more places, but these are the key places from my life that I miss.

There was this indoor playground that I went to when I was little that was torn down. I have been to two waterparks that closed down. Also, several restaurants, video rental places and stores. There was this hotel in Portland Oregon that became a restaurant, than later burned down.

Double post.

Last edited by ocdgirl123 on 17 May 2011, 10:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I remember crying when my favorite DVD store, Suncoast, closed down. It was inside the Boise Towne Square Mall. I don't know what's replaced it, if anything.

There also used to be a Chinese buffet that my dad and I used to eat at, but the last time we went there, it had closed down. There have been many restaurants in that building, but all of them have failed because it's in a bad location.

My interest as far as abandoned buildings focuses primarily on old 50's coffee houses, drive-in theaters, and bowl-a-ramas like the Hollywood Star Lanes in The Big Lebowski, which was razed I think back in 2008 to make room for a school.
I have a soft spot of things like hotdog stands that are shaped like hotdogs, and all the really cool space-age googie architecture from that era. It's part of our story and we're destroying it.

I recall seeing a lot of movies at the Starlight drive-in theater when I was a kid...now it's an outdoor flea market.

My dad was born at St Pat's in Missoula but they imploded that building in 1999 or 2000.

What was the place that burned down? I live in Portland.

Many restaurants and movie theaters I frequented as a child moved to other locations rather than close down.

As a film buff, I was crushed when the Angelika theater closed down in downtown Houston...just one week after I saw the movie "The Concert" (it was a really lousy movie, btw). It closed down in August 2010.

Not closed down, but Pasadena Town Square mall is largely deserted due to most of the major clients relocating to Fairway Plaza in the early 2000s. Many places in the neighborhood I grew up in relocated a few miles away.

The old Southmore theater in Pasadena, TX is now a Spanish-language movie theater. That is actually a neat concept.

i've been there (when it was still a bowling alley)

i get very attached to places and buildings and i don't like when new things get built, old things get torn down or stores close and move. it upsets me that there are virtually no drive in theaters left either. i loved drive in theaters.

i never got to CBGB's before it shut down and am heartbroken. it is now a marc jacobs store or some such fashion circus.

That dome Seattle had where they played baseball and football, I have been in there to see football and they imploded that in 1999.

I have been at the Sizzlers here in Portland somewhere and been at one that was next to Vancouver Mall and that was on Mill Plain and those all shut down and became other restaurants. We ate at the one in Missoula and it shut down too and became another restaurant.

I used to go to this video store in Ronan and now it's no longer a video store and it's now the dollar store but it's owned by the same person who owned the video store. She wasn't making enough money for rentals so she sold them all and turned her place into something else.

The Safeway in Polson that was along the highway, it was an old marina Safeway and it wasn't very big but then in 1999, they bought the vacant building that sat next to Walmart where Pamida used to be and they redid the inside to make it a grocery store and moved in there. First interstate bank bought the old Safeway building and did a good facelift on it and did the inside and made it into a bank.