roadside goodness returns

Just FYI, folks: agilitynut is out in the Midwest and posting the pics and such to prove it.

Oh, ye olde Krispy Kreme . . .

And former Arby's . . .

And lend this an ear . . .

And a moment of silence for a good pig remembered . . .

seven on the flip side

click for a closer view

The above is from circa spring 1978 when my oldest brother kindly send me a clipping of a Richmond Times-Dispatch article on jazz music.

Thirty-one years later, sifting through my old old stuff, I found these movie ads on the back.

Of all of these movies, I've only seen Which Way Is Up?. If working my way through to watch the others, the Pam Grier and Rudy Ray Moore look the most promising. The Other Side of the Mountain Part 2 will likely wait.

IIRC, these were all Neighborhood Theatres. The GNH seen in the movie times was short for Good Neighbor Hour and designated the cheaper matinee showings.

Only the Byrd and the Towne (now known as the National) are still standing. The Byrd shows movies and features a cool theater organ. The National is a concert venue.

But even the fallen Colonial, Capitol and State theaters live on at Cinema Treasures. All sorts of links to photos and such can be found, including this old newsreel of the State Theatre's opening in 1933 (no audio):

persistence of vision: Walnut Mall, Petersburg VA

As posted back in the fall of '06, I tried taking my mom by the Walnut Mall where she used to go way back when. It was by then a red clay lot awaiting a new Food Lion to be born. The adjacent Crater Cinema building was still there (repurposed as a church), but the mall was gone.

Thanks to the online sleuthing of That Mall's Sick And That Store's Dead! (aka Sickmalls) one could check the Virginia Film Office location site & find interior & exterior shots of the vanished mall.

Unfortunately, though the location page still exists for Walnut Mall, the pictures are gone. Perhaps deleted--I can't say for sure.

UPDATE 29 Sept 2008--Forget what I wrote above and try this link for the VA Film Office pics of Walnut Mall:
http://va.reel-scout.com/loc_detail.aspx?id=2657&g=

(Thinking out loud: If these images have been ever are deleted, I hope the Virginia Film Office will pass along copies/hard originals to the Library of Virginia or some appropriate historical group or archive. Perhaps make them available online again as images of Virginia's recent past.)

Thankfully, an informative Labelscar post about Walnut Mall still has two cool pics from 1991. While some things had likely changed, I know these pictures revive my own faded memories of the mall (of Thalheimer's and Peoples Drug, in particular) as it was in the early 1970s.

Also the Labelscar post links to aerial images of the area that still (so far) show the old Walnut Mall.

Sometimes it's good when things lag a bit and information is not so up to date.

sick in a good way . . .

[reposted from unterkayness, epic backstory to be found there]

On her way to work, school and Lane Bryant, Anita Rose has been keeping tabs on dead & dying retail in the Hampton Roads area and thereabouts. The now long gone Coliseum Mall and Mercury Plaza. The pretty much totally repurposed Newmarket North/Newmarket Fair mall. The extant time machine to '89 that is Southpark Mall.

Beyond southeastern Virginia, the Sickmalls blog has links to other retail blogs and sites dedicated to once ubiquitous chains like Caldor and Ames. And Anita also has a hand in Deadmalls.com.

But shunting over to the big grid experience, you'll miss some cool details and such.

So go see for yourself why That Mall's Sick And That Store's Dead! wins with special recommendation the E for Excellent blog award.

Downtown Mall & thereabouts

From the slippery slope of my A & N entry . . .


Guess I should look into getting a Flickr account.



But then it'd be more obvious that I'm but the 3rd person in recent times to post a photograph of the above Coca-Cola sign.

The one just below I recall being near the C & O Restaurant (documented in my nostalgia fest on unterkayness).


Sundry stuff, mostly old, beyond. All taken early last October.






































And the aforementioned thereabouts:

cinema arcana

The good thing about being older and hardly throwing anything away is finding crazy bits of who knows what. Like a ticket stub from the Newmarket Mall Four cinema in Hampton.

Or yet another ticket stub from the same movie theatre. Note the buck increase in admission.

Below is a stub from the Crater movie theatre that used to be near Walnut Mall in Petersburg.


None of this could be anymore recent than the early 1980s. The buck seventy five Newmarket ticket may be from the 70s.

Wish I could say for sure what movies were seen on those tickets. The Crater I'd be guessing from the admission price etc. would be a midnight showing of Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris.

Somewhere I have stubs from the NARO and Vinegar Hill and more far flung art houses. Later maybe.

scenes from the Riverdale, Hampton VA

Hardly the better or the best pictures of what used to be known as the Riverdale movie theater.



Just maybe some of the more recent pics, taken this past mid-May.












I neglected to get this sculpture into the overall shot (as it is in the image found on CinemaTour).



Like the time capsule at the old Newmarket, this sculpture is one of few connections to this theater as it was years before. Back when I saw Escape from the Planet of the Apes here (the first of the series I'd managed to see). Or saw long lines outside waiting for Jaws.

time capsule at Newmarket Theatre

Waiting for the movie to begin, my mind would boggle over the dates on this plaque. Especially that second one: Sept. 13, 2015.




Go up those steps in the picture above and somewhere just to the left or the right you'd find that plaque. But no movie to wait for.



Heck, these pictures were taken in 2000 and it was a very closed theatre then.




The newer Cinema 3 & 4, last I saw (sometime after these photos were taken), had become a church. Hardly the first time I've seen that happen.

While I sit and think of every science fiction movie I ever watched and await the arrival of the now retired WB froggy singing "hello my Ragtime gal" along with transistor radios and whatever other mid-60s ephemera the now very retired Newmarket Theatre shoved down into the concrete under that plaque, I strain just as hard as I did decades ago to see the shiny vision of a year 2015. Maybe not the real year just seven and a half years away. But the one seen so long ago in 1965, when movie theatres came in multiples of one and 50 years of relevance was not so much to hope for.

Meantime, a shout out to Anita whose Sickmalls blog entry on the Riverdale movie theatre got me to finally scan these pics. And to my friend Derm, the man with the Time Capsule plan.

And I've added the Newmarket Cinemas (its last incarnation) to the Cinema Treasures website so I can see what someone else has to say.

in search of Walnut Mall, Petersburg VA

As you can see above, I arrived a little late.

What was Walnut Mall is a future home of Food Lion and, for the time being, a red clay lot.

And since there's already a Food Lion not too south on Rt. 301, I guess that location may soon take a step down in the commercial real estate food chain.

In the meantime, you can currently still find an aerial image of Walnut Mall at Mapquest if you search for a map of Walnut Blvd. Petersburg VA and select the aerial image feature. (UPDATE: thanks to Sickmalls, these exterior & interior shots of the mall from the Virginia Film Office. And at now at Labelscar, mall info plus recently posted 1991 pics of the Thalheimer's there.)

Thankfully, the old movie theatre across the Blvd. from the ex-mall is still standing.


But now it's a church.


Though it may not be the same place where I saw The Goodbye Girl and (some years later) a midnight showing of Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris, the building doesn't look all that different than it did 25-30 years ago. (UPDATE: An old ticket stub and more besides.)

Here are some other pics of the area, like the nearby Walnut Hill Plaza sign:



I'd never noticed those walnuts before . . .

To make it up to my agéd mom for having driven her way up to some non-existent mall, we went to King's BBQ No. 2.