The Place With The Smiling Gangster Rat
When I was still a kid, all bright-eyed, super-optimistic, and not world-weary, and the one thing I loved to do was visit the local mall in my city, Tower Mall.
That retail oasis was a haven from a busy week of school, but since it wasn't somewhere I could visit unless I didn't have a little change in my pocket, those trips were few and far-between. But every now and then, my folks and I always made a trip at least twice a month.
It wasn't a big mall, mind you. Military Circle, Greenbriar Mall, and Lynnhaven Mall were all much, much bigger at the time, but they were far from home and tended to be an all-day trip.
Tower Mall had everything you could get at most other malls. The mall was open Mondays through Saturdays because at the time, Virginia had "blue laws" that kept most retail businesses closed on Sundays and oddly didn't go away until Walmart entered the region.
The mall was anchored by Montgomery Ward, Rices Nachmans (later Hess's), Miller & Rhoads, and Bradlees, retailers now lost in time, a Morrison's Cafeteria, e and ghosts to older generations. There was also a multiscreen movie theater, a tuxedo rental shop, a piano store, a toy store (good ol' K&K Toys), a Waldenbooks, several shoe stores, an Orange Julius in the middle of a court, a doughnut store called Dutch Maid, a Chick Fil'A that always offered samples on a toothpick, an ice cream parlor, a record store, a fish-and-steakhouse, a cafeteria, and two pizza parlors.
Needless to say, the mall had a particular noxious scent of leather, paper, ink, popcorn, pizza, fried chicken, fried pastries, plastic, vinyl, various meats, spices, paints, pipe tobacco, cigar and cigarette smoke, and general human funk that wafted through the air.
One of those pizza parlors was called Orange Bowl, which I've always found strange since the name evokes a juice bar rather than a place to buy pizza, and at the time, my hometown wasn't that cool, and in hindsight, it still isn't. The Orange Bowl as across from Record Bar, so it was a great place to just chill out on a Saturday afternoon after buying a bunch of stuff you either were looking for or didn't know you wanted.
The other one was Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Place.
I think Tower Mall was the only Chuck E. Cheese's in the region that was inside of a mall instead of a stand-alone location. In hindsight, it was on-par with everything this mall was all about. It was in the back corner of the darkest part of the mall on the other side of the tux rental store. Once you got past the darkened labyrinthian corridors, you reached your destination beneath a smiling rat's head.
And in a corner of the restaurant was a grown-ups section that served beer and allowed smoking that may or may not have been a strip club. At least that's I heard from a friend of a friend of a friend of mine during lunchtime in my elementary school.
But nothing at Chuck E. Cheese's could compare to the ball pit. The ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese was the best place to let out a lot of energy after eating greasy pizza, cups of sugary soda, and, you were at a birthday party, cake and ice cream. The ball pit was the kid equivalent to the Playboy Grotto.
Forgive me for dating myself with that reference. I am old and can't think of a modern equivalent at this time. But imagine a place where you can be free from the world, your parents, schoolwork, and just swim. Only you're still in your clothes. For about 15 minutes, you could stay in the ball pit and just swim like Scrooge McDuck in his money bin. Just as long as some dopey kid doesn't pretend the ball pit is a wrestling ring where they're doing hammer drops like they're "Macho Man" Randy Savage. It was always a great way to close out any trip to Chuck E. Cheese's back in the day when that place was a bacchanal den of gambling, gluttony, and hedonism.
You know, for kids.
The last time I went to Chuck E. Cheese's as a kid, It was around late January or early February 1985. I was in the first grade, just a few weeks after I turned seven. A friend of mine we called "Tree" had a birthday party there, and a lot of my classmates all showed up for her with gifts in tow. I brought her a Barbie doll. Well, my mom bought it. I just delivered it to her in person. Tree gave me a Masters of the Universe figure for my birthday weeks earlier. We knew what we liked. We all enjoyed the show, the food, the cake and ice cream, the video games, and the Skeeball machine. But time was flying, and everybody at the party knew what we wanted to do:
Spend time in the ball pit.
We all lined up that evening to take our turn in the pit. About six or so at a time, so we had to wait. Now, when you're a kid with barely any notion of time, minutes could feel like hours. Watching other kids having the time of their life while you're just looking at them awaiting your turn just seems cruel. I had to go through this ordeal for about four cycles. All I had to do was wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Then I was in the front of the line preparing to head into the ball pit in the next cycle. While I was still in line, I saw my little cousin enter the restaurant. She was smirking because she saw I was about to have fun and she was ready to ruin it with 13 words:
"Hey, Jeff, Granddad's here and told me it was time to go home."
"But I'm still in line waiting for to get in the ball pit, and..."
"C'mon, we gotta go!"
"Now?"
"Now."
And that was that. No protesting, no fighting, and no complaining. I had to go home.
I left the party, said goodbye to my friends and telling them I'll see them on Monday, did a slow walk from the ball pit line, and walked out of Chuck E. Cheese's and the mall, and got in Granddad's car with my cousin and rode back home.
Little would I know that would be the last time I stepped into the Chuck E. Cheese's at Tower Mall. While I'm not clear what happened, I think CEC was in the middle of shutting down a bunch of underperforming restaurants after the company went bankrupt and got sold to a competitor in May of that year.
Tower Mall stayed around and remained a popular shopping destination until about 1989 when Chesapeake Square opened across the river. Tower Mall never replaced Chuck E. Cheese's, and the area stayed vacant until the mall closed down. The 1990s were rough for Tower Mall. The movie theater was the first to close. The last film I saw there was Back to the Future Part III, which also happened to be my first date, but that's a whole other story.
Montgomery Ward shut down and moved to Chesapeake Square.
The other anchor tenants left with Bradlee's being the last big tenant to go.
Then most of the bigger chains like K&K Toys and Waldenbooks.
By 2000, Tower Mall was just gone. Barely anything in it since everybody went to Chesapeake Square and later MacArthur Center. It was torn down and replaced with a shopping center, Victory Crossing, which is fine and all, but it's hardly a mall.
Over time, the malls that stole Tower Mall's thunder began to go away. Venerable retailers like Montgomery Ward, Sears, J.C. Penney's, Leggett's, Proffitt's, and Hecht's faded under the shadow of the Big Box juggernauts and online retailers. The big toy store chains combined and collapsed. Theaters shut down.
But to my surprise, there is a Chuck E. Cheese in my part of the world. It's closer to Chesapeake Square and has been around for over a decade now. I went to a party for one of my younger cousin's kids at the time. They had a blast playing games and enjoying music. The pizza was still... okay. The experience wasn't really the same as it was back in the day either. For starters, everything's all digitized with cards and apps replacing physical tokens and tickets. Chuck E. Cheese isn't quite the kid-friendly casino it used to be anymore. It's all controlled
But alas, there's no ball pit there.
Chuck E. Cheese took out the ball pits from all of their restaurants back in 2011, so kids are missing out of that rite of passage of waiting in line for the ball pit and taking that first plunge while enjoying 15 minutes of pure bliss only a kid could truly appreciate at a place that a kid could be a kid.
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