Valley View I & II

Somebody beat me to it. Drove by last week to see that the theater along with most of the mall is now a huge pile of debris. All that’s left is the core food court are and other sections adjacent to the still open AMC Valley View. Looks really strange. I remember as a kid when just the Sears store was there. Now essentially all of it is gone.

The Valley View mall site is a sad ugly picture now. I can remember the mall being built in the early 70’s to connect the already-existing Sears store to the new Sanger Harris, with its unique and beautiful mosaic facade. It was a fine mall of the era, and a great hangout through my teen years. I can remember seeing some of my first movies at the Cinema (Swiss Family Robinson, etc) when I was a child. Eventually, I got my first brief management stint there in 1983. It wasn’t a great theatre design (the lobby was sunken and far too tiny to accomodate lines at the concession stand), but the twin screens were larger than the ones at the muliplexes at the time, and good for seeing a “big” movie. If I were a billionaire, I’d buy up the site and turn the whole thing into a park and piss everyone off (except the nearby homeowners, of course). I don’t fancy the congestion and population density that will result from the “Midtown” community that is planned.

The clock is now ticking down for the old Valley View. Demolition of the mall officially began this past Friday morning with a groundbreaking ceremony for the new development project and the tearing down of the parking garage outside of the theater and Dillards. The old Sangar Harris/Foleys/Macys building was torn down over the past few months.

I worked as the Assistant Manager of this theater from April of 1990 to it’s closing in January of 1992. From the accident reports retained on file in it’s office. This theater had been open in 1972. And the GM’s sig on the report was none other than my future GM at the UA Prestonwood Creek 5. During it’s last few years as a dollar theater. It made it’s money off of one thing: Weekend Midnite showings of “The Rocky Horror Pictureshow”. We even managed to sell out the 500 seat auditorium a few times. That was alot of toilet paper and toast to clean up.

Hard for me to Believe some upstart Theatre chain like REGAL would bring down GCC.I have never been impressed with any Regal Theatre.But i am a GCC homeboy.Remember when it was AMC and GCC,the good old days.