Empty stores and funky smells on the last day of Dundalk’s Eastpoint Mall

There will be no more finding your finesse at Find Your Finesse. No choices at Choices, no stitching or pressing at Stitch and Press, and no parties — with or without bouncing — at the Stars Bounce Party Place.

Eastpoint Mall is going the way of the stegosaurus whose replica once greeted onlookers pouring into the 63-acre shopping and entertainment emporium between Eastern Avenue and North Point Boulevard. A Dundalk fixture since 1956, it is the most recent mall to go extinct; it closed Monday.

It won’t be the only fossil. About 2,500 malls stretched across America in the 1980s, compared to about 1,200 today. Another 300 are expected to close in 2028, according to Capital One research.

The reasons: the rise of online shopping, changing retail strategies, shifting consumer behavior, and a hunger to redevelop the land into something more profitable.

Eastpoint’s sister mall, Golden Ring Mall, opened in 1974 and closed in 2001. On the west side, Owings Mills Mall closed in 2015. Both were reborn as outdoor shopping centers. Even upscale Bethesda couldn’t keep its mall — White Flint morphed into a mixed-use development more than a decade ago.

The surviving Maryland malls are struggling: Glen Burnie’s Marley Station has been largely empty since Macy’s left in April. At least a quarter of Towson Town Center’s shops are vacant.

The last open hours of Eastpoint Mall were a far cry from its early days, when malls were as much about the spectacle as the shopping. Eastpoint’s store windows displayed penguins and monkeys, and people got dressed up to come and watch them. In contrast, confused shoppers on Monday looked around at the half-empty or shuttered stores that they’d visited for decades and tried to find out where the retailers would go next.

JCPenney is staying open. It’s a stand-alone store with one entrance to the parking lot. Other stores posted handwritten signs announcing where they’d end up next: Blissful Events Studio is going to White Marsh Mall, Osaka Japan will go to Patapsco Market, and Find Your Finesse soccer training will move to Sparrows Point this month.

As he snapped photographs under the food court’s weathered “eat, play, shop” sign, Jarrett Lembach had one word for his former childhood haunt: “depressing.”

Lembach runs a karaoke and DJ business. He has been chronicling the demise of area malls because, as he notes, it’s hard to find photos and videos of them online. A former record store manager and lead singer of the band Reignstorm, Lembach remembers visiting Eastpoint’s record stores — Sound Waves, Record Hut and Luskin’s — and strolling through the mall with friends from his native Perry Hall as well as Dundalk.

“It served a purpose for a long time,” he said.

Penguins, monkeys, dinosaurs

Looking at the empty corridors, the Turtle Treasure claw machine that promises a “winner every time,” and the half-lit Turning Point sign, it’s hard to see the magic Eastpoint once delivered.

On the mall’s last day, in a little circle with kiddie rides, an ice cream truck and a car with a dog on top blared an intermittent recording of laughing children. The eerie sound reverberated through the empty play area. Down the hall, a few customers rustled garment bags filled with wedding dresses at Class Act. A beauty shop advertised, “Wow! All Human Hair 30% off.” Employees at the few jewelry stores still hoped to sell their last gold and silver chains.

The mall smelled like nail cleaner, floor polish, freshly baked cookies, mothballs and soy sauce. Outside, the pungent odor of the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant wafted through the air.

Many remember better times.

“Everybody went to Eastpoint,” recalled tavern owner and County Council candidate Donna Eve Radtke Sekora. She remembers getting her feet measured for saddle shoes at Hess Shoes, where her mother took her baby booties to be bronzed. She still has luggage from the Hochschild-Kohn department store, which went out of business in 1984.

Daniel Dean, who grew up in Colgate, fondly remembers the mall for its father-son bowling tournaments — and also for breaking his arm on a merry-go-round that has since been removed.

When the mall opened in 1956, a marching band played while Gov. Theodore McKeldin cut the ribbon. Shortly thereafter, visitors marveled at live monkeys in the Hess display window. Sinclair Oil’s famous Dinoland exhibit from the 1964-65 World’s Fair was a fixture, too. Not to be outdone, Hochschild-Kohn brought in emperor penguins and an arctic pond.

“As a kid, I thought that was the greatest thing,” said community activist Mary Taylor. “Looking back now, it’s kind of crazy to think there were live penguins at a shopping center, but back then it was just something we grew up with.”

The G.C. Murphy store featured live parakeets. Christmas brought not just Santa but Beau and Tinsel, the talking mechanical reindeer. Safety Town, an enclosed, Richard Scarry-style village where children could learn to cross the street safely on their bicycles, featured a real Officer Friendly.

Visits from Colts and Orioles

For the teens in the 1970s and ’80s, there was bowling and an arcade called Aladdin’s Castle, recalled Nestor Aparicio, who grew up in the Colgate neighborhood across the street.

Little League wins meant trips to Friendly’s for Jim Dandy sundaes – strawberry, vanilla and chocolate with a freshly split banana. Work breaks were for scarfing fries with gravy from the White Coffee Pot. Aparicio ate his first chicken sandwich at the mall in the 1980s; he described it as “revolutionary.”

His father worked at Bethlehem Steel. When he got paid, the pair went straight to the mall, where Aparicio could buy a record. Just before he turned 16, he started working at Sound Waves. In 1984, he listened to his 45 rpm of “Born in the U.S.A.” on a loop, occasionally rotating in “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” Later, he became a music critic — which he credits to his early Eastpoint days.

He also met every member of the 1979-81 Baltimore Orioles at the Brooks Robinson store. The Colts would show up and sign autographs at JCPenney. If he needed a gift for a crush, there were knickknacks at Things Remembered. If he wanted a hot dog, he grabbed one by Murphy’s.

“It was like a little bit of an amusement park,” said Aparicio, who runs the B-More Positive podcast and news site. “It was a place to just take your kids and get lost.”

Eastpoint became less of a destination in recent years — more jewelry and phone shops, fewer department stores. Two years ago, when Baltimore County Council member Todd Crandell opened a drawer containing a gun in his upstairs office at the mall, officers didn’t evacuate the premises. Hardly anyone was around.

Scott Huffines, a writer and archivist, says it broke his heart when the mall’s owner, MCG Properties, said the property might become warehouses.

“These kids now, what are their good old days going to be?” he asked.

A ‘time capsule of memories’

As a group of women in scrubs walked by a nearly empty food court, Andy Cheng popped up from behind the counter at Osaka Japan. “We’re still here, waiting for you,” he called out to them. They were among the few regular customers planning to return for their last serving of No. 4, the teriyaki chicken special.

Dean had already come for his. During the last week the mall was open, he craved the teriyaki chicken special for a taste of what he called a “time capsule of memories.”

The dish did not disappoint. Greasy, but oh, so good.

“I knew it would tear up my stomach,” he said. “One last memory I will not soon forget.”