Post to regularjoe1365@yahoo.com – thanks!

C- my post above about the tobacco store – that’s the source of your tobacco smell. The mall also was, at least up until I moved out of Oshkosh in 1990, a smoking OK facility.

The Paper Tiger didn’t sell tobacco to the best of my knowledge. When it first opened it was very small and right on center – court, the sloping side directly across from the Grey Fox. Walden’s sold hardcover and paperbacks and at that point the Paper Tiger was a lot of magazines and a couple aisles of paperbacks. The aisles were very narrow and you were always in someones’ way. Around that time the arcade was right across the mall from them as you headed toward the grocery store. Both stores relocated to the wing of the mall that Sears anchored when spaces opened during the hard times of the 80s.

I worked in Sears starting around 86 and the economy had really hit the mall hard. They had just laid off most of the full time folks and broken down their jobs into part time jobs without benefits. The people who remained were pretty salty and despirited. I remember the first year I worked there at Christmas, I think we had more managers than hourly employees. I remember one stretch where there were maybe 4 hourly employees working the entire first floor and the customers were not happy about not being able to find a clerk while doing their Christmas shopping.

Between 86 & 90 when I left the mall really took a beating, I remember a lot of the wing with Sears having openings, but the mall seemed to be hanging on.

They did a great Christmas there. I remember the Prange’s would convert park of their stockroom to a Christmas menagerie with all sorts of dioramas depicting holiday scenes and at the end was Santa Claus.

I grew up in Oshkosh. Your history of the mall is impressive but you are mistaken, there was a record store in the mall. I remember it being open circa 77/78. If you took the elevators down from the parking ramp and came out by the restrooms and walked into the mall, if you took a left you would head toward Prange’s/Waldenbooks. If you went straight you would hit the aisle that became the food court. Back in 77/78 the record store was kitty corner to the right of that, pretty much in the vicinity of what became the Orange Julius by the early 80’s.

On that hall that I mentioned that connected the stairs/elevators to the mall were a couple of businesses you didn’t mention. There was one one side a tobacco store and on the other side was a plaster works store that sold little statues and bric-a-brac. It was ran by a man named Pedro, my father would hang out there and talk with Pedro while my brother and I ran around the mall.

Worked in the Waldenbooks, the Sears and I opened the Hero’s in the mall – first thing we served was a gyro. There was for the longest time right when the mall opened just a bakery in that stretch that became their food court.

When I worked at Walden’s a guy I went to college with worked the seasonal Swiss Colony booth that was often set in the mall right in front of our store. He would hand out cheese and sausage samples to people and the maintenance people would tell us that they would find them on the floor closer to center court….I guess they never figured out that we sometimes played baseball with the sticks of sausage and cheese

Also predating your time there, the very large unit where the wings meet that would outside abut on the river and Pearl St. [I think part of it now is a restaurant called Becketts' [2009]]…anyhow, this was a Kohl’s Grocery Store – yes, the mall had a full-fledged grocery market in it.

Thought it was boring when I was a kid, went to Madison a lot and East Town/West Town and Westgate spoiled me. Hindsight is 20/20 and I have some great memories of the mall as a kid & teenager.

“Appleton already had a downtown mall of its own and two very small, aged enclosed centers on the north and south sides of town, respectively, but they were not as large or as regional a draw as Park Plaza.”

Appleton’s “Avenue Mall” (built between two long existing Prange’s and Gimbel’s stores) came about long after Park Plaza opened, if that’s the one you are talking about. I don’t recall there being anything resembling a mall in downtown Appleton before it was opened. The Avenue was conceived and built in the mid-80’s, *after* Fox Valley Mall opened, in what turned out to be a fool’s errand of trying to draw people back to the downtown area, presumably using the example of the Grand Avenue mall in Milwaukee as a template as opposed to Green Bay’s downtown Port Plaza. It’d be nice to see an entry about Appleton’s Avenue Mall here sometime. Classic case of redevelopment gone flat…

On a separate note…I have many memories of going to the Park Plaza mall with my family during the mid to late 70’s. I grew up in nearby Neenah and it was considered quite the “luxury” to be able to go shopping at an indoor mall, especially during the cold Wisconsin winters! I have vivid memories of going to the mall on the weekends when they’d have big events, specifically the weekend of the annual boat show. Boats of all shapes and sizes would be crammed into the mall center court and hallways and the mall was always packed with people.

As APM mentioned, the mall did have a distinctive wood and tobacco smell. I believe the tobacco smell came from the small tobacco store that my dad frequented during a pipe smoking phase–I always loved the way that shop smelled. I also remember the fountains and how they would cap them off for the holiday decorations.

My parents would always park in the ramp so that we entered the mall through Sears. Since the parking was on the top of the mall, you had to take the escalators down to the main level and I remember that the Sears escalators ended in the home appliance section and they always seemed to have one of those plexiglass-fronted dishwashers (so you could see the interior in action) right at the bottom of the escalator and they always fascinated me. Strange, the things you remember from your childhood!

Also–I’m almost positive that Younker’s left the mall in the summer of 1996. It was the summer that I moved to Oshkosh and I remember them having their store-closing sale at the same time.