I was Sunday driving my 1978 Dodge Magnum in February of 2010 when I noticed the shuttered Belz Factory Outlet off Highway 75 near our then home in Allen, Texas was being torn down. Finding such things fascinating, I drove closer to the property and found no fence around it and a gaping hole in the building on the far side of a massive heap of rubble. I determined it was large enough for me to drive my car through which, of course, I did. At the time, it didn't occur to me I was channeling the famous scene from "The Blues Brothers" where Elwood and Jake drive through a mall, although it's hard not to make that assumption now.
The Belz Factory Outlet Center in Allen opened in 1983 and was a mall ahead of its time, not in terms of design and scope but in location. In those heady, early days of the Reagan administration, a group of investors, who ultimately would be correct in their assessment of how the massive DFW area would eventually grow, believed the then sleepy town of Allen would be the perfect home for an outlet center.
However, the area did not grow enough in the 1980's to support the mall and with no shortage of shopping centers and malls in and around downtown Dallas, "Belz" had constant retailer and vendor turnover and little customer foot traffic. That it was thirty miles north of DFW didn't help either. It closed in 1988 after less than five years of operation.
By the time my family and I moved to Allen in 2005, the Belz Outlet had been closed for seventeen years, and "eyesore" doesn't do justice to what the enormous compound had become. The outside was splattered with graffiti, the landscaping overgrown, walkways were unwalkable stretches of shattered concrete with waist high weeds. On the inside, legend had it, it was a makeshift homeless shelter, drug den, brothel and a lair where animal sacrifices were made in the name of Satan. Can't make this stuff up, kids.
Local officials had attempted in vain for years to get the former owners to knock it down. The only reason it was eventually razed was to make way for a "frontage road", that's what Texans refer to what us Long Islanders call a "service road", to run alongside a newly expanded stretch of Highway 75 that was to intersect with SR 121.
Anti-climatically, once inside the mall, I didn't see anything super-natural or illicit. Aside from my being spooked about hitting a spindly support holding up the roof or picking up an errant nail or two, or four, my traipse inside was unremarkable. I was concerned the cops would get me, I was trespassing after all, but I had an alibi - there was nothing stopping me from doing what I did. I know, it was wafer thin, but I went with it. I remember that except for the burble of my car's engine and the crunching sound my tires made on the dusty, concrete and drywall strewn floors, the silence in there was as loud as jack hammers.
I did have the good sense to take some photos with my trusty Blackberry Pearl with its hedonistic 1.7-megapixel camera. When was the last time you saw someone using a Blackberry? Do they still make Blackberry's? When was the last time you saw someone driving a Dodge Magnum? I got rid of mine shortly before we left Dallas years ago and I haven't seen one since.
"The Blues Brothers" were a blues and soul review founded in 1978 by Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi and appeared frequently on Saturday Night Live. They opened for Steve Martin during Martin's residency at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles in September of 1978. Recordings from their performances were released as the chart-topping live album, "A Briefcase Full of Blues".
They were so popular, Hollywood came calling. In 1980, the musical comedy, action epic "The Blues Brothers", directed by John Landis, was released. A story of redemption after Jake, Belushi, is released from prison, the Blues set out on a "Mission from God" to reform their band so they can go on tour to raise funds to save the orphanage they were raised in.
Along the way, naturally, all hell breaks loose including when they crashed "The Bluesmobile", a 1974 Dodge Monaco police car, into a shopping mall to avoid capture by police. The scene was filmed at the then closed Dixie Square Mall south of Chicago. Dixie Square opened in 1966 and, just like the Belz Outlet in Allen, suffered from high vacancy and low patronage. Shows you how not all malls back in the day were slam dunks. Now all malls are feeling a similar pinch, many closing and facing the wrecking ball. Dixie Square Mall closed in 1978 although demolition wasn't completed until 2012.
I'd love to say it was life imitating art when I drove my Magnum through that mall, but I can't. Honestly, it was more curiosity than anything else. Just like the Blues Brothers, though, the Po-Po caught up to me that Sunday morning years ago. It wasn't for trespassing; it was for speeding. Jake and Elwood would have been proud of me.
The Blues Borther remain the most successful blues revue act of all time.
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