Remembering the Macon Mall Macy’s: Handprints on the footprints of time

In the summer of 1975, when the soundtrack in Macon was the incessant hum of air conditioners, Mary Hendrickson took her young son to the Macon Mall.

The mall had opened in late July. The stores were filled with shoppers. Parking spaces were at a premium.

Davison’s, which later became Macy’s, was having a grand opening celebration. Children ages 7 and under were invited to make handprints in wet cement along the base of the outside wall on the store’s lower level.

It would be a cornerstone, of sorts, an anchor for none of the anchor stores.

Mary drove to the mall with her mother and son, Grant, who was a few months shy of his third birthday.

Store officials were expecting about 300 children. An estimated 500 showed up. Despite the threat of thunderstorms, the line stretched up the hill.

Grant’s photograph appeared the next day in the afternoon newspaper, The Macon News. He was somewhat reluctantly holding out his hand, preparing to leave his mark in the mortar mix. “He didn’t like getting his hand dirty,’’ his mother said.

This past week. Mary went back to the mall and revisited the handprint. It had been a long time. The weathered concrete was the color of the overcast afternoon sky. Her eyes searched along the sidewalk until she spotted it, not far from the door. The initials “G.H.” were still legible after 45 years, like an embedded time capsule.

A bronze plaque on the wall read:

“This space belongs forever and a day to the children whose hands are immortalized here. Davison’s will always remember the day we met. July 30, 1975.”

Her memories were stirred by the recent news that Macy’s is closing 15 stores nationwide, including its Macon Mall location. Mary turned to the page in her scrapbook and found the story with Grant’s picture. She posted it on Facebook.

“A precious memory,’’ she wrote.

The announced store closing was the same week as the 25th anniversary week of a sad memory.

On Jan. 3, 1995, Grant Hendrickson and his girlfriend, Michele Cartagena, were murdered while parked in her car along the shores of Lake Juliette. They were Mercer students. Grant had been an honor student at Tattnall Square Academy and was on the dean’s list at Mercer, where he was majoring in electrical engineering and physics. Michele had been valedictorian at Spencer High School in Columbus. The convicted killer, Andy Cook, was executed by lethal injection 18 years later.

As Mary stood near her son’s tiny handprint outside Macy’s, she pointed up at the large corner windows on the second floor at the front of the store.

“There used to be a restaurant up there,’’ she said. “I sometimes would take Grant to eat there.’’

The closing of Macy’s will mark the end of an era in Macon retail. The departure will leave Burlington as the last major department store in what has been a domino effect of vacancies.

The irony is that for many years, Burlington held a similar distinction of being the “last man standing” when it was located at Westgate Mall. Westgate opened in October 1961 and was the first enclosed mall in Georgia. Now, Burlington is a tourniquet for what once was the largest mall in the state.

Along with Rich’s, Davison’s once was a shopping tradition in Atlanta. In 1986, it was bought by Macy’s, the largest retail department store in the U.S., famous for its annual Thanksgiving Day parade in New York. In the 1990s, Rich’s became part of the Macy’s family, and the Macon Mall location changed its name to Rich’s. It eventually was rebranded back to Macy’s on its long (and complex) family tree.

It has been heartbreaking to witness the decline of the Macon Mall since the opening of The Shoppes at River Crossing. For years, everyone talked about the prospects of a second “mall’ in North Macon. When River Crossing cut the ribbon in 2008, conventional wisdom was it would be a knockout punch for the old guard.

It now has been 12 years, so the Macon Mall has demonstrated a strong will to live. In the beginning, there were four anchor stores — Belk-Matthews, Sears, J.C. Penny and Davison’s/Macy’s. Two more were added (Dillard’s and Parisian) in the mid-1990s. Then six was pared to four, then whittled down to three, two and one. (And, now, more like a half.)

Like anyone who has lived in Macon most of their life, I have a long history with the mall. I ate one of my first Macon meals at the old Morrison’s Cafeteria on the upper level. In high school, one of my wife’s first jobs was at Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor. Remember that place?

Unlike River Crossing, where you practically have to drive from anchor store to anchor store, the Macon Mall was a Swiss army knife of shopping all under one roof. It was possible to buy a baseball glove from Oschman’s and a pair of jeans from the County Seat without breaking a sweat. Before you could “download” songs, I used to stroll the aisles of Camelot Music and the Record Bar. When I became a published author, I had book signings at B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. Those were fun days.

I have fond memories of Macy’s, too, so it will be sad to see them turn out the lights for the last time.

I did not leave my handprints near the door, but my footprints have been all over that floor.

Ed Grisamore teaches journalism at Stratford Academy in Macon. His column appears on Sundays in The Telegraph. Contact him at edgrisamore@gmail.com.