The day has finally arrived: exterior demolition at Muncie Mall is underway. The first area in the wreckers’ sights is the old Muncie Mall 3 cinema. For those of us who’d hoped for one last glimpse inside the theater, we finally got our chance! It just happened to be through a gaping hole in the wall.
Here’s a 2023 photo of the Muncie Mall 3, empty but intact. The multiplex operated under various owners and formats starting as a first-run United Artists cinema in 1974, but it closed for good in 2005. I remember seeing movies like Shrek and Harry Potter: The Chamber of Secrets there, but it was probably best known for its raucous showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show back in the mid-seventies.
Observers noticed heavy equipment staged outside of the mall last week. According to the construction worker I spoke with, the cinema’s destruction was imminent. I’ve written extensively about the Mall’s slow death and pending annihilation, and it seemed that the theater would be the visible sign of the inevitable.
Sure enough, it was! Shortly after noon today, three friends sent me videos of the first blows to the old Muncie Mall 3- specifically, Theater 1. My brother and I dropped what we were doing and raced over. By the time I arrived, a small crowd had gathered to watch from the comfort of their cars on the scorching summer day.
Here’s what John and I saw when we rolled up: the demolition crew had already made its way through much of the first auditorium. From across the parking lot, the collapsed wall looked like the open maw of a cave! Meanwhile, what was left of the roof sagged into the ruined auditorium almost like Thistlethwaite Falls.
Construction fencing gave the demolition crews plenty of room to work, so I circled around to the west side of the building to get the closest view I could. There, a growing mound of shattered cinder blocks testified to just how much of Theater 1 had already been reduced to rubble.
Update #1:
By about 2:00, crews had already moved on to Theater 2. A jagged opening had been torn through its exterior wall, exposing faded green walls and the steel skeleton hidden beneath the building’s tan façade.
Just hours earlier, the cinema had still looked largely intact from the outside. Now, the demolition was advancing so quickly that the familiar structure seemed to be disappearing before the eyes of those still watching the progress.
Twisted metal, broken masonry, and scraps of roofing joined the pile of cinder blocks near the excavator as it paused before taking another bite out of the old cinema.
Update #2:
By 6:00, the Muncie Mall 3 was barely recognizable. All but the cinema’s northwestern corner had been reduced to a stepped shell as excavators chewed steadily through the building. Despite the heat index, a few stragglers remained in the parking lot watching the progress.
Each swing of the excavator erased another chapter of Muncie’s moviegoing history. I didn’t catch the most dramatic moments in this video, but the old theater was going away fast.
The view from the northwest was especially dramatic: a mountain of broken brick and concrete now filled the spot where movie screens had stood hours earlier. The lone walls, with serrated, stair-stepped edges, appeared defiant against the clear blue sky! Unfortunately, it was obvious they wouldn’t last much longer.
Update #3:
The old cinema’s transformation was impossible to miss by 8:00 Wednesday morning. Overnight, the demolition crew had stripped away the last remaining section of the roof, leaving what remained of building completely exposed to the rising summer sun.
Update #4:
By 6:00 Wednesday evening, the only obvious work had removed most of the northeastern wall and cleaned up some rubble. Without busy demolition contractors, I could walk right up to the fence and take photos through the links! Here’s where the multiplex stood, with its exterior entrance about a third of the frame in from the right next to the yellow wall.
Only a slim triangle of brick survived on the cinema’s southwest side, but the entire north wall continued to defy the excavator. The project also revealed a hidden relic of the mall’s past: a stretch of its original dark brown exterior brick that had been concealed by the theater’s addition.
What began as a modest pile of dirt before external demolition started has grown into a sprawling landscape of brick, concrete, and twisted steel. The latest addition is an enormous heap of girders and structural debris towering over the mall’s southwestern parking lot.
Back at the theater’s western corner, a lone parking lot light pole cast a long shadow across the pavement, its arm pointing like an arrow toward the last substantial piece of the Muncie Mall 3. Before long, even that wall will be gone. Soon, the cinema will exist only in photographs, newspaper clippings, and the memories of everyone who bought a ticket, found a seat in the dark, and waited for the lights to dim.
Update 5:
A few hours after I left around eight o’clock, a friend stopped by to grab some photos of his own. By then, the atmosphere had changed: police were reportedly patrolling the perimeter, and a woman walking across the property was sent on her way. Whether the increased presence of law enforcement was simply because the mall had closed for the evening or because demolition had drawn more attention is something I can’t say. My friend and I never crossed the fence, but his observations made me wonder if all the activity had put the site under a brighter spotlight! Nevertheless, I’ll continue to update this post from any angle I can as the old cinema eventually disappears.
I hated to click “like” on this – like you, I hate seeing a venerable building go away .
It’ll be strange seeing the rest of it torn down. Aside from the old LS Ayres, at least, now an Ollie’s knock off called buyer’s market. That wing is owned separately.
There’s a sense of place in malls that …hits different, somehow, than a regular strip center. People generally don’t mourn demolished strip centers, at least nowhere near as much as demolished malls.