It has been a rough couple of years at the Great Northern Mall in Clay.

Its Macy's store closed last year. In June, Sears announced the closing of its store there this fall, leaving the mall with just one anchor store, Dick's Sporting Goods.

Many of the mall's in-line storefronts are vacant and a lot of the ones that are occupied are by tenants holding month-to-month leases.

The floor plan for the Great Northern Mall showed the layout of the over 90 stores and restaurants as the mall opened on Oct. 5, 1988.

The downturn the mall has experienced recently pales in comparison to the excitement around its opening on Oct. 5, 1988.

Great Northern had been in the works since 1973, billed as a new shopping center, built along Route 31, which would appeal to shoppers in northern Onondaga and Oswego counties.

Worries that there were already too many malls were hushed.

It was the peak of the mall-boom in the United States. A 1988 Herald American story said that 70 percent of Americans then visited a mall at least once a week, more than they attended church, visited relatives or even talked to one another.

"The mall is the place to be, not just the place to buy," said Don Pendley, director of public relations for the International Council of Shopping Centers in New York City.

"Malls are taking on a function as recreation and entertainment centers. They have a social function now like the marketplace in medieval Europe."

(When it opened, Great Northern would be the 13th shopping center in Onondaga County. It joined: Penn Can, Marketplace Mall, Tri-county Mall, Seneca Mall, Northern Lights Mall, Shop City, Fairmount Fair, Camillus Mall, the recently-opened Galleries, Marshall Square Mall, Shoppingtown and Fayetteville Mall.)

With the population of the Clay-area booming, up by 30,000 people over the previous 20 years, Great Northern's developers, Wilmorite of Rochester and Crown American Corp. of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, were confident that the $70 million mall could be supported.

"The population can support another mall," John Konarski, assistant professor of retailing at Syracuse University told The Post-Standard. "Even if we're supposedly 'malled-out,' people in the north don't want to travel so far out. The mall fulfills that interest."

And it was not just another mall.

At more than 1 million square feet of space, it would be the largest in Onondaga County. To walk from end to end, would be the equivalent of four football fields.

It would open with two anchor stores, Hess's and Sears, recently poached from Penn Can Mall, with two more, Dey Brothers and Sibley's, on the way. A separate Toy-R-Us store was built next door.

There would be 91 smaller stores and restaurants ready for opening day, featuring many of the national chain stores synonymous with shopping malls of the 1980s, like Record Town, Radio Shack, Waldenbooks, Kay-Bee Toys and Claire's Boutique.

It was built with extra-wide corridors lit with natural light from skylights and featured live trees planted at ground level, not in planters.

"We are encouraging a lot of walking and stopping. It looks much like a street walk," architect Marc Weissman said. "It is a balanced design. You can stand at one end of the mall and see the other end."

Great Northern would be the first suburban mall to have a food court, with enough seating for 400 people. McDonalds, Taco Bell, Friendly's and Plainville Turkey, as well as a Sega Time-Out arcade, were some of its highlights.

Just off the food court was a six-screen movie theater, all equipped with Dolby sound systems.

Thirty years after its opening, the Great Northern Mall, once the area's largest shopping center, is mostly deserted.

(Opening day films included two Tom Hanks' movies, "Big" and "Punchline," "Gorillas in the Mist," "Alien Nation," "Memories of Me" and "Imagine: John Lennon.")

Hundreds of shoppers charged into the mall on opening day right after the red ribbon was cut at 9 a.m.

Great Northern made a great first impression.

"It's very spacious. It's a beautiful mall," said Doug Kay of Baldwinsville.

The mall's manager said 100,000 people visited on opening day.

Activity seemed to especially pick up in the afternoon once schools let for the day. The mall was very popular with teenagers.

Sherie Busco, 17, was impressed and said it was already her preferred mall, over Shoppingtown and Penn Can.

"It's big, and it's got all the stores the other two have in one place," she said. "It's just a place you can get away and shop and your parents aren't with you."

"Six theaters. I love it," said Todd Klee, 18, of Clay. "I'll come up here tonight and watch about eight movies."

Klee said he had become bored with the other area malls and predicted he would be at Great Northern every day.

"There's tons of girls here," he said.

"This place is going to crank" said 19-year-old Colin Delia of Syracuse.

Business was brisk everywhere. Lines of 20 people or more were seen in the food court and the manager at Sunglass Hut said he sold $300 worth of merchandise in one 40-minute period.

But the mall's future status as the area's marquee shopping center was already under threat.

As it opened, many newspaper articles mentioned that there were plans being finalized to build a new one-of-a-kind mall near Syracuse's Oil City.

On Oct. 15, 1990, almost exactly two years after Great Northern opened, the Carousel Center would become the area's largest mall.

This feature is a part of CNY Nostalgia, a section on syracuse.com. Send your ideas and curiosities to Johnathan Croyle: