Today, there was a festive groundbreaking ceremony at the Latham Circle Mall near Albany, NY. A dead enclosed mall was demolished and will be replaced with a strip center of big-box stores in Nowheresville, USA: why is that interesting? It gives us an excuse to highlight the mall’s very unofficial Facebook account, a funny local prank that transcends its region.

After all, every region has that one mall that is dead or on life support. Even if you’ve never visited the Latham Circle Mall, you’ve been there before. Surely there’s a dead mall somewhere near you, where you can see the familiar storefronts of your childhood in ruin, with tarp-covered empty store spaces, broken floor tiles, and leaking roofs.

The fun began back in 2011, when the mall was already quite doomed. However, the page seemed…sincere. Nostalgic.

That didn’t last long.

Criticize the premise of the page if you want to, but at least it tried to drum up business for the mall.

The Knickerbocker News stopped printing in 1988, the mall’s heyday.

As 2013 began, demolition loomed.

LCM didn’t accept that reality.

No matter what the biased local media outlets said.

Even once demolition began.

It tried to find the bright side.

Even if there wasn’t always a bright side.

With no pesky customers, the fake mall even had some time to keep up with retail news. Such as events at other local malls…

The faux mall reacted to the news that some malls and retailers were opening early on Thanksgiving in 2013, assuring customers that Latham Circle Mall would do no such thing, what with being a pile of rubble and all.

The mall had a firm anti-Christmas Creep stance.

Finally, a nonexistent mall doesn’t have to worry about credit card breaches like the one at Target during the holiday season, does it?

The page lives on and its owner has posted as recently as April. Meanwhile, the original mall has shut down and been demolished except for a standalone Lowe’s store. Yesterday, the mall’s real owners held a groundbreaking ceremony and announced that Walmart will be the first tenant in the new strip center.

Maybe the new mall, the ridiculously named “Shoppes at Latham Circle,” will have its own Facebook page, but it won’t be anywhere near as interesting as the self-aware dead mall in denial.

Latham Circle Mall [Facebook]