This is a website dedicated to retail, malls, and interesting commercial architecture in general. I plan on sharing photos and blog entries. I live in Northeast Ohio so many of the things I post about will be from there, but if I ever venture out of the area (like to maybe Western Pennsylvania or something LOL), I'll be sure to post about any interesting things I see there, too.
I haven't really set any specific guidelines for what "interesting commercial architecture" is to this site, but I still wanted to give it some organization. So, the contents of each section I plan on adding are:
Retail:I will try to update this site regularly, but I'm a student so things might get a little slow at times. I also don't own a car!!!!!!!! So updates might be a little slow for that reason as well, especially when many of the places I visit are in Car City TM.
As implied by this site's title, my name is Odie. I'm a 20-something-year-old student (Digital Media Productions) and I really like retail! I created this site because I wanted a place to info-dump and share info about commercial architecture/retail history in places local to me. I love to time travel on Google Maps and trying to figure out when buildings were built and/or what they used to be.
My retail origin story isn't really interesting I don't think. I'd always been into "old stuff" and history in general. During COVID lockdowns, I started to find myself interested in abandoned/dying stores and dead malls, because those were very relevant at the time. That love of dead retail slowly started to combine with my lifelong love of history and vintage design, and I discovered that there was a dedicated community for this stuff early last year!
Other than commercial architecture, I'm super interested in TV commercials, sitcoms, music history, vintage toys, writing, drawing, and Minecraft. In case you were wondering, yes, I am autistic.