Waited 45 minutes for a guy at the payphone kiosk in a dead Ohio mall, and he showed me his whole model train setup

Betty Perry · 2026-09-30T05:55:05.274343+00:00

Stopped by the Rolling Acres mall in Akron on a Tuesday afternoon just to walk around and take photos of the empty food court. I noticed one skinny storefront still had lights on, so I peeked in and this older guy waved me over from behind a card table covered in tiny buildings. Turns out he pays $300 a month to keep that space and has been running a little model train club there since 2019, mostly because nobody bothers him. I sat with him for 45 minutes while he showed me a scaled down version of the mall itself, right down to the boarded up Sears. He said the rent is cheaper than a storage unit and he gets to talk to the occasional photographer. Does anyone else have a story about a dead mall tenant who just never left?

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Waited 45 minutes for a guy at the payphone kiosk in a dead Ohio mall, and he showed me his whole model train setup | Dead Mall Finds - Vivisector