Rotterdam Square Mall

You’ve heard of dead malls? Rotterdam is a Pre-​Dead Mall. It shows all the signs of creeping towards the edge of the deathbed: a smattering of vacancies with no «coming soon» signs; a huge, perpetually empty fountain in the middle; flea-​market level vendors setting up on the concourses; the only cell phone sales people are the incredibly cheap generic service you’ve never heard of; half the remaining stores are discount shoe places; one of the anchor stores is K-​Mart; the movie theater isn’t part of any chain; no coffee place. All signs of an irregular heartbeat. As far as discount indoor shopping, you could do worse. The movie theater’s reasonably nice. The layout is weird, with the food court sort of thrown over to one side and the «middle» fountain at the intersection of two long «ells», as if one side was put on as an afterthought later. This sort of makes it a three-​star and falling mall, but I give it the big stinkeye for the following wretched history that we ought not encourage by patronizing such a place.
Add to this the creepy (OK, creepy-​cool) feature of Rotterdam mall: it’s built around a graveyard. Yes, seriously. If you go into the entrance between K-​Mart and the entrance by Macy’s, you’ll see the Vedder family graveyard, enclosed in a lonely gate with a little historical marker. The «whirring» sound you hear is the sound of the departed Vedders, who poured their souls into making a farm out of wilderness, spinning in their graves.
The mall was built atop a unique aquifer, and in the middle of a nature preserve, by the same people who had built the Completely Dead former Mohawk Commons Mall (now the site of the Mohawk Commons strip mall) on the farmlands of the old Stanford Mansion/​golf course. (Of course, even the old Stanford Mansion got stripped out, moved, the site leveled, to make the world safe for more Chipotles.) Oh, and to build this mall, they tore down an historic 1832 mansion. Why they just didn’t dig up the bodies from the cemetery and threw them into dumpsters, hard to say.
Is there no history we won’t destroy in this area for a freaking shopping mall? Were we so out of empty places we had to entomb the dead in a disposable fluorescent hellscape, shoving aside the last few unique habitats industrialization didn’t bury?
Did I say Pre-​Dead? Maybe Undead. It’s staggering along like a zombie, and I wouldn’t be surprised that the Curse of the Vedders gets this place yet. The sooner the better.
Happy Halloween.