Derry Mall
Derry Mall was a large, modern shopping center located on Mall Road, the renamed Pasture Road, on the outskirts of Derry, Maine. It stood on the site of the former Kitchener Ironworks, a place of historic tragedy where an Easter egg hunt in 1906 ended in a catastrophic explosion that killed over a hundred people, most of them children. The mall was a symbol of Derry's late-twentieth-century economic ambitions, a sprawling complex of chain stores and parking lots that replaced the wild field and industrial ruins that had once defined the area. Its construction represented a deliberate erasure of the town's dark past, a physical manifestation of the civic desire to forget and to modernize.
Location and Construction
The mall was built on a large field that had once been the site of the Kitchener Ironworks, which had exploded on Easter Sunday in 1906. The field was full of relics—bricks, dippers, chunks of iron—that the children of the Losers' Club had explored with archaeological interest. By the time of the novel's present, this field was gone, replaced by an ugly collection of buildings with signs for Sears, J. C. Penney, Woolworth's, and dozens of other retailers. Roads wove in and out of parking lots, and the mall was described as the third-biggest shopping mall in the state. The transformation was so complete that when Bill Denbrough returned to Derry in 1985, he felt a queer doubling sensation, trying to reconcile his memory of the wild field and the Ironworks ruins with the reality of the mall.
The Mall as a Symbol of Derry's Transformation
The mall was a product of the urban renewal and economic development that had reshaped Derry in the decades since the Losers' Club's childhood. It was part of a broader trend that saw the demolition of old buildings and the construction of banks and parking lots, a process that a local cabbie described as "rip down everythin" and "revitalize" the downtown. The mall was a key part of this new Derry, a place of commerce and consumption that stood in stark contrast to the decaying, haunted spaces of the town's past. It was also a place where the town's dark history was literally buried; the Ironworks' ruins, where Mike Hanlon had once been attacked by a giant bird, were now covered by the mall's parking lot.
Destruction During the 1985 Storm
During the catastrophic storm and flood of May 31, 1985, the Derry Mall was severely damaged by a series of explosions. The blasts, which investigators later attributed to water seeping into the electrical system, caused widespread destruction. One explosion totally wiped out Zale's Jewelry Store, sending diamond rings, ID bracelets, and wedding rings flying. A music-box flew the length of the east corridor and landed in the fountain outside J. C. Penney's. Another blast tore through a Baskin-Robbins, turning the thirty-one flavors into ice-cream soup. A third explosion ripped through Hit or Miss, sending flaming clothes into the flooded parking lot. A final explosion tore open the mall branch of the Derry Farmers' Trust, sending loan contracts, deposit slips, and over $75,000 in cash blowing away in the wind. The mall was ultimately declared a total loss, a financial disaster that contributed to the town's economic decline.
Narrative Significance
The mall's destruction was part of the larger collapse of Derry's downtown, which was physically swallowed by the Canal during the same storm. The mall's failure, along with the cancellation of other development projects, signaled the end of Derry's modern era. The mall, which had been built on a site of historic tragedy, was itself destroyed, suggesting that the town's attempts to bury its past were ultimately futile. The mall's fate was intertwined with the final defeat of It, the ancient evil that had haunted Derry for centuries; the storm that destroyed the mall was the same storm that raged as the Losers' Club confronted It in the sewers beneath the town. The mall's collapse was a physical manifestation of the evil's demise, a sign that the cycle of violence and forgetting that had defined Derry was finally broken.
