The City of Charlotte is finally going to build something on the site of the old Eastland Mall. Eastland’s story is basically like that of many, many malls: They were once cool and then times changed and the malls were no longer cool, then lots of them closed and people got sort of nostalgic for them? People my age, maybe. I’m not really missing them now, since I can go have a beer at a brewery instead of hanging out in front of Hot Topic. (Related: My wife can vouch for my terrible fashion instincts, and yet I was once employed by Structure at the Eastwood Mall in Niles, Ohio over a Christmas break where I doled out a bunch of terrible recommendations that matched parachute pants with long-sleeved orange t-shirts. It was a different time.)

Still though, there are going to be soccer fields and buildings and stuff, which will be much nicer than the 69-acres of red clay that’s been sitting off of Central Avenue in East Charlotte for a decade. I don’t really have any feelings for the mall itself: It was starting to become vacant by the time I showed up in Charlotte in 2005. No, I’d like to wax poetic for a moment about the ice rink in the basement, which was by far the weirdest place I’ve ever played hockey.

Now here’s the thing. I grew up in Ohio, where it’s cold in the winter, and you don’t really need as much precision engineering to build an ice rink. In the south, rinks have to fight pesky things like outdoor humidity. Contrast that to a rink I once played at in (I believe) western Pennsylvania. The people who created it threw up a giant open-air pole barn, draped giant tarps over the ends, pulled up temporary trailers to function as locker rooms, and built a rink in the middle. The ice was fine! Another rink in suburban Cleveland looked as if the boards had been built by the local high school shop class. There’s all sorts of whimsy up there.

That said, a lot of rinks really do look the same, but Eastland was far different. Basically, there was an ice sheet that sat in the basement. A space between the Sears, the food court, and other stores was cut out so people could look over the railing and watch the skaters. Same with folks coming down the escalators. It was the focal point of the center of the mall, and it had been since it opened in 1975.

I played a bunch of pick-up games there when I lived a few miles away in 2005. It was odd. I was told to walk in through a loading dock door so I wouldn’t have to carry my gear through the mall. The rink itself was smaller than a standard surface. It was a little warm inside. Parts of the rink seemed to have low ceilings, since the cutout for the food court above didn’t run along the entire length of the ice. Also, occasionally teenagers would yell at you from above. I was hit by a penny once. People throwing bits of hot dog on to the ice was not uncommon.

A lot of Russian and Eastern European players would show up to skate. Most of them would yell at me in their native tongues before flinging a puck in my direction. I had to wait until I got back to the bench to explain that even though I had “Markovich” on the back of my jersey, I only spoke English.

The games were fine. It was all just… odd.

By the time I got there, the rink was far from the days when former Olympic figure skaters would come in to skate on it. I only got to play hockey there after it had turned into a weird fishbowl inside a largely abandoned mall where the sounds of skates and pucks competed with the sound of Muzak being piped in from above. The magical portal to this strange land was up the steps past a Dumpster.

Anyhow, it didn’t last long. The rink closed in 2006, less than a year after I moved to Charlotte. I started playing in leagues at the Pineville Ice House instead. That’s where I made some of my best friends in the city. Two of them would be groomsmen at my wedding.

The rest of the Eastland Mall was doomed. It closed in 2010 and was demolished in 2013, and ever since, people in East Charlotte dreamed of some sort of rebirth there. For a while it seemed like David Tepper, always a man of his word, would build a big complex for his soccer team on the site. But that also didn’t happen. Fast forward to today, when it seems like finally, SOMEBODY will actually put something on the site. It might include an ice rink! Or not! But if it does happen, I guarantee you it will be sadly more normal than what came before.