This week, thousands of middle-aged north Louisiana natives lost one of their last connections to the 1980s when Cinemark Theatres abruptly closed their 38-year-old movie complex at Monroe’s Pecanland Mall.

The theater was there from the mall’s beginning and was a big part of the mall’s character.

Pecanland Mall opened in 1985 and still survives, but for how much longer? In 38 years, society changed dramatically. Malls nationwide (obviously) are dying off.

As a child, Pecanland Mall was a palace of toy stores, bookstores, cookie stores and music stores. The mall even had a comic book and baseball card store.

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The food court smelled like corn dogs.

The movie theater had 10 screens, unheard of at the time, and people waited in long lines to get in.

At Christmas the mall smelled like…well…Christmas.

And at 964,123 square feet, the mall was huge compared to others in North Louisiana.

That was the 1980s, a far more innocent time.

The 90s came. Then the early 2000s. By then, America was less innocent.

The mall started to decline and became less and less of a big deal.

Parents were too cheap to hire babysitters to monitor their kids. They falsely assumed their rowdy and undisciplined children had a constitutional right to loiter at this or any other mall without actually buying something (and as a reporter, I’ve interviewed parents who believe just that).

Teenagers brawled in the food court and behaved like savages in the wild. Every time I witnessed such a display, I thought of Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in Tombstone and muttered “Very cosmopolitan” before I traipsed on to the next point of interest.

Monroe’s economy suffered.

State Farm had a corporate office in Monroe that employed 1,300 people but the company relocated that office out-of-state 20 years ago.

Some of the mall’s last reminders of the 1980s — Sears, Radio Shack, Morrison’s Cafeteria, and even Waldenbooks — have long since left.

The sea of people I saw at Pecanland Mall during the 1980s trickled down dramatically, and for good reason.

Authorities last year arrested a 14-year-old boy for shooting a gun there. That incident prompted Monroe’s police chief to tell the press that he “can’t raise [other] people’s kids.”

Shoppers now have to tolerate people who either gamble on mall grounds or even strip naked for all to behold.

And as this recent story attests, the food court smells like something other than corn dogs.

Monroe once was a safe place to live. The city now ranks among the nation’s most dangerous metropolitan areas.

Don’t blame all the mall’s problems on unruly children, low life hellraisers, and a rotten economy. Technology played a part.

The rise of the Internet, specifically Amazon.com, allowed people to bypass the mall so that, quite frankly, none of us have to put up with your kid’s stupid bull****.

More and more people own 75-inch flatscreens, which means we now have the movie theater experience at home. We no longer need to pay an exorbitant sum of money to see a film, preceded, of course, by nearly 30 minutes of movie trailers.

I’m not saying Pecanland Mall’s goose is cooked just yet. But as the mall approaches its 40-year-anniversary, perhaps it’s well on its way?

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What will become of it?

One hundred miles west, Shreveport residents converted the old South Park Mall into a church. Governments in other cities bought dead malls and turned them into vo-tech schools or centers for at-risk youth.

Pecanland Mall’s future is for people (supposedly) smarter than me to discuss and sort out.

The rest of us who are now middle-aged and remember how special Pecanland Mall once was mourn a time in America that was far more innocent…and will never come again.

Special thanks to Warhammer’s Wife for proofreading this story before publication. Follow Warhammer on Twitter @Real_Warhammer