A final walk through sacred corridors of the condemned Fort Steuben Mall

The Fort Steuben Mall had its own weather. The kind a building makes after enough people carry their lives and part of their souls through it.

Fort Steuben Mall was condemned on June 30, 2026, after the owner failed to meet compliance requirements; tenants reportedly had to cease operations immediately and were given 30 days to remove inventory/equipment.

Earlier reporting cited building and fire-code issues including shifting storefront facades, broken skylights, leaks, mold/mildew odors, uneven flooring, potholes, exposed wiring, uncovered electrical panels, and missing alarm/sprinkler inspections.

Usually, I hit hard and unapologetically on themes behind my work, without a care of who it offends. But today, one day after the city of Steubenville condemned the Fort Steuben Mall, I’m taking a different direction. I’m walking down memory lane of what was once upon a time a sacred space and the place to be on a Friday or Saturday night well into my high school days.

It’s not just told from my eyes and my point of view, but also my protagonist’s in Beyond the Lost, Quinn Cozens. He and I are almost one and the same, and much of my own backstory bleeds into his. Since, ironically, I unleashed Book I in Quinn’s story on June 30th, Beyond the Lost Horizon, there’s no better person on this planet to reminisce about a now-former staple in the community.

What you’re about to read is a creative nonfiction account exclusively from memory.

One last walk through the Fort Steuben Mall

I’m standing under those old skylights, whose prime had long since gone by the wayside. I vaguely remember them, the old fountains people used to throw money into, or even the restaurant on Kaufmann’s second floor.

But I remember spending half my weekend there, along that bright corridor where The Ville’s neon purple lights shone, the sunlight pouring through the glass entryway, and the hordes of families, holiday crowds, and nonstop energy.

In those days, I ran rampant at 10 years old. No cell phone, either. That was always a blast — trying to locate everyone I came with years before we all started carrying glowing rectangles in our pockets.

Often, they’d find me at the old Waldenbooks store — long before Amazon put a chokehold on the market — sitting in a corner after discovering my latest read. Nobody working there ever asked me to leave and left the fifth-grader in me to my own devices.

The place rang with life at every single turn

It only had three corridors. One that led from the sunlit entrance, another from the Wal Mart entrance, and the back entrance near the old Cinemas. You never fought through crowds, even in those days. But the place nonetheless found itself brimming with different faces from all over the surrounding area and attracted hundreds of people.

And there were competitors all over the place within those walls — multiple shoe stores, electronic stores, apparel outlets, jewelers, restaurants in about every niche imaginable, food stands, hair salons, arcades, pizza places, hobby shops, and even a GNC where I’d load up on protein bars and RTD shakes by the time I was in high school.

Every store was jam-packed. I remember heading into GameStop, and spending a half-hour alone playing those video game demos. And I never walked away without a new game. Games that to this day, are as popular as ever — NASCAR Thunder 2004, ESPN NFL 2K5, GTA III, you get it. Or Sam Goody — located across from Waldenbooks — which was a freaking warehouse of electronics and memorabilia.

And who could forget Spencer’s? One of my friends refused to go into the place because the Chuckie doll was in there. Yeah, he literally thought it’d come to life and kill him. But was there a better place to find the most obscene apparel imaginable or items that would surely cause harm if put into the “wrong” hands?

Those of us who fantasized about appearing in our own version of the movie Jackass, anyway. My cousin once walked out of the place with a “Jesus is My Homeboy” shirt — something I’m sure he probably has stashed somewhere.

A nostalgic blast of trouble-making from the mid-2000s

The constant buzzing of voices never died, whether it was 10 in the morning or seven in the evening. When I was in high school, there’d sometimes be twenty of us. I’m sure security had a fun time following us, because we were up to no good.

We’d head into the Wal Mart, one of its anchor stores that survived condemnation, buy saran wrap, smuggle it into the place, and put it over the bathroom toilets and urinals. Then, we’d wait for our unsuspecting victim to walk in and get met with an unpleasant surprise before bolting back down that long hallway, past the security offices, and into the main part of the building.

That was only the beginning. I couldn’t tell you how many moviegoers we pissed off because we constantly clowned around while the flick played. With those seats filled from wall to wall, it wouldn’t have been hard for anyone angry enough to point out the culprits. Sometimes, we’d kick over a drink for the fun of it, causing someone (or a few people) to walk out of the place with sticky shoes.

And don’t even get me started on those mannequins. We’d put them into suggestive positions, if you know where I’m going. Then, we’d duck behind a clothing rack, keeping ourselves visible just enough for an employee to put two and two together, then beeline toward us. But we already pre-planned our escape route, disappearing through the crowd in the open section where those fountains used to be, laughing.

Once, my cousin and I thought we’d terrorize those working at the pizza place. We did our usual — acting like we were just a couple innocent teenagers who wanted a slice of pizza and a Pepsi. Then the janitor passed by a couple times, and we’d knock the drink over in front of him. God, I nearly died laughing. We were gone before they could kick us out, bolting by my grandmother and my younger brother who threw us a couple of those knowing looks.

The best spot that became an early casualty…

The A&W/Long John Silvers was my favorite place. It had a bar section where you could look into the floor-to-ceiling windows and into the Wal Mart lot. Beyond it and peeking through the treetops sat the Trinity West hospital and all of uptown Steubenville.

It was a great spot to gaze, and think about how cool this small city and the little gem that the Fort Steuben Mall was residing inside it. Something I became so fixated on that I didn’t even realize, after placing our orders once, my cousin used the names Corny and Lepidus. And not before he snuck into the Employees Only room because for a 12/13-year-old, that was a place of hidden mystery.

Little did we know that things would start to fade by the end of the decade, and our favorite food outlet was one of the first to go.

The crowds start to thin as the world plunged into a recession

You ask a dozen people when the place started declining and you’ll get a dozen different answers. For me, it started when the Great Recession hit. At that time, I was into bodybuilding and harbored dreams to become the next Jay Cutler. It didn’t work out, but it set me on the right path from a fitness standpoint.

I went into GNC, got my RTD, strode into Waldenbooks, and bought an Iron Man and a Muscular Development magazine — I used to love the Ron Harris articles. Then, the woman behind the counter gave me the news:

All sales are final, and our doors close in August…unfortunately.

Gut punch. But I didn’t realize how many more gut punches I’d get.

The foot traffic got noticeably thinner that summer and more than a few store spaces sat vacant, though still enough to keep the place’s status as a local attraction.

It got more apparent during my freshman year at the community college (now a satellite campus for Youngstown State). I’d hop in there between classes, hoping to find familiar faces, but seeing maybe a couple dozen random faces, if that.

At that point, I knew the heyday, or what was left of it, was history.

All that’s left are memories from an aging crowd

That decline continued through the 2010s. Businesses either left, closed, or built around the place. The parking lot became desolate and pothole-laden, while people either parked at the anchor stores and stuck to them, or used outside entrances in places like The Ville — another casualty in the closure and a tenant in that mall since 1996.

As the decade wore on, the place wore down. The floor started losing its shape, stains lined the walls and ceiling, and it had just enough lighting so you could see where you were going. Kids 16 and under at the time of its closure will always know it as a big, empty shell of a building with a few stores in it and a couple restaurants.

They’ll never know that it used to be a place to kill teenage boredom, or just to kill time, where many of my friends worked their first jobs, or hung out in droves during those Friday and Saturday nights. Best yet, it’s a place where I learned independence because nobody gave a damn that you were a minor (less than that, really) and weren’t accompanied by an adult.

It was a place where you could go Christmas shopping without feeling like you had to venture to Robinson Township, Ross Park, or St. Clairsville because you could get so much in that hub. Best yet, it housed a lot of local businesses that simply wanted to survive, and serve those in the community. Something this world has deviated so far away from.

It was a place full of ordinary rituals that nobody photographs into their memories until they’re gone. Then, the memory bank operates like the supercomputer it is.

And that leads me to Quinn and Beyond the Lost Horizon.

How very curious indeed…

Beyond the Lost Horizon may be a post-apocalyptic dystopian survival novella and the first of three books in a trilogy. It’s driven with libertarian and revisionist themes, but they don’t cut out the work’s sentimental nature.

Nostalgia, and longing for something that once was that you can never get back is the core theme. It hits Quinn early and often in Horizon, and it never lets up until the very last page, when Quinn can finally move on from a past he’d do anything to return to for just one single day.

It’s curious, because with the Fort Steuben Mall standing as a pillar to my own childhood memories to the point that a part of me will always linger on the property, that I released Part I of Quinn’s story that very same evening, at 8:00 p.m. EST on June 30th.

Crazy how symbolic things can be sometimes.

Click the image below to get the entire Beyond the Lost trilogy at a sweet price.