Found a GeoCities page from 1997 about my hometown's abandoned mall

I was digging through old bookmarks from a Windows 98 machine I picked up at a flea market in Tucson last month. One link went to a GeoCities shrine with grainy photos of the Santa Fe Springs Mall before it closed, complete with MIDI files and a guestbook. Has anyone else stumbled across a time capsule page that brought back a specific place like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

hernandez.jordan1mo ago

Hold on, let's not get too carried away here. It's a GeoCities page with some blurry JPEGs, not a life-changing historical document. Yeah, it's cool to see the old web and all that weird design, but do we really need to act like it's some profound relic? People made these pages all the time back then and most of them were just someone bored in their bedroom with a scanner. It's fun for a nostalgia hit but I wouldn't start calling it "honest" or whatever, it's just old internet junk that happened to survive.

juliam401mo ago

That really hit me... I found something similar a few years back, a GeoCities page about the old roller rink in my town that burned down in '98. The layout was that classic early web look, all bright backgrounds and blinking text, and it had these scanned photos from someone's disposable camera. It felt like I was actually there again, you know? The guestbook still worked too, with messages from people who remembered skating there on Friday nights. There's something about those old pages that just feels more honest than modern websites... like someone actually cared enough to build a shrine to a place they loved.