The screening of route 9
| Northampton at night. (Ben Barnhart photo) |
Going to the movies might seem an obvious solution to the dilemma of what to do on a Friday night. Not so in Amherst, where cinematic options were slim until recently, when theaters in the Hampshire Mall re-opened.
In the early and mid-1990s, Amherst boasted the Amherst Cinema, which showed first run, cutting edge movies such as David Lynch’s Wild At Heart. Meanwhile, the faux-Victorian food court at the Hampshire Mall was crammed all weekend with students hanging out before the show they’d come to see on one of the mall’s six AMC-owned screens. The Mountain Farms Four in the next mall west, also owned by AMC, did just fine, too.
Then, in January,1999, the Hampshire Mall six-plex closed for renovations and expansion. Rumors of multiplexes abounded: At one point, 24 screens were planned. Permit complications and other snafus stretched the planned six months closure to more than a year-and-a-half. Meanwhile the Amherst Cinema, plagued with building problems and spotty programming, closed too. (For an update on the current plans for this long-time Amherst landmark, see our related story.)
The net result was seven fewer screens on the Amherst side of the river, and the difference made itself felt. “It’s so dead in Amherst,” says alumna Jodi Butler ’98 of Easthampton, who suspects the dearth of movie screens has something to do with the situation.
Not that students were completely without big-screen options. The Mountain Farms Four – located in what an earlier generation of students knew as the “dead mall,” but which, with its Walmart and other stores, is comparatively lively today – continued to operate. Northampton has the Pleasant Street Theatre and the Academy of Music, both of which show excellent independent films; South Hadley has its Tower Theatres in the college-developed complex across from the campus.
But to see mainstream films, UMass senior Dina Mouldovan told us, students mostly trekked south to the multiplexes of metro-Springfield. Friday nights found the Hampshire Mall’s food court peopled mostly by a few hardy Taco Bell devotees.
Then on November 22, the mall’s new 12-screen Cinemark theater opened. It’s a cushy joint. The stadium seating leaves so much room between you and the next person that, one local deejay jokes, you could have Marge Simpson in front of you and it wouldn’t matter.
Mouldovan predicts that her friends will be making a lot fewer trips down I-91 now. On a recent Friday night at the Hampshire Mall, traffic around the ersatz statue in the ersatz fountain in the no-fooling food court was heavier than we’d seen it in a long time.
