I grew up at the top of Springville, not too far from the old Tanasbourne, and both I and my younger brother went to The Learning Tree for preschool. The Learning Tree is probably why the old Tanasbourne has stuck with me, because it had two entrance doors – one adult-sized, and another child-sized, and as a four-year-old boy, I loved that. In addition to the stores already mentioned, on the ground floor there was a Miller's department store, a hobby store, and an OLCC liquor store, and on the upper floor a surprisingly good deli and a very 70s-styled bistro adjacent to the elevator (that later became the original location of the Chang's Mongolian Grill franchise that later moved further down Cornell, where I believe it remains).
I spent a lot of time there, because the Safeway was where my mother did the bulk of our family shopping pretty much up until Safeway moved across 185th. The library was small but had enough science fiction books to keep me occupied as a kid, and the movie theater was never really a first-class first-run theater, but it was convenient and the Sunshine Pizza Exchange was directly opposite. The mall was also inevitably the site of a lot of activities with my elementary-school classmates, because it wasn't too far from Skyline.
Its architecture was unique; it was probably too small to ever be a successful mall, and a lot of its most distinctive features (the sloping roof lines that now mostly survive as echoes in the roofs of the Providence Medical Center and the Wells Fargo, the lawn planted along the slopes on the side of the building) probably were what made it turn into a maintenance nightmare. But my feelings about its design are pretty much exactly the opposite of Richard's – it captured a certain 70s modernist aesthetic in a near-perfect way. The circular windows and curved skylight glass, the ramps that led up to the mall entrances and sloped down to the lower level, and the way the landscaping tried to integrate the mall into the surrounding landscape (which failed, because it was, after all, a mall, and surrounded on 3 sides by parking lots) – given how compact the mall was, these all had much more impact than they would have as part of a larger structure.
It started dying early, and I suppose there was no way it could have survived. Miller's was originally a traditional anchor store with an open entrance out into the mall, and once Payless expanded to take over the whole space, that entrance was walled over and the interior of the mall had to survive or fail on its own merits. As I recall, Hallmark pretty much survived to the bitter end, and it would take an asteroid strike to shut down an OLCC outlet, but everything else pretty much ground down and gave up even before Safeway and Payless made their big move.
All that said, I miss it, which is a ridiculous thing to say about a failed mall, but true anyway. It literally haunts my dreams, and I have a kind of memory cathedral thing going on where I associate specific books / genres of movies / computer games / activities with places, and the old mall is rich with associations, which means I can visualize pretty much every corner of it in a kind of disjointed, surrealistic detail – the kind where you can recall individual images with hallucinatory clarity, but with no real idea how they're connected to anything else spatially or temporally. I am dead certain these memories, which are as strong in their way as any of my mature knowledge or beliefs, will be with me until I die. My main wish is that there were more pictures of it, so I had some concrete visualization of the space outside my head.