Woodland Plaza – DeLand, FL

When I was a kid back in the 70’s there was pretty much one “major” shopping center in DeLand: Woodland Plaza.  This place had everything.  It had a Roses, it had a Winn Dixie (or was it a Pantry Pride, or maybe both at different points…), it had a Super-X drugstore (which sounds like an adult bookstore, but it wasn’t, and I think it became a Walgreens I think before the end), it had a Radio Shack, it had a fru fru gift-type shop called Peerz, it had a Belk-Lindsey’s, on the out parcels it had a Burger King and an ABC Liquor Store, and also in another disconnected island of stores it had an Eagles Discount Store and a Ben Franklin’s, and then tucked away, back in an almost hidden back left corner it had the Woodland Plaza Cinema, which is where I saw my first real films (Pinocchio, followed by Raiders of the Lost Ark, both of which gave me nightmares for totally different reasons).

One weekend in September 2015 I found myself back in DeLand with the better part of a day on my hands, so I decided to revisit some classic locations from my childhood, and other classic DeLand locations before they no longer exist.  Here’s the snaps from the former Woodland Plaza Shopping Center.