[font=Verdana]Nearly three decades after the Dixie Square Shopping Mall in [/font][font=Verdana]Harvey[/font][font=Verdana] was nearly demolished by Jake and Elwood during filming of a chase scene in the movie "The Blues Brothers," it finally has a date with the wrecker's ball.

The deteriorating shopping center--long a monument to the economic woes facing [/font][font=Verdana]Chicago[/font][font=Verdana]'s southern suburbs--is being razed to make way for a new retail development.

[/font][font=Verdana]Harvey[/font][font=Verdana] city officials gathered in the parking lot of the shopping center on Tuesday to formally announce the sale of the 57-acre site to a private commercial developer and launch the demolition of the 750,000-square-foot structure.

With the sound of bulldozers biting into the brick and concrete shell that once housed more than 60 stores, Harvey Mayor Eric Kellogg, joined by developer John Deneen of Chicago-based Emerald Property Group, described the occasion as "historic" for [/font][font=Verdana]Harvey[/font][font=Verdana] and the region.

[/font][font=Verdana]Dixie Square[/font][font=Verdana], one of the state's first enclosed malls when it opened on a former golf course in 1966, fell on hard times a decade later. Crime rates in and near the mall skyrocketed. As the local economy declined, shoppers opted for larger, more opulent shopping centers.

It wasn't until after it closed in 1979 that [/font][font=Verdana]Dixie Square[/font][font=Verdana] achieved national recognition when [/font][font=Verdana]Hollywood[/font][font=Verdana] chose it as a backdrop for the John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd film.

Over the years, proposals to redevelop the site into everything from a shopping center to a housing complex to an industrial park fell through. There also was a plan to build a 157,000-square-foot mausoleum, and city officials once offered the land for the White Sox to build a new stadium.

Deneen said demolition should be completed in about six weeks and the first phase of redevelopment--525,000 square-feet of retail space including two big box stores, several smaller stores, a supermarket and smaller outlets--could be in business by October 2007.

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