@MedleyCentre, dead mall parody Twitter account, dies at age 6 

@MedleyCentre, the parody Twitter account for the shopping mall-turned-post-apocalyptic movie set in the heart of Irondequoit, whose witticisms on daily life in Rochester injected levity into the dreary existence of doomscrollers everywhere, has died. It was 6 years old.

Its death appears to have been discovered Tuesday by CITY Editor David Andreatta, who had attempted to apologize publicly for referring to @MedleyCentre as “perhaps the town’s biggest blight” in a report he had written earlier in the day on Irondequoit Supervisor Dave Seeley announcing that he would not seek re-election.

“It was a terrible shock,” Andreatta said upon making the discovery, as though he weren't quoting himself. “I was trying to tag @MedleyCentre in a tweet and realized he was gone. Life is just so fragile.”

I was going to publicly apologize to @MedleyCentre for calling it "perhaps the town's biggest blight" in my short report on Irondequoit Supervisor Dave Seeley not seeking re-election. Then I noticed this. It's a sad day in Rochester. pic.twitter.com/nnJMbO6Hej

— David Andreatta (@david_andreatta) January 12, 2021

Visitors to the @MedleyCentre account on Tuesday were greeted with the message, “This account does not exist. Try searching for another.”

But anyone familiar with @MedleyCentre knew there was no substitute for the “fairly standard internet non-sequitur nonsense humor” that described @MedleyCentre in its Twitter profile and that the account served up daily under the name, “I’m the Medley Centre, Dammit.”

It was not immediately clear why the account was dismantled or whether it could be revived. But the formal acknowledgement by Twitter that the account ceased to exist prompted cries of "Nooooooooo!" and "OMG" on the social media platform.



The account’s last interaction with another tweep appears to have been on Jan. 6, when Twitter user Shawn Bond, who goes by the handle @inkman2000, replied to a @MedleyCentre tweet, “Eat corn. Poop corn.”
It was not immediately clear to what Bond was referring, although it was not a stretch to think it may have been @MedleyCentre’s penchant for Wegmans displays of pre-shucked corn, which @MedleyCentre tweeted about incessantly and with contempt throughout the harvest season.

Twitter reported that the @MedleyCentre tweet to which Bond was replying was deleted by its author.
@MedleyCentre burst into the Twittersphere in February 2014 as "Lonely Medley," when it asked no one in particular out of nowhere, “Soooooo, does anyone want to come hang out? I have some old Mrs. Field’s cookies from 1995 and we could see if Tape World left any VHS’s.”

From there, it quickly amassed a loyal following of fans, topping 5,500 followers as of late last year. It subsequently changed its name to "I'm the Medley Centre, Dammit."

During its lifetime, @MedleyCentre tweeted or replied to tweets on some 4,400 occasions — a number generally surpassed only by journalists living in their own echo chamber.

The closing of @MedleyCentre’s account meant that the archive of his tweets disappeared with it, leaving its followers searching their collective memory for some of its greatest one-liners.

But like the everyman who attempts to recreate a comedian’s best bit, few of @MedleyCentre's followers seemed to be able to recall a specific quip, wisecrack, or turn of phrase, as though its epigrams were as ephemeral as the shooting stars that once peppered the mall’s towering sign overlooking Route 104.
Most people could only recall vague references to its favorite targets — Rusted Root, Blues Traveler, and, coincidentally considering the timing, Seeley, with whom @MedleyCentre had a tumultuous relationship.

In announcing that Medley Centre would be renamed Skyview on the Ridge and converted into “flex office space for light-assembly distribution centers,” Seeley referred to the mall as a “1 million-square-foot albatross that has been nothing but broken promise after broken promise.”

@MedleyCentre shot back: “That’s fake news! I’m pretty sure I’m larger than a million square feet.”
If anyone knew the true identity of who or what behind the account, they never disclosed it publicly. Many people over the years claimed to know @MedleyCentre's puppeteer, but when pressed for details they invariably declined to say, claiming they had been sworn to secrecy, and were dismissed by their audience as attention-seeking fabulists.

There was much speculation that the account was administered by Andreatta, a theory sometimes fueled by @MedleyCentre, who in 2019 provided Andreatta’s home address to CITY for delivery of his “Best of Rochester” certificate for “Best Twitter Feed.”
Andreatta has consistently denied the rumors, most recently in a tweet last November. 

In an interview with Andreatta in 2017, when Andreatta was hard up for material for his column at the Democrat and Chronicle, @MedleyCentre described himself as “just an empty mall trying to get by in this hardscrabble, dog-eat-dog world."

"And Batman," he added. "I’m also Batman.”

David Andreatta is CITY's editor. He can be reached at [email protected].