Remember the Lamcy Plaza clown? Dubai residents want to know if it's coming back

Dubai: For anyone who grew up in Dubai in the late 1990s and 2000s, one image of Lamcy Plaza tends to come to mind first. It isn't a shop or a restaurant. It's a clown.

The figure, dressed in a patterned costume with a red nose and yellow hair, climbed a rope through the mall's central atrium. It went all the way up to the fifth floor, came back down, and then started again.

Now that the Oud Metha mall is set to return under a new name, The Plaza, many former regulars are asking the same question: will the clown come back too?

A mall that shaped weekends

Lamcy Plaza opened in 1997. It was one of Dubai's earliest community malls, with more than 150 outlets across five floors, two cinemas, a hypermarket and a busy food court.

Families went there long before Dubai Mall or Mall of the Emirates existed. Shoppers came for affordable fashion, homeware and groceries. Children headed for the Fun City play area on the ground floor, and film fans went to the small cinema, which mostly screened Bollywood films.

For many residents from the subcontinent, it became a regular meeting spot. In a Gulf News column remembering the mall, a writer recalled a former colleague's standing invitation: "Let's catch up at our adda." Adda is the Hindi word for a hangout.

Watching the clown climb

Among all of that, the clown became something of a landmark. Children craned their necks to see which floor it had reached. Parents used it as a meeting point.

Its appeal lasted. One Tripadvisor reviewer who first visited in 1998, when the mall was brand new, wrote years later that the rope-climbing puppet clown was still as fascinating to children as it had been then.

The mall's cascading indoor waterfall, which ran across several floors, was another favourite. It was the backdrop for many family photos.

The Plaza takes shape

Passers-by have recently noticed major work on the building's exterior. Gulf News reported that the mall will return as The Plaza.

A representative for The Plaza told Gulf News that the mall is tentatively set to reopen in the first or second quarter of next year, which would mean some time between January and June 2027. An exact date has not yet been confirmed.

It is also unclear how much of the old Lamcy Plaza will be kept. Nothing has been said so far about the clown, the waterfall or the layout of the central atrium.

Waiting to find out

For now, the clown exists mainly in old photographs and online reels. Dubai residents who grew up with it now share clips of it climbing the rope.

Until The Plaza opens its doors, former regulars will have to wait to see whether the clown makes the climb one more time.