To paraphrase David Bellos, in reading or watching historical works, we’re struck not just by what was meant to be conveyed, but what was so obvious at the time that it didn’t need to be said at all. I was reminded of this recently while watching Back to the Future.
The JC Penny sign dominates the background as Doc introduces the time traveling DeLorean to Marty McFly.
The film does not try to explain a mall. Or why the cavernous, empty parking lot exists. In order to go on the adventure to a strange land, the hero must start at an ordinary place. And what was more ordinary in the American psyche of 1985 than a shopping mall?
The DeLorean lands back in 1955 into an empty field and the film, perhaps unwittingly, gives nearly the perfect history of malls. They barely existed only thirty years prior, but by the time Marty McFly reached high school they had become an essential part of our common life.
Around the mid-80’s, my Mom frequently carted us off to nearby Greenwood Park Mall. Inevitably the trip began at the pickup counter for orders from the JC Penny catalogue and this was the worst part. The experience involved grabbing a ticket, waiting for a clerk to call that number and then, somehow, more waiting. My siblings and I squirmed in the chairs on the tan carpet while the clerks there moved at the speed of zombies on tranquilizers. The experience has blended in my mind with images of Soviets waiting in bread lines at the end of the Gorbachev era.
Next we would make our way into the store itself. My brothers and I ended up climbing inside of the circular racks of clothing, and rocking them back and forth. Clothes occasionally flew off the rack onto the floor. Mom had, at that time, the mind of a Zen priestess and could intensely focus on her task . . . until she finally snapped.
“Get out of there” she would say in a voice two degrees below a yell, “you’re embarrassing me.”
My brother Jon and I would then slowly drift away from her towards our favorite activity of all: the escalator. Climbing a downward escalator as a fitness class could possibly revive the mall concept. But at our age, the real challenge was reaching the second floor before a legitimate adult customer started to come down. I strain to remember who achieved this first. When in doubt though, Jon, a pioneer in so many of our devious childhood activities, deserves the credit.
Things improved once we made it into the mall itself. The air felt lighter and, in fact, sun poured in from the many skylights. I remember the clack, clack, clack of the stroller through our mall, which for a public space had unusually deep grooves between the floor tiles. Mom gave us pennies to throw into the fountain for a wish and we walked under lives trees placed in the various plazas. On a rushed day, she would push forward an agenda. On other days, we would insist on a stop in K.B. Toys or Waldenbooks and she would relent.
Somewhere in the mix we would stop in at the food court, a term now so maligned that I have difficulties reconciling it with these pleasant childhood memories. My regular readers know that I’m the oldest of eight children. It wouldn’t have been unusual in this time period for my Mom to corral five or six of us under the age of ten over to a table for lunch. She did this while negotiating our conflicting pleas for one restaurant or the other, declining our inevitable requests for Happy Meals, attending to our emotional needs and then balancing drinks on the way to the table. In practice this involved a lot of arguing and abrupt, direct orders. But in my memory, it glides like a choreographed dance. A waltz that always ended with her troupe eating at a table and, if she was lucky, the loud cacophony of kids at other tables would preoccupy us to the point where we would not fight amongst ourselves.
Now that I have travelled through time and remembered that teeming little corner of suburbia, I feel a small loss seeing today’s map on the Greenwood Park Mall website. It shows a half-dozen empty restaurants in the food court. But I am not surprised either. The death of the U.S. shopping mall has been going on now for years and I am hardly the first to write about it.
The mall is certainly dying. An affluent, eighty-five year old friend of my parents recently told us that she bought all thirty-five of her Christmas presents online. On the Tuesday before Christmas, around noon, I walked through Santa Monica Place on the way from the Expo Line to a meeting of mine. The current conventional wisdom holds that the so-called luxury malls in affluent areas will survive, but the smattering of shoppers there that day hardly matched the pre-Christmas bustle I remember.
That so many of the articles on this subject speak of malls as dying in its own way pays homage to the life we once felt in those spaces. But all living things face death. Death and taxes for that matter and to this list of certainties I would add Change. The concept of Rebirth deserves the spot of Honorable Mention on the same list. Or said with less Christian overtones, the old always becomes new again.
Last summer I experienced this when I had the pleasure of going on several dates with the young and talented filmmaker Serrandon Jones. Mr. Jones has a sharp visual eye and strong opinions on design. Mark my words, he has a bright future. One night we sat on my sofa and he opened his Instagram. He started to show me who he followed.
“Aaaaah,” he sighed with faux pain and then added earnestly, “this stuff is sodope.”
I laughed out loud. A laugh that nearly erupted into a full belly laugh, had I not been so conscious of my age (and my belly).
This “stuff” he showed me surely had its own day at Greenwood Park Mall but now populated dozens of specialty Instagram accounts. Fluorescent t-shirts, flowing parachute pants, hip high jeans , denim overalls and the high tight cuffs.
For me, this was the first introduction to the fact that a growing group of the early twenties set has a penchant for all of that “stuff.” Meanwhile, I barely wish to admit that I ever owned a fluorescent green t-shirt.
And so it goes. The stench from the carcass of dead and dying malls remains too fresh to admit the concept had any value. But one day, I predict, they too will have their rebirth. I do not mean the many attempts by current operators to salvage sunk costs by converting existing buildings into community colleges or medical centers. And I would not invest in mall operators. The industry has many funerals on the horizon.
Instead, I imagine the true rebirth when many, many years from now a young architect enthusiastically pitches an emerging developer. These buildings were so dope, he or she might say. On the coldest day of the year, these people would stroll with friends under one roof without coats. These buildings, he or she might add, often had high ceilings with skylights, several places to sit, and clean and free public restrooms. Some of them exceeded a million square feet and had extensive indoor gardens, collectively the size of a small arboretum. How could we use these concepts with a group of apartment buildings they might ask?
Or I envision the museum curator, finally far enough removed from our memories of Spencer Gifts and Hallmark cards. He or she might pitch — A Retrospective: Architects of The American Indoor Mall from 1970 to 1998. One of the great things about this exhibit, he or she might add in the pitch, is that we would take the part of our gift shop dedicated to items from this temporary exhibit and make it feel like a store. You know, like a store that a typical American would have experienced in this time frame.
The notion of revisiting mall architectural concepts may seem absurd in the short term with store closings announced weekly and many, many more to come. But considering that Roman, Greek, Byzantine and other ancient motifs still frequently find their way into our buildings, the notion is at once absurd and inevitable. The old becomes new again.
For we mere consumers, the current indifference for malls, I suspect, will ripen into nostalgia and perhaps even a little mourning. Given the lyrics of the remainder of Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell would absolutely cringe as I quote her in this context:
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
And when the mall is finally gone, we may realize that we had something.
On most of the summer days of our childhood we played outside and frequently swam. Indiana has hot and especially humid summer days that I still shudder thinking about. For some of the worst days, Mom always had Greenwood Park Mall in her bag of occasional tricks. During our summer visits there she would buy our brief silence by doling out a few frozen Cokes. It was simple. But as I think about walking through the air-conditioned Greenwood Park Mall and taking our frozen Cokes to sit by the murmuring fountain, I’m not sure I fully agree with Ms. Mitchell. On some occasions, the developer paved an area and, at least briefly, created a paradise.
Los Angeles, California
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