The wide, swinging entrance taking in crowds and, at once, disgorging people to the football-field-wide parking lots, hundreds of lanes, hundreds of cars, either glistening under the snow and ice, or recently shut off engines ticking loudly in the summer heat. Every time we’d drive up, my mom would remark on the number of people. “What’s going on here today? You’d think they were giving this stuff away!” But the malls didn’t need to give anything away to draw in the people. At the time in which they were prominent American fixtures—arguably most saliently in the 1990s—the malls provided a sense of community and belonging which was not available elsewhere in small town America—especially to kids who had no recourse to bars, lodges, or other gathering places and in the 1990s, cafés were only beginning to enter the American panoply of places to spend money in and were largely small, dingy establishments in college towns.
When I was very young, I went to the mall to walk through a physical recreation of the toy commercials the TV was inundating me with. The mall was the world on TV brought to life. Everything smelled like new plastic, the floors were always recently waxed and squeaky, and the coins in the fountain sparked like they’d been polished before being tossed in. After the drudgery of home, with its worn carpets, smells of frying food, and the gray voices of local talk radio, the mall was so full of promise; each time the doors opened on their pneumatic hinges, they loosed a promise of entertainment, arcades, toy stores, and the smell of freshly baked pretzels. It was just an aspect of entertainment—it was all aspects of entertainment, together.
Now, the doors scrape across the tile floor, and the foyer, once overstimulating with music, conversation and back-lit store signs is now only a cold and echoing hallway, the light insufficient and rainy-day gray, like the light through empty aquarium glass. Inside, one feels the senses significantly neglected rather than catered to, something like descending into a cold basement with a single naked lightbulb illuminating the scene—unconsciously, you want to limit the length of your stay.
Today, the malls offer only large-scale emptiness and the memory of the station they previously occupied in the American social/commercial map. The emptiness and memories that were once the propriety of warehouses and abandoned factories, only the malls are still open for touring while the warehouses have rusted chains and sometimes barking guard dogs.
Despite the lights, and the climate control and the lack of (visible) rust, the malls, like the warehouses and empty factories seem like blight; in the name of progress, one wants to tear them down, or, better yet, turn them into something functional. But what could these airplane-hanger-size buildings possibly be repackaged as? Now that we have at length returned to our downtowns, and have learned to appreciate the open sky above us while shopping, why would we ever return to these cheap tenements of commerce? It seems their only possible function now would be as museum pieces; life-size displays of the late 20th century.
…
My kids go through the doors of the mall as if they are trespassing on something, holding my hands tightly but then, gradually, perhaps scenting the vague promises of the past, they loosen their grips and begin to run unheeding through the empty corridor, laughing at their echoing voices, the clattering of their feet on this vacancy. To them, it’s just a big empty building, how could I possibly explain to them the prominent place it still occupies in my memory and all it once meant? How it was all here. Even when I rebelled, eschewed the narrowly competitive confines of capitalist consumption, I couldn’t help but to return to the malls, over and over. How can I explain how the malls felt to me who was once young in them?
…
1994. Downtown is still in the death throes of the late 80s and early 90s when unemployment, drugs, and violence emptied all but the most well-known stores of the more prosperous 50s and 60s. The comic book store held on, so did the fur coat store, and a jewelry shop. But there was no congregating point; no cafes, no restaurants, just a few greasy spoon diners that you’d emerge from reeking of cigarette smoke and raw onions. Worse yet, everyone said if you were to attempt the distance between any of the stores that were open downtown, the long blocks of empty storefronts, and alleys latticed in old fire escapes and crumbling brickwork, you were sure to be mugged. Downtown bordered multiple “bad” neighborhoods. Mechanic., MLK Jr., Blackstone, if you didn’t live on these streets, common wisdom held that they were not wisely transversed. And all of them overlaid downtown. So, people parked right in front of Walt’s Heath Food, got their yoghurt-covered raisins, and got back in their cars and got the hell out of there. Indeed, I wondered how people could work in the Viginia Coney Island and Walt’s all day and not be robbed repeatedly with respect to where they were.
The center—because downtown is always the center regardless of where it is geographically in a city or town— was empty and sad. The big buildings, the Greek-columned post office, and the Greek-owned diners, but they’d put another post office in one of the malls and everyone went to that one even though the lines were so much longer and lacked any official grandeur. And after they mailed their letters and paid their utility bills? That’s right, the mall had a Greek diner now, too. Combined with the plastic, floor wax and fountain chlorine, the cigarette and onion smell wasn’t too overwhelming. It is hard to understand now, but the smells actually complemented each other; together, they were a kind of fragrance, young and heady.
I’m in fifth grade and I have my first crush. I am holding the fluttery love to my chest, thinking constantly of her eyes and hair and associated fruity smells that, at ten, is the sum of the feminine mystic. This crush is making me feel courageous and beautiful. It is endowing me with a purpose I have never known. It says, “you, too, belong to the race of humanity; you are not merely an observer, but an active participant.” I smile upon my fellow humans as I push open the mall doors, knowing they have all been in love as I am now and feeling gentler toward them as a result, feeling like we all share a great and important secret; we know beauty and its consort, compassion. And everything, everything I see in the mall is, in some way, connected to that feeling, those radiant, languorous eyes and the desperate need to do something to please them, to see them slightly crinkle at the corners in smiling response to something I have done. And everything in the mall confronts me with this possibility.
At the entrance is the hippo sculpture I climbed on and slid down as a kid waiting for my mom, the space between the hippo’s ears and nose having been burnished by millions of kids’ butts and scored by the rivets in their jeans. The music of the fountain is a low murmuring over the voices of those waiting in line for cookies and pretzels. Ace of Base and All 4 One on the overhead gently urging on my nascent, peacefully romantic feeling. Without being made explicitly aware, we are all in a party, a party to shop, to buy, to consume, yes, but a party nonetheless.
I wander through this festive background to pre-teen romance, into the plastic aisles of the Kay Bee Toys, past the mirrored walls of the Sbarro Pizza, into the blacklit poster display of Spencer’s Gifts. And throughout it all, She is there because if she could be anywhere in the world, she is here in this place of general meeting, custom and satisfaction. If she is anywhere, she is here in the agora, the souk, the plaza, the market: the mall, and then, over the racks of CDs in Record Town, the blood drains from my head, the sound goes down, and there, through the pulsing of my heartbeat in my ears, I see her, and I am overcome with wonder and contentment at this incomprehensible and benign world.
I say “hi”, she smiles at me, and waves “hi”. Ah, the way she said it. Low and clear, she sculpted the air coming from her perfumed mouth for me alone. I know it was not just a greeting, but a pronouncement of her mutual affection. She had, after all, smiled gently when she said it. At 11, it is enough, there is no reason to go beyond this single syllable, the elaboration of which will easily consume the rest of my day imagining how we will spend the rest of our lives together. The mall around me quietly encouraging this sentiment, despite the intention of the greedy rich who built the thing, I buy nothing, I need nothing, having derived all I needed from a simple visit and an encounter.
What backdrop will serve for this feeling for my children? The mall they have grown up with is cavernous and empty; a novel place of emptiness. The Claire’s, instead of being the birthplace of worldly femininity, is a couple of sad racks on a too-wide tile floor. The products obviously woefully out-of-date. The Game Stop, rather than being the sole means of accessing the supreme entertainment, is a faded tribute to it. The music store is gone, along with the packages music used to come in, jewel cases, liner notes, and anti-theft devices. There is only one restaurant left in the food court—one!—in a place that was once a feast of the senses and a tribute to our great nation of immigrants and the one contribution to culture that is always appreciated: food. Chinese, Italian, Mexican, Thai with the spice, the ferment, the fish, the too-bright, the too-spicey the unAmerican all paired away until all that was left was the palaver of sugar, salt and color, but, ah, how beautiful it looked and how contented we felt eating it. And the big box stores at the ends, once gigantic and labyrinthine places to seek out our moms, among endless aisles of clothing are now shuttered, offering only a blank, incongruent surface where once was a great opening, a way in.
Of course, it is a great thing that our meeting places are no longer in corporate hands. Now that we do our shopping online, we don’t need the consumerist excuse to meet and our meeting places have returned to the 19th century ideal: Cafes, parks, seashores, hiking trails and downtown squares festooned with hanging lights and not crowded but convivial in the evening. The downtowns are no longer empty. Once we started looking for more than just a place to buy from our meeting places, we returned to the forgotten beauty of red brick, sidewalks, murals, actual stars overhead, and wide restaurant windows giving out onto all of it.
And maybe, like the malls, the downtown squares have speakers which play top 40, and maybe the parks have their own incredible smells. Wet pine needles, leaf litter, and melt water streams being more subtly redolent of peace and harmony than plastic and floor wax. And maybe as the summer day closes and dissolves into twilight, and the gold comes up in peoples’ faces, and the lights sparkle on their eyes, maybe in those times, children ardent with first love are still encountering each other. Maybe it is better that they should love the sight of each other in a natural light rather than the halogen of the mall. Maybe it is better that they should see each other as a part of the sky and the trees rather than between aisles of crap to buy. Maybe. I wouldn’t really know. I only have my experience; I only have my memory of the malls as they were and can’t begin to imagine seeing my crush on, say, a hiking trail at 11 years old. This is as incongruent as imagining seeing her on the moon.
It's for the best that my kids will grow up without the artifice of the malls. They will become comfortable with things as they actually are, and they will expect the world to behave in a natural way rather than the artificial way I learned to expect from a childhood spent indoors going from one store to the next. However, as my kids and I range down the empty mall together, and I catch what feels like the last wiff of Sbarro’s pizza and hear the last soft plash of a coin falling into a fountain, the last click of the camera capturing a picture with Santa, a curtain is falling, a curtain that will separate their experience from mine. Perhaps this is a curtain that must fall between every generation so that adults cannot know their children’s loves too closely and interfere with them, but as this curtain tumbles down between my children and me, in a flash, I see how beautiful my mall world once was, and how terribly lonely and empty it is now, and I see my children’s glittering new world—just a glimpse—then the curtain is down, and I’m left with the tyranny of this memory, these huge buildings no one wants anymore, and, way down at the bottom of it, the euphoria of the love I knew there when I was young and without expectation, back when the curtain was heavily falling between my parents and me, piling in velvet folds and plumes of dust on the stage floor. I want to reach out in all directions. Toward my memories of the 1990s, toward my children’s world of smart phones and real trees in their social spaces, and even back to my parents’ world of department stores and bring them all together, but, no, we only get one experience and there I stand, looking over the CD racks, 11 again, seeing her wave to no one but me.
