I’m fascinated by these old mall images. Why are they so comforting? Why do I want to roam around these spaces while they’re empty, peering into the gated, now extinct shops, the faint splashing of the fountain my only company? I’m like one of those poor zombies in the original Dawn of the Dead.
Francine: What are they doing? Why do they come here?
Stephen: Some kind of instinct, memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.
And it was. Because the mall was designed to be a second home. The shops were the bedrooms and the dens, the kitchens were the food courts, the marbled open spaces were the living rooms. You smoked there, ate there, crapped there, read your paper there, checked your watch by the big clock. Plants were everywhere, and you didn’t have to water them. The brown-orange carpeting stretched from J.C. Penney to The Broadway, and you didn’t have to vacuum it. The kids watched the adults, and knew that the mall was good. The adults dropped the kids off in front of Sears. The kids spent their lunch money at the arcade, looked at toys, raised hell, spilled potato chips and Skittles (someone else would clean it up). The adults picked the kids up in front of Sears.
There was nowhere else to go in the suburbs. We learned to associate home and comfort with spending money. Spending money was what we were supposed to be doing. And if we couldn’t afford anything at the moment, that was okay: one day we’d be all grown up, we’d get that paycheck, and we’d remember how good it felt to be at the mall, how good it feels to finally be able to shop.
Malls today aren’t designed to keep people in; they’re made to keep people moving. The idea is to get you to buy the shit you don’t really need before you realize that there’s no reason to go to the mall anymore: they no longer feel like home, nobody “hangs out” there, and you can buy the shit you don’t really need on the internet.
I’ll be posting more of these shots as I find them.
(Images via Christian Montone/Flickr and The Hungry Pilgrims)
2 Warps to Neptune 
Speaking of malls, how’s this for a bittersweet memory of life how it used to be. 100 Bonus points if you can identify which mall it is 😉
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trKmk8eGCwM
Oh my God. This is terrible/awesome. The dude from Mama and Me at… Fox Hills?
This was “my mall”: a lush greenhouse with glittering chrome and glass everywhere. It looked like something from the Micronauts and could have felt sterile, but it didn’t. It was so comfortable and fun.
http://www.tampapix.com/tampabaycenter.htm
Very cool. Actually, I’ll do a post on this. I’ve been shirking my mall duties lately, and there are some good photos and articles on the center. If you have specific memories you’d like to share, I’d love to include them. Was there an arcade, for instance?
There was an arcade, and I remember a KayBee Toys, Woolworth, and (I think) a McCrory’s store there too. I remember a hobby shop that sold D&D miniatures that I liked to stare at (largely because D&D was taboo for me as a kid, and therefore much cooler). The mall itself had a merry-go-round on the first floor (which was underground) and famous for having a glass elevator positioned out over a fountain/pool: I remember being a kid and being scared the elevator was going to keep descending into the water…
Whatever the hell this is, it shows a bit of the mall (including the elevator) before it closed down:
Thanks for sharing, Don! That was a bizarre video. Totally understated, but still kinda intriguing to have an eagle visit a mall out of nowhere.
Ah, the mall. Fox Hills Mall (from the video in my first comment in this post) was my second home for many years in my childhood. It’s still there, but fully converted into a brand new identity and bought out by Westfield, who has named it Westfield Culver City. It’s funny that all the 40-somethings—including myself—still stubbornly call it Fox Hills Mall, no matter what. That’s what it’ll always be to us.
Speaking of D&D being taboo, I think 2Warps presented a couple of comic book scans awhile back from some religious brochures addressing that very issue. Does my memory serve me correctly?
Yeah. You’re thinking of the Chick Tract:
https://2warpstoneptune.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/chick-tracts-dark-dungeons-1984/
I haven’t even started posting the hundreds of articles trying to link D&D to Satanism, etc.
Don, have you seen this?
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tampa-Bay-Center-1976-2002/43675169723