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 