i heard about this site, Dead Malls.com, on NPR this weekend. it’s mainly a collection of user posts about failing or demolished shopping malls. i spent a couple of hours reading through the entries.
a lot of the entries are fairly prosaic descriptions of failure. a community loses it’s economic livelihood and they build an interstate ten miles too far west, and then the big-box stores syphon off the remaining shoppers.
some of the entries are sentimental tales of a childhood lost, of formative years spent in the mall, with only a boarded-up JCpenny to remind one of youthful innocence.
there are urban explorers who break into the abandoned spaces and post their photos of a decrepit post-consumer world.
the best entries are grandiose narratives of monolithic hubris, cycling down into strange fires, mysterious drywalling where there used to be entire floors, shootings, gangwars, and illicit sex. my girlfriend says that she used to drive past the "prestonwood town center" in dallas in order to get to another mall. one user who waxed nostalgic about it’s decay wrote:
The elevators could be stopped without an emergency alarm sounding and could be restarted from inside the elevator. This made it rather easy to have sex in the elevators or do drugs that required lengthy preparation. When a minor epidemic of teenage heroin use spread across North Dallas, it became hip to shoot up in the elevators and squirt your leftover blood on the walls.
i remember spending the day before christmas eve in the eden prairie mall near minneapolis. it was in the middle of a renovation and there couldn’t have been more than a handful of tenants. it’s tough being a giant shopping center only a few miles from the mall of america. but it was a magical place for me. there were huge echoing spaces, like aircraft hangers. sunlight and melting snow poured through holes in the ceiling. a santa claus sat on his throne beneath a four-story tarp-wrapped scaffolding, surrounded by a few draped strings of lights and bored elves. i found an abandoned power outlet and wrote away on my laptop, an interloper in a creative blank space.
my uncle complained that their tiny little suburb wasn’t getting enough property taxes from the mall, and i thought he was just being a grump.
it’s interesting that people would care for these malls. at one point they were just a cynical commercialization of public space, crassly undermining american culture with their vacuity. but compared to the specter of the big-box stores they seem almost wholesome. certainly with age and failure, the malls can gain some sort of respect.
i was at austin’s northcross mall recently. it’s not quite a dead mall yet, but it’s tenants are fairly low-end, there are many vacant spaces, and the primary inhabitants of the mall are teenage ice-skaters and elderly mall-walkers. it was a comfortable space because of it’s emptiness and it’s relaxed atmosphere. i felt that i could occupy my space, that i wasn’t beholden to the consumer impulse.
i stole a power-outlet near a silent fountain and wrote away at my laptop.