Dead Malls Predicted The Erosion Of Public Space In America

Source: Medium, Rachel Presser
Photo: Interior of a dilapidated abandoned mall. (Licensed via Adobe Stock)

There’s a million memes, jokes, and videos about dead malls but the fervored discussion conceals what we won’t say out loud: cities and suburbs alike are losing places we can socialize and foster communities.

I was inspired to write this after I read this brilliant and heart-rending piece by Jacqueline Dooley

I’ve been following the dead mall phenomenon for years myself. I’ve written about it for current and previous columns, like the mass repurposing of abandoned malls for housing and VR experiences.

As someone who spends a lot of time deciphering the epidemic levels of Millennial loneliness and feels like facepalming every time yet another thinkpiece comes out proclaiming that social media is making us miserable and we just need to go out and talk to people again — they’ve forgotten how it’s not just the ways that we use technology that cause us to be hyper-intimate yet complete strangers, but WHERE do we actually go when everything is either shuttered or become a Wal-Mart?

I don’t want to wax too nostalgically about the turn of the millennium, it was a shit time for me personally even if there’s various aspects of life, technology, and what my city was that I sorely miss.

But it dawned on me that malls were the canary in the coal mine for essentially losing our public spaces where we don’t have to be rushed out once we fork over our money — if we fork it out at all.

Sure, it’s easy to make fun of those empty stretches of derelict FYE stores that were once wafted with the cloying miasma of Perfumania as the spot where you once picked up an Orange Julius is a vacant food stand with tumbleweeds rolling by.

A friend of mine got her COVID vaccine at a dead mall upstate and said it was intensely trippy to see masked people lining up inside a vacant Lord and Taylor store to get jabbed with Pfizer where you could once pick up some Clinique. You could almost hear the vaporwave being piped in, much like the videos in Dan Bell’s brilliant Dead Mall series.

But perhaps we mock because it’s the only way to come to the grips with the fact that we’re just losing places we can actually go without immediately being hustled out once we’ve dropped some cash.

Look, I never got super into mall culture myself. By the time I was old enough to start going out by myself, I was more interested in loitering in the Village, going to punk shows, and trawling St. Marks Place and environs to look at vestments you couldn’t find at Hot Topic if you didn’t make them yourself.

Though just like how mall food courts around America boarded up along with JC Penney, so did my all my old haunts far from the beige grip of suburbia.

It’s happening whether you live in a small town or one of the largest cities in the nation: places where we can just congregate and socialize freely are being yanked out from under us. To say nothing of how this disproportionately impacts young people who seem to have even less autonomy and rights than when I was their age; as even adults with decent incomes and control over their time thanks to remote jobs and freelancing are finding themselves lonelier than expected with very few places to go.

And look, it’s not just beloved bars, restaurants, music venues, and small shops being put through the financial meat grinder of commercial real estate brokers who got greedy. Even our PARKS are being made into hostile places where you can’t just go to exist and watch the world go by unless it’s some shitty corporate curated experience kept in order by jackboots.

Isolationist urban planning carries a lot of blame in making American society an incredibly lonely one. But when discussing Millennial loneliness, is no one seriously noticing how few places we have to go compared to yesteryear? Blame us being buried in our phones all you want, for a lot of us it’s the only way to find other people at the rate we’re going.

When it comes to dead malls in particular, they deserve some extra analysis because there’s a couple things going unsaid with how they met their demise.

It wasn’t just Amazon and online shopping that killed malls, real estate developers and investors got overzealous with how many malls they invested in.

Abandoned mall documentarian Sal on YouTube described how this happened in his area of central New Jersey when malls were at their peak in the 1980s and 1990s.

Malls and their emergent culture sprang from the mass suburbanization in the postwar era, with a tax law in 1954 that encouraged large commercial projects by enabling developers to accelerate their depreciation deductions. We had a strong economy in the 1990s which gave Millennials Jolt Cola-sweet false hope about our futures, and the Internet was this newfangled thing that would not be associated with shopping for quite a while yet. Mail-order catalogs existed, but this was long before the days of Amazon making us expect two-day delivery. You had to go to a physical store if you needed or wanted something, and the whole idea of a mall was to make a day of it.

Malls and shopping centers subsequently cropped up like kudzu all over the nation as they were making money hand over fist for their investors. Ergo, the 1% kept shoveling more money into real estate development companies and they immediately funneled it into a sea of malls with no regard for location or what those communities actually wanted or needed.

So sure, malls were this huge wasteful bastion of capitalism designed to enrich real estate developers who could diversify their risk across a variety of commercial tenants under the same roof. But malls were also a place you could just hang around, meet people, and people watch for long timeframes so their decline is bittersweet. Even if you were a teenager with little or no money, it was a relatively safe public place to aimlessly wander on a weekend with friends or by yourself.

“Mall Walkers” became a common community-building thing with older people in malls across America. Who WOULDN’T want to hang around a cold mall then in a subzero movie theater after getting some Jamba Juice in the climate change fueled heatwaves we’ve been having?

But while online shopping has made people less reliant on retail stores compared to the past, the pandemic has revealed that we still like to leave the house to eat and be entertained, and yes, talk to people outside of Twitter. And sometimes you just can’t trust the timeliness of package fulfillment and delivery, or deal with long waits due to supply chain issues that world-shattering events like a plague can cause or exacerbate.

I don’t buy that consumer spending behaviors alone drove the death of malls. After all, nothing but big-box stores gets built near me in The Bronx anymore, along with many of the same exact chains found at the malls in NYC’s outer boroughs. Hell, we didn’t even get a mall here until 2014 and it’s thriving, unlike the sprawling megaplexes in various dots of suburbia.

There’s definitely other forces at work, like our nerfed spending power and not having enough time to shop when work, commuting, and the other basics of daily life suck up more time than they really have to. Still, real estate investors overestimated just how many malls an area needed in the first place, then didn’t attract the types of tenants who’d make people want to make the schlep to the mall — which would have a more experiential element today, if retail shopping has been relegated online for the most part.

But it’s not just young people who suddenly lack a place to go when the mall shutters: more age-diverse groups also lose community spaces.

The 2020 documentary Jasper Mall, about the eponymous mall in decline in Jasper, Alabama, showed a group of mall walkers and older residents playing dominoes and having gospel concerts in addition to events arranged by the mall manager like carnivals. Jasper is a fairly small town, the aforementioned Burlington is nowhere near as huge as New York but affords a higher degree of anonymity alongside its population density. Regardless, both places foster this sense of community in seeing familiar faces shopping and just hanging out in this indoor area. The filmmakers even point out that the loss of community will be devastating as more malls shutter around the nation.

I checked the comments section of the movie and found something curious:

YouTube comments — top one says “I hope this mall survives, this mall manager seems amazing however, this mall is owned by Kohan- they have a HORRIBLE record, they’re mall slum lords.”

A cursory Googling shows that the retail management firm in question is located in western Long Island. Nothing wrong with doing business across state lines, I do it constantly in my line of work. But perhaps a company located this far from its tenants doesn’t really know what’s best for them, or the communities they serve, to say nothing of the individual circumstances for Jasper, AL.

But whether it’s Jasper or The Bronx, holding companies shouldn’t dictate as many lives as they do.

How do we get our public space back? To easily congregate and not be so atomized?

There’s no one size fits all solution for this, as reclaiming public space would look different in a city like New York opposed to a small southern town like Jasper in terms of both cultural and legal differences.

If some malls get taken off life support, perhaps they should be resurrected as small co-ops where the workers who actually run these places and the communities they serve have a say in how they’re run? Because I bet there’s families who want climate-controlled places to take their kids, and 30-somethings who found their social lives totally gutted one day and want to find their peers and start anew. Plus older people who don’t want to be lonely, and want somewhere else to go aside from community rooms at assisted living centers. A place where you can accommodate both the “here for the day” crowd and “I just need to buy a new microphone and maybe I’ll grab a sandwich on the way out”.

We can get more circular thinkpieces about both Zoomer and millennial loneliness that blame podcasts and Instagram, or we can take what’s rightfully ours: public and private spaces and the right to loiter and congregate, building actual bonds without a care about likes and algorithms. Where you’ll actually text one another to make plans instead of DMing!

Well, that and making real estate schemes like this illegal. Yeah, you need to make a profit to run a business. Everyone knows that. But holding onto dying real estate? Come on. Friends, families, communities, and lovers matter more than some asshole’s balance sheet.

Even if society moved past the need for malls, it hasn’t moved past the need for community. And we’re losing places where we can build them. The mall was just the last domino that fell, quieter than the airbrushing of a T-shirt at that cart between Aerie and Bath and Body Works.

https://sonictoad.medium.com/dead-malls-predicted-the-erosion-of-public-space-in-america