Shopping Mall

A book about the curiosity, ritual, and fantasy of the American mall

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An in-depth look at the peak mall year of 1982, with Oak Park Mall in Overland Park, Kansas the focal point.

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A gathering of sales clerks at the Gimbels in Eastland Mall, ca. 1970s.

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From Littlewhitehead’s Pink Fountains series.

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A view of the BEST Products Inside/Outside Showroom in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1984. This Inside/Outside display of store merchandise, designed by architect James Wines, shows the transition from real objects to ghosted counterparts as they pass through the glass wall.

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Ghost Malls

“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” —Wendell Berry 

When demolition crews arrived at Greengate Mall in May 2003, it marked the end of a decade-long financial collapse that had left the shopping mall in a state of obsolescence. Shuttered two years earlier, the vacant mall—a community fixture in and around the town of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, for nearly 40 years—was being razed to make way for a Walmart Supercenter. News of the demolition upset longtime customers and former employees, senior citizens who walked the concourses for morning exercise and former mall rats who came of age in Greengate’s neon hallways. Losing the mall also triggered an almost immediate sense of longing among those who adored it.

“It wasn’t just a place to shop,” said Gary Nelson. “It was a community center.” Nelson, who was born in the late 1980s, grew up going to Greengate. It was the mall his parents preferred. Before his family had a car, they would take a bus to the mall from where they lived in the nearby town of Jeannette. When asked to recall his most vivid memories of Greengate, Nelson cited dinners at Elby’s, playing video games at Tilt, and shopping at stores like G. C. Murphy and National Record Mart. His family’s trips to the mall, much like my own as a child, were experiences steeped in emotion. Read full essay over at The Outline.

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Shopping Mall in good company at Octavia Books in New Orleans.

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The Legend of the Gun-Shaped Mall

In Erie, Pennsylvania, there is a shopping mall shaped like a gun. This architectural flourish, however, is not readily apparent from inside the mall. To visualize Millcreek Mall’s weaponized consumerism, one must rely on aerial views via Google Maps. According to urban legend, the mall, built in 1975, achieved its unique shape thanks to a rather dubious backstory. In his essay “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” James M. Russell brings that backstory to life:

Millcreek, what James Howard Kunstler defines as “The Geography of Nowhere,” is a suburb of dreary Erie. The Millcreek Mall acts as the center of this soulless place. Youngstown, Ohio’s William Cafaro, arguably the King of Strip Malls (if regional goodfella Edward J. DeBartolo Sr. didn’t wear the crown), built this palace of conspicuous consumption in the shape of a firearm aimed at city hall or the courthouse. There’s more to this suburban mafia myth. My father told me a farmer on part of the land targeted for mall development held out and his barn succumbed to fire. “Arson,” my dad insisted. Ill-begotten gains rooted in a godforsaken cul-de-sac. Home.

Whether William Cafaro purposely built Millcreek Mall in the shape of a gun to send a message to city hall may never be known. But I would imagine the mafia works in far more direct ways than intimidation through architecture.   

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The Malls of My Dreams

The countdown clock had less than a minute remaining. My legs were all pins and needles, like they had fallen asleep. Moving myself forward, let alone the cart, seemed impossible. I could see the finish line. There was a black-and-white checkerboard strip on the ground and a red ribbon with the word “Winner” emblazoned in white letters. I imagined breaking through the ribbon with my cart. How wonderful it would feel to be hoisted on the shoulders of the crowd, celebrated by those who had wished me well.

As I struggled to push the cart out of the water and across a small patch of sand, I saw my mother’s face in the crowd. She was smiling and clapping and trying to tell me something. Her mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear the words. All sound had drained from the store. The crowd’s excitement was telegraphed in silent pantomime. My shopping cart, piled high with toys and games and stuffed animals and plungers, was harder and harder to push. My arms were tired and my legs had gone numb.

Beyond the finish line was the world of the mall. I could see it, hear it too. It hummed like a great machine. But not the type dripping with oil and powered by gasoline and iron gears. Instead, it consumed oxygen, carbon dioxide, and body heat. And the more it had the more it came alive. The concourses were populated with strangers who appeared to be lost in dreams of their own, moving past the entrance to the toy store like traffic at a busy intersection. The mall was at the center—pulling each of us toward its doors, urging us to lock in, coaxing us to give ourselves over. And its long, neon hallways represented a future I couldn’t know then but which has now become the past. As I neared the finish line with only seconds left on the clock, the cart’s black rubber wheels covered in sand and garbage and unable to roll, I woke up.

Read the full essay over at 3:AM Magazine: http://bit.ly/2uhV3q6

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AT&T encourages the public to embrace its inner voyeur.

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Here’s a photograph of filmmaker George Kuchar standing in the parking lot of a Kmart.

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Life is Ridiculously Awesome

Vinson Cunningham on Shana Novak’s photograph of Kmart’s recently redesigned plastic bag, and its callback to the halcyon days of retail:

"The hope was to convince [millennial shoppers] (or, I guess, remind them) that consumption, retail-style, could, in the corporation’s words, be ‘fun,’ even ‘awesome.’ 2016 was the hundredth anniversary of Kmart’s incorporation; the hint of self-consciously campy nostalgia in its new ‘look and feel’ seems connected to the steady decay of the shopping experience that once helped to define, and to bolster, a wide swath of working- and lower-middle-class life in America."

(via The New Yorker)

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Mall Dad never lets his daughter and her friend roam the promenade without a cellular phone to stay in touch.

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When I Saw the Firebird I Fell in Love

My parents found the Firebird in the Pennysaver. I remember the night we drove out to the country to pick it up. I was still dressed in my Catholic school uniform, khaki pants and an Oxford shirt, which was wrinkled from a long day sitting in class. We drove until we reached what felt like the middle of nowhere, an open landscape of winding roads and endless guardrails, until we finally arrived. When I saw the Firebird I fell in love. Its Kelly green paint was tinted with silver and gold flecks that shimmered in the fading sunlight. The rear end of the Firebird was lifted like a muscle car, and the big back tires reminded me of racing slicks—the same kind I’d seen on Don Garlits’ dragster when my father and I watched the NHRA races each weekend on TV. I couldn’t believe this was our new car. It looked like a Hot Wheels, one I would have played with until the wheels were loose and the paint wore thin. I imagined we would own it forever and that my mother would eventually hand it down to my sister who would later hand it down to me. That night in the country, however, as my mother sat behind the steering wheel for the first time—gushing with excitement—you could see her imagining all the places we’d go. Excerpt from Shopping Mall (Bloomsbury)

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The Wonderfall at Palm Beach Mall

For a fleeting moment in postwar America, shopping malls were more than retail emporiums—they were fantasy worlds where people sought to escape the pressures of daily life. Not always with consumerism in mind either, but with the desire to commune in an architectural wonderland, to experience an environment unlike any other. At Palm Beach Mall in West Palm Beach, Florida, which opened in 1967, the “Wonderfall” (pictured just beyond the bridge) embodied that suspension of disbelief. It was a small bit of fiction rendered in reality. In 2013, Palm Beach Mall was demolished to make way for an outlet mall. As its walls were being torn down, Ginger Pedersen wrote about looking through “the chain link fence to the rubble that once was one of the largest malls in the nation.” 

(Photograph: David Cobb Craig. Caption: When the Palm Beach Mall opened in 1967, the “Wonderfall” was the central feature in the mall promenade.)

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When Richard Simmons Danced for Us

On October 8, 1994, fitness guru Richard Simmons arrived at Century III Mall in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, determined to entertain. Dressed in a hot pink tank top adorned with music notes, his signature short-shorts, and gleaming white tennis shoes, he embodied his larger-than-life persona that had been seen on infomercials and VHS workout tapes throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Apparently part of an event sponsored by B-94 FM, Simmons danced for a crowd of hundreds in the mall’s central court, in the days when Century III was still a desired destination.    (Photograph: C3Nostalgia)

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The ‘Fish Music’ of Woodfield Mall

“From Muzak to Hot Topic, the musical history of American shopping malls is not, by and large, a proud tale. But if the pioneering electronic musician Suzanne Ciani had been given more say, things might have turned out very different. Predating her commercial work for companies like AT&T and Coca-Cola, “Fish Music,” recently unearthed from her archive by Andy Votel’s Finders Keepers label, was composed in 1971 for the opening of the Woodfield mall in Schaumburg, Ill. The shopping center’s developers hired Ciani, then in her mid-20s, to create an immersive soundtrack to accompany a complex of three large aquariums stocked with exotic fish and displayed in the mall’s Grand Court.”

via Pitchfork

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Teens at the mall are almost preternaturally skilled in the semiotics of fashion.

Bruce Dobler