Feb 27
Within of Static - Northgate Mall
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Within of Static - Northgate Mall
The Districts of the Seattle Sourcebook (1st Edition): Downtown/Seattle, Part 2
The Conclusion of the long-winded discussion of the Seattle Sourcebook.
Downtown Downtown has the Ork Underground, Renraku Arcology, and the Aztechnology Pyramid, while the rest of the district has… the airport. Outside of downtown Downtown, the rest of Downtown Seattle is kind of just… there.
#Plot Hooks: 39 (includes downtown Downtown)
Organized Crime
Mafia -- Major
Yakuza -- Major
Seoulpa Rings -- Minor
Gangs -- Major
Places of Note
Alabaster Maiden
Address: 12th Ave E & E Mercer St. Located in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, this nightclub’s eponymous entryway statue is supposedly an actual Petrified magician.
Sea-Tac (Seattle-Tacoma International Airport)
This is normally the type of place that runners wouldn’t touch with a monofilament whip: just think about the level of security that is present at airports today, in 2020, and then having your party’s Street Samurai just step foot on site. This is just a roundabout way of saying, “I’d like to make a new character.”
Northgate Mall
Address: N Northgate Way & 1st Ave NE. Just off I-5 in the Northgate neighborhood has swelled to a 10-story mall in 2050.
This is the only item they sell.
“The Decline of Mall Civilization” brings to life vivid images of short shorts, big hair, and bigger suburban commerce.
They’re at the bottom of the escalator, faces obscured. They could be anyone — your grandparents, perhaps. They don’t have shopping bags. Perhaps they’ve just arrived, or maybe they’ve come for lunch at the food court … no. That’s not it. Look at the clothes: bold blocked pastels, light pinks, white pants, sneakers. They’re mall walkers.
If the unmistakable style doesn’t give the era away, the film stock’s grain does.
We’re looking into the past, into the heart of a time and place that is all but gone: the American shopping mall, monolithic and, in the late eighties, ubiquitous.
This is one of the most striking images in local photographer Michael Galinsky’s forthcoming photo book, The Decline of Mall Civilization, for which he’s raising funds on Kickstarter to publish in August. (He’s surpassed his goal by more than $30,000.) The composition is near-perfect, with the escalator’s lines and the floor’s tiles giving the image a distinct sense of movement.
But it wasn’t composition Galinsky had in mind. Rather, it was simple point-and-shoot documentation, capturing a moment that would soon be lost to memory.
In 1989, Galinsky — a native of Chapel Hill, best known for images published in 2013 he took, while in high school, of a 1987 KKK march down Franklin Street — was a sophomore at New York University. Fascinated by the work of photographers William Eggleston and Robert Frank, and inspired by the anthropology and sociology he was studying in college, Galinsky wanted to examine the mall as a “privatized public square.” He began snapping photos at malls on Long Island. Encouraged by a professor to continue his work that summer, Galinsky and a friend packed up his friend’s dented Toyota hatchback and struck out to document malls across America.
“I had recently read On The Road,” Galinsky says. “I had this romantic notion of what [the trip] could be. We’d meet interesting people and have wild adventures. This did not happen.”
Hamstrung by what Galinsky describes as an inherent shyness and a lack of money, the duo plodded around the country for over a month, documenting fifteen malls from New York to Seattle, while crashing with friends, family, and sometimes in the back of the Toyota.
Upon his return to New York, Galinsky grew discouraged by the art world’s disinterest in point-and-shoot street photography. He filed the mall photos away and focused on filmmaking and New York’s thriving indie rock scene.
In the decades since, Galinsky, along with his wife and creative partner, Suki Hawley, became an acclaimed independent filmmaker — from his debut, Half-Cocked, a black-and-white examination of Louisville’s nascent indie-rock scene, to the couple’s lauded Battle For Brooklyn. But he’s remained an avid photographer, documenting the flora and fauna of Chapel Hill’s verdant Merritt’s Pasture and sharing his trove of pictures of legendary indie-rockers.
Twenty-one years after that cross-country journey, in 2010, Galinsky came upon the slides of those images while scanning his personal archives. He realized that he had documents of a disappearing moment. So he set up a Kickstarter campaign to fund the release of his first book of images, Malls Across America, in 2013. That run of fifteen hundred books sold out before Galinsky had a chance to solicit stores for copies.
The Decline of Mall Civilization picks up where Malls Across America left off, offering yet another window into what was the cultural and civic hub of much of the U.S. And while both books examine the culture of the shopping mall at the height of its popularity, Decline approaches the images as companions to one another, rather than the two-page, single-image spreads of Malls Across America.
“We spent a lot of time and effort pairing the images into diptychs that play off each other in interesting ways,” Galinsky says.
The fashions are amusing, the hairstyles embarrassing, the neon signage and retro-futuristic fonts almost a joke. But the photos are intimate portraits of a time when commerce was communal — and when you could still smoke inside.
It’s no coincidence that collective nostalgia trips happen in two-to-three-decade cycles, as it’s then that the shapers of our cultural capital — our filmmakers, fashion designers, and musicians — are reaching the peak of their creative careers.
For those who grew up in the fifties, there was American Graffiti; for children of the sixties, Wonder Years; the seventies, Dazed and Confused (and That ‘70s Show). In the same way, the Durham native Duffer brothers’ Stranger Things reignited our curiosity in the styles, sounds, and looks (and New Coke) of the eighties.
And while traces of eighties nostalgia can be found in fashion (hello, big hair and shoulder pads) and music (popular and otherwise), nowhere is it more prominent than on our television screens.
“San Junipero,” the most lauded episode of post-technology horror show Black Mirror, is drenched in the style of the Me Generation; Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence are once again karate-kicking all over Reseda in Cobra Kai; Alison Brie and Marc Maron take to the ring in the ladies’ wrestling gem GLOW; HBO’s masterful, haunting series Chernobyl examines the 1986 nuclear disaster that killed untold thousands (and nearly killed millions more).
And then there’s Stranger Things, which first took us to the Upside Down in 2017.
A central character of the Netflix show’s third season is the Starcourt Mall, which the producers built inside a derelict mall in an Atlanta suburb. In the show, set in summer 1985, the shiny, new mall is a beacon of growth for the fictional Hawkins, Indiana, and parallels its protagonists’ emotional evolution.
Striking fear in the hearts of Hawkins’s mom-and-pops, the Starcourt Mall is a picture-perfect rendering of the classic malls of the eighties. This was the time when malls were king — and it makes you wonder from which local mall Matt and Ross Duffer drew inspiration: The long-shuttered South Square Mall, a cornerstone of Durham life from 1975 to 2002, when it was overwhelmed by the then-new Streets at Southpoint. Or maybe the Northgate Mall, which just moved out of bankruptcy but still faces an uncertain future at the hands of its new investment-bank owners. Or perhaps Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh, which opened in 1972 and is today the largest enclosed mall in the Triangle, yet is still fighting for its very existence. (Mall officials recently unveiled a $290 million proposal for a thirty-floor mixed-use building that will replace a vacant Sears and, they hope, help the mall “evolve with the times.”)
Or, more likely, it’s some amalgam of all of those — and other long-forgotten malls.
The era of mall supremacy, the one Galinsky’s book documents, wasn’t long-lived. Malls in America saw their boom begin in concert with the postwar generation’s migration to the suburbs and the rise of automobile culture. In 1956, an enclosed shopping center called Southdale opened in a Minneapolis suburb, the first mall. By 1960, there were more than forty-five hundred of them across the U.S. The boom peaked somewhere in the mid-nineties. By 2004, the U.S. had more than forty-seven thousand malls.
The collapse came quick. Malls took their biggest hit from the Great Recession. Between 2007 and 2009, more than four hundred of the largest ones closed. By the time the economy regained steam, online shopping was ubiquitous, and the re-urbanization of America was underway, with young people returning to the cities their parents and grandparents had abandoned.
The seemingly inescapable decline of what was once called the “New American Main Street” had fully taken hold.
Unlike Stranger Things, unlike Cobra Kai, and unlike “San Junipero,” The Decline of Mall Civilization exists as more than a paean to a bygone era.
Despite its name, an homage to Penelope Spheeris’s landmark examination of Los Angeles’s early-eighties punk scene, Decline is a document detached from the haze of memory. Its subjects were real people, living real lives; its images are renderings of what life actually looked like in 1989.
Maybe, somewhere in his subconscious, Galinsky knew then that someday these monoliths would go extinct.
“I was twenty when I shot these,” Galinsky says. “My field of vision wasn’t that deep. But I was vaguely aware that they would be gone. I did understand the import of documenting something before it was gone.”
He had no way of knowing what would come after them.
But just as malls replaced the mom-and-pops across America, leaving once-bustling suburban hubs riddled with shuttered windows and empty sidewalks, now Amazon and eBay have rendered malls obsolete, monuments to an outmoded time when we shopped, ate, lingered, and smoked inside together.
Which makes you wonder what nostalgia for the 2010s is going to look like twenty years from now.
Comment on this story at [email protected].
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Buy what’s left of Northgate Mall + NC’s regressive tax structure + Carroll’s Kitchen owner doesn’t want your gay wedding + NCAA backs trans athletes + Israel attacks Iran
Buy what’s left of Northgate Mall + NC’s regressive tax structure + Carroll’s Kitchen owner doesn’t want your gay wedding + NCAA backs trans athletes + Israel attacks Iran
Last night, Wester Auction & Realty held the first in a series of online auctions of, well, everything in the now-closed Northgate Mall. More auctions will take place every 10 days, leading up to the mall’s demolition this summer.
Today’s Number: 7.6 -- Effective state tax rate of white families in the top 20% of household incomes (earning > $91,300/year).
Fuquay-Varina Wedding Venue Discriminates Against Gay Couple
McCrory’s In. The Race Is On.
Other NCPOL News (3 stories)
NCAA Backs Trans Athletes
Minnesota Cop Reached for Taser, Fired Gun
Israel Attacks Iran as U.S. Begins Nuke Talks
Other Israel News (1 story)
Click link for more.
They closing Northgate FOREVER.
Starting Monday, all assets from the Northgate mall in Durham will be up for auction.
That space could've been used for something..
I bet they gonna tear it down and throw up some apartments
It was cool while it lasted tho, got some good memories n bad memories at that place lol
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Everything you need to know this morning
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It’s Friday, January 15.
Hey y’all,
I hope everyone has a great weekend. Nothing too major to report on my end, so let’s get to the newsletter.
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Private Equity Firm to Redevelop Northgate Mall Into More Complicated Mall
It’s a bad time to be a mall in America. Once a urban-sprawl staple full of big-box retail stores, multi-screen movie theaters, and teenagers hanging out in American Eagle and/or the food court, these formerly flourishing establishments are at risk going the way of the dodo. And really, if you wanted to design a business that would fail in 2021, you’d go with in-person retail (replaced by Amazon), movie theaters (replaced by online streaming services), and physical hangout spaces for teens (replaced by TikTok/Twitch/Fortnite/probably some other thing I’ve never heard of). But malls are big, and when they die, they do so in a way that creates serious blight. Last week, I wrote about how Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite, is taking over a big mall in Cary and turning it into an office. And today, I am writing about how CBRE Retail Services and Northwood Investors, two companies that don’t make a single video game (!), have taken over Northgate Mall in Durham, which shuttered in May.
Though Northwood, which I’ll get to in a moment, purchased Northgate in 2018, the firm announced its partnership with CBRE this week, and along with that announcement came its plans to redevelop the 55-acre Northgate property into, per a press release, a "mixed-use development" featuring "retail, Class A and creative office, residential, hospitality and life sciences."
In other words… it’s gonna be a mall, plus office spaces, condos, bars, and like some biotech labs or something.
Because there’s something inherently villainous to me about the name "Northwood Investors," I decided to go to their website and see what was up with them. It turns out that Northwood Investors is a private equity firm which "seeks to acquire assets at an attractive basis and unlock value over time through hands-on asset management." They specialize in real estate.
For a rundown of how private equity firms work, please read this article from Splinter, a website that was owned by a private equity firm which killed it.
Did you read the article? Great!
According to Northwood’s website, the firm is involved with over 270 properties throughout the world, including seven in the Triangle, all of which you definitely know and definitely love.
Most of them are random apartment complexes or office parks that aren’t really near anything that isn’t urban sprawl, but Northwood has crept into our downtowns. In Durham, they’ve got Van Alen, that generic-looking apartment building downtown whose sign I always confuse for "Van Halen," and smack-dab in the middle of Chapel Hill, there’s Carolina Square, aka the generic-looking apartment building on Franklin Street that has a Target on the bottom floor for some reason.
Northwood’s web page for Northgate, which they charmingly refer to at the moment as "Sears Redevelopment Portfolio II," is pretty vague as far as their actual plans, but it does feature, believe it or not, a generic-looking multi-building apartment complex with stores on the bottom floor of every building.
On one hand, this is probably good, as much as I hate to admit it. Durham has, as a 2019 report from HUD put it, "robust demand and a limited inventory" of housing. Northgate Mall is super close to downtown, Duke, and Ninth Street, and putting a buttload of apartments there might ease that demand by increasing supply. From this perspective, having a bunch of crappy stores and bars and restaurants attached is simply the price of doing business.
However, there is another type of supply and demand at play, one that’s more ephemeral. People love Durham and want to move here because it’s a unique place with a unique community. But there’s only one Durham, and a development like the one happening at Northgate Mall dilutes this town’s uniqueness, weakening our supply in a way that, in time, could very well erode people’s reasons for moving here.
Ultimately, it’s pretty wack that some private equity company can have such power over Durham simply by holding the deed to the local mall in their robust property portfolio. Northwood Investors has the best interests of Northwood Investors in mind — not the best interests of Durham. And though our interests currently align in that Durham needs more housing and Northwood Investors is down to provide it, the moment they can’t make a profit off Northgate Mall/Sears Redevelopment Portfolio II, they’ll dump us. And then, we’ll be right back to where we are now — but this time, the empty and unloved mall will be even bigger.
Statewide COVID-19 by the numbers: Thursday, January 14
9,853 New lab-confirmed cases (650,926 total; seven-day average trending down)
60,365 Completed tests (7.79 million total; most recent positive rate was 11.1 percent)
3,990 Current hospitalizations reported (seven-day average evening out; 7,825 total deaths)
238,344 Total vaccinated (First dose only; state data not updated daily)
Quick Hits
Oh boy, it turns out that North Carolina may be one of the world’s biggest exporters of cockfighting birds. Not chill! [INDY Week]
Once again, North Carolina has switched up its coronavirus vaccination plan. Now, anyone over 65 or who is a healthcare worker is eligible to receive the vaccine. Hooray! [News & Observer]
Following closely in the footsteps of Hillsborough, Chapel Hill has announced LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination ordinances. [INDY Week]
Joe Biden has announced he plans to push for a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, which will include direct financial assistance, plus money for schools, COVID testing, and more vaccinations. Hopefully, the price tag is high enough that it’ll still have an effect once the Republicans (and Joe Manchin) inevitably water it down. [WUNC]
The jobs… they do not exist. [Axios]
This weekend’s weather: Potentially rainy tomorrow, cold and kinda windy on Saturday, and generic January weather on Sunday.
Song of the day: This Ten-Minute Black Thought Freestyle In terms of technical skill, clever and profound writing, and freestyling ability, Black Thought of The Roots might be the greatest living MC. He’s not necessarily my favorite MC, but if you watch something like the above video, you’ll understand why objectively, he’s probably the best.
— Drew Millard — Send me an email | Find me on Twitter
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Happy Birthday, Mom ~
Happy Birthday, Mom ~
Everybody has a mother, maybe a sister, possibly a brother. Grandmas and grandpas and dads in there too, but our family is family thanks to you! You’ve always been with us to laugh or to cry, and sometimes (I’m sure) to think, “Why, oh why??” To this family you made, you’ve given your all, how can we say thank you, the words seem so small! But now it’s your birthday, and we cannot wait, to…
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