For we who aren't out in the malls this Black Friday, here's an amusingly written feature story from the WaPo's great Hank Stuever, who's been at the mall lately and sees a whole way of American life dying. Here's how it starts:
Shopocalypse now!We're living at what may be the beginning of the end of mallworld as we know it: Certain Circuit City locations are marked for death here and there, and certain Ann Taylor Lofts are not responding to the corporate chemo, and the vacant Hecht's box is still a forlorn husk at Westfield Wheaton Shopping Centre, its parking lot filled with empty school buses. Across the land, it's heebie-jeebie vibes in the homogenous habitat. Bennigan's, Sharper Image, Bombay Co., Linens 'N Things, RIP. It's a series of harbingers. It's the end of things 'N things.
Ever seen Deadmalls.com? I remember as a kid watching Baton Rouge's Bon Marche mall die. It was the city's first and only mall; I remember as a wee lad walking through it with my folks, holding my dad's hand and thinking I was in some sort of magic kingdom. I was most fascinated by the Hickory Farms store -- by its colors, it's sausagey smell, and the implication that every day was Christmas (I think it must have been all the brightly colored cellophane on the cheeses). When we were there that first time, it was still an open-air mall, but in 1974 they closed it in.
And then, in 1976, when I was nine years old, Cortana Mall (now called The Mall at Cortana) opened a couple of miles away from Bon Marche. It was a wonder. Bon Marche was instantly out of date. Everybody shopped at Cortana. On the occasion that we would go to Bon Marche for something, you could tell that poor mall was on its way out. There would be surprisingly few shoppers milling about, and a growing number of poor black people. White people started to think of Bon Marche as the "black mall," notwithstanding that middle-class black people shopped at Cortana. Over time, the housing development next door, which, according to the Deadmalls.com history of Bon Marche's death, was built for yuppies, turned into a crime-infested ghetto. My first job on graduating from journalism school was as an intern crime reporter at the Baton Rouge Advocate. Mall City, as it was then called, kept me busy. By then, Bon Marche mall was well into its terminal phase, although its owners didn't know it, spending $3 million on a useless renovation in 1991.
Surely there must have been academic work on the role of class and ethnicity in driving the success and failure of malls.
Here in Dallas, I've noticed a similar phenomenon. I'm thinking of a particular mall that has become known as the kind of mall where poor and working-class Mexicans shop, and is on the glide path to defunctitude. If a mall gets known among white people as "the black mall" -- or, I suppose, in a regional variation, as "the Mexican mall" -- they just won't go to it. Stuff White People Hate? Right-minded white people will deplore the trend, but the kind of liberal, educated white people who deplore this kind of thing aren't the kind of white people who would be caught dead actually shopping in the black mall. They're embarrassed by other white people who won't shop there, and who don't feel bad about it.
I wonder if this is a spiral: does a mall start to falter economically, making it accessible to minorities with less money to spend, who frighten middle class white people (and middle class folks of other races) away? If not "frighten," then serve as a subconscious sign that this mall is in decline, and not where the cool people shop? I know, I know, racism and classism, let us all deplore it and move on. I'm interested in this cultural and economic dynamic. Can anybody here point to any academic research or something like it documenting this sort of thing, and explaining it?
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1) The further north a mall is located is probably inversely proportional to the chances of mall-death. In winter they are exceptionally inviting. There's a reason that malls were invented in the Twin Cities.
2) While working in the Fargo mall, the threat was not blacks-- there aren't many to speak of and what ones exist pretty much aren't all that outwardly different from anyone else, other than skin color. The threat to the mall came from white immigrants-- Croatians and others-- and white teenagers [particularly 13-15 year old girls and the drooling boys trying to impress them] who acted very obnoxiously and drove patrons away. The vast majority of the people with pictures in the security Banned Binder were in those two groups.
Nancy Irving
November 29, 2008 5:40 AM
What Nancy said - every single thing Nancy said.
One theory I've heard, but have no idea if anything has ever been written about, is that the decline and fall of a mall is directly related to the presence of public transportation.
CC - I think you've hit the nail on the head, linking public transportation and mall problems.
I live in a middle-class neighborhood very near two malls which are directly across the street from each other. Every weekend the bus lines empty out throngs of black teenagers who move about in packs and drive the security people crazy. (One of the malls has a "no-unescorted-teenager" policy after a certain time in the evening. They spend large amounts of their time and money desperately trying to enforce this.)
The local gang-unit has a large percentage of its staff permanently stationed here at the malls. Shootings are not exactly common, but they are not at surprising either. (This very afternoon my teenager witnessed a drug bust, for example.)
They're doomed.
"For we who are..."
How about "for us". Prepositional phrase and all...
Cloverleaf Mall in Chesterfield County Virginia is located right outside of Richmond City limits. Built in the early 70's, it remained solidly middle-class and prosperous- until the mid-90s, when the City extended the municipal bus line out to the mall. Businesses declined but slowly until couple of murders happened, thereafter only 99 cent stores and subwoofer shops were left. Cloverleaf's customers fled to the Chesterfield Towne Center a few miles west. The last I heard the business owners and the county were fighting plans to extend the city bus line out to that mall.
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