It came to me in a dream, honestly. The notion that one would walk the mall with one’s friends is not something I got from popular culture, because popular culture didn’t reach the exurbs of Alabama in 1983. I literally had a dream that I and some of my classmates (notice I don’t say friends) were at Century Plaza, in an era when that was still the premier mall in Greater Birmingham. Western Hills Mall, Eastwood Mall – both still broadly feasible, but neither as equipped as Century Plaza for my needs, which in the early era meant a toy store, an arcade, a bookstore and a music shop.
Three years later, the Riverchase Galleria opened. And it blew every other place away – a quarter mile long, skylights and atrium with neon lights, aBanana Republic with a Jeep sticking through the window, two bookstores, two record shops, a Macy’s! – to the point that I stopped going anywhere else. Inasmuch as I could, obviously – I was two years from a drivers license and on the wrong side of Birmingham to get there without begging my parents. But it was something that approximated a future life – it was walkable. You could go from shop to shop to dining to just hanging around, all day and all night. I fantasized about the kind of wealth that would let me live in the top floor of the attached hotel or office tower (I was getting through a lot of Fantastic Four at the time).
There was one other smaller mall, closest to school and with a 70s Brutalist feel that was almost subterranean, but once I could drive it was the easiest stop from school. It was an obvious hangout, albeit a solitary one. It and the Gal were the only malls I frequented through the end of college. Largely because there was little enough else to do.
In Nashville, the malls were at the cardinal points of the compass, and diverse in audience – Green Hills, my local, was most posh, and Rivergate was a touch downmarket, but the others all covered a pretty broad array (with the additional novelty at Bellevue) and I could find most anything I was looking for – which by this point was mainly hats, jerseys, Nikes and outerwear. Music came from Tower Records and books from Davis-Kidd or Bookstar, and hanging out was for the Overcup Oak or SATCO.
By the time I was in DC, malls like Tysons Corner or Pentagon City were mainly for movies or dinner. It didn’t take long for music stores to become irrelevant in the digital era, and a good tobacconist was as important as anything else. It didn’t hurt to have the very first Apple Store open in Tyson’s either. Once I got to California, the mall was only interesting for a couple of years, and only out of habit.
Which brings us to today. With one exception, there are two types of malls in Silicon Valley: upscale luxury malls and demolished malls. Valley Fair, Stanford Shopping Center and Santana Row are all explicitly dialed in on big money, especially the Chinese tourism market. Sunnyvale Town Center, Tanforan and Vallco are closed or rubble. Hillsdale is going upscale. The lone holdout, so far, is Oakridge Mall in San Jose, which has gone broad church: Target as an anchor store, a food court and a movie theater, ethnic shopping and local ownership alongside more major national chains, and a willingness to cater to customers larger than size 4 or poorer than a quarter-million a year.
The Amazon bomb did for the malls. Did for most retail, honestly. I never thought I would be willing to shop for clothing online, but between American Giant and LC King, it’s gotten pretty simple. Socks from Bombas, drawers from Made Here, and as much as I don’t want to use Amazon, it’s basically the search engine for commercial goods. But more than that – I’ve spent most of a quarter century living with public transport, major cities, walkable downtowns of varying sizes. If all I get from a mall any more is lunch or coffee, there are plenty of options in Menlo Park or Mountain View or San Jose, and much better loitering.
The mall, in the 80s, was a set of training wheels for a bigger world. The problem was when I didn’t have anything else in Birmingham for years and years to provide the grown-up version. I suppose one of the reasons I have a hard time feeling fifty is because I didn’t accumulate fifty years’ worth of living. Maybe when I say it’s not the years, it’s the mileage, it’s because the mileage is lower than it ought to be. And more highway miles than city, to my cost.