R.I.P. Ada Louise

I never met Ada Louise Huxtable, though for a brief period we were both writing for the New York Times. She even quoted me in one of her books, and I certainly quoted her in The Malling of America. She was one of its guiding lights. She died this week at the age of 91. Here's her LA Times obit.

Her beat was architecture for the Times, their first real architecture critic, and she was up there with Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford in reshaping New York City and how architects and planners thought about cities and how people live in them. She shaped criticism itself as a journalistic pursuit involving reporting, scholarship and taste.

In particular I found her work revelatory on the South Street Seaport in New York, when it was about to host another urban "marketplace" mall built by the Rouse Company, after its successes on the waterfronts of Boston and Baltimore.

At retirement age she instead became the architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal. She also wrote books (I'm footnoted in The Unreal America.) Her influence was highest in the 60s but her work inspired me in the 80s and I'm sure it is inspiring others right now. No reason why it won't for a long time to come. May she rest in peace, and her work live on.

As Black Friday Goes...

Well, this looks like the annual Black Friday post.  The blog's look has changed, and not for the last time probably.

This year's Black Friday has been characterized by that great new product: pepper spray.  Justifiably famous for its use against Occupy protestors, especially at U.C. Davis (inspiring the Pepper Spraying Cop site and the image above, which is no longer satirical) it has been used today by cops against shoppers, and at least one shopper against all.

Most of the incidents--including tasering and shootings--happened at Wal-Marts or other low-end outlets, testifying both to the desperate straits many in the 99% are in, and to the residual power of consumerism, especially when TV commercials portray the appropriate Christmas gift for young couples as expensive cars. Check Wikipedia and see that this instance of Black Friday is the only one that isn't overtly (as opposed to ironically) a catastrophe. Our society's dependence on consumption is at least as dangerous as its dependence on fossil fuel, and of course the two are intimately related. Yet it is dependence in every sense of the word. And so this Black Friday is both different from the others and exactly the same.

Meanwhile back at the mall: 15,000 lined up at the Mall of America at midnight to raid bargains at 120 stores: "Mall operators estimated that it was the largest crowd ever at the mall, which is big enough to hold seven Yankee Stadiums."  Yet observers observed dolefully that there weren't a lot of bags being carried, so the amount of buying is in doubt.  Which once against provokes the question: is this an economy or is it an addiction?

Santa Claus' sleigh these days takes the form of this huge ship, commissioned by Wal-Mart and built in Denmark specifically and only to haul goodies from China to the U.S. It takes just 13 people to run it, even though it's longer than a U.S. aircraft carrier. This ship is so big that it had to be built in five separate sections that were welded together. The command bridge alone is higher than a 10-story building. The ship has its own cargo crane rigs--11 of them--that operating simultaneously can unload the entire ship in under two hours. So this is where Christmas comes from, where Black Friday lives. Typically, cargo ships from China that bring consumer goods to California ports, return with cardboard and material for recycling--in other words, garbage. But these ships reputedly return completely empty. [Thanks to Bill T. for sending me these photos etc. awhile back.]

Cathedrals of Consumption

The apparent enemies may change, but this is the real religion that is so persistently and vociferously defended in America: the one true Church of Buying and Selling.

Through lofty times and fearful times, from the 50s onward, people have looked to the mall for excitement and solace, adventure and surcease, novelty and reassurance--and they found it all.

By the 1980s, Americans had come to believe in consumption as salvation: shop till you drop, spend till the end, buy till you die. Buying was the new time religion, which links adherents of all other religions and seems to transcend all other faiths. And the shopping mall was its cathedral of consumption.

There were the votive candles of neon, the altars of Atari, the icons of Calvin and St. Liz (Claiborne.) Like the cathedrals of Europe, the malls made their magic through the senses: the swirl of products' colors and textures, the smiles of clerks and waitresses, the soft splash of fountains and the dance of mirrored light in the Church of Buy Now, Pay Later. As psychologist James Hillman suggested, "Maybe that's what consumerism and advertising are all about, unconsciously, compulsively: a way to rekindle our desire for the world."

The needs and fears hidden in the human shadow were also expressed with their usual shocking power. The desire for comfort became raging greed and the addict's apathyt: the need for peace and identity within a community of worshippers became the walls of denial and exclusion.

What became most obvious during the 1980s was that the new religion of consumption had become organized and dogmatized. It had become the true church: one, unholy and apocalyptic. It was filling the world with waste, devouring its resources, exhausting society and the planet. But buying as a value above all others became a dogma and those who disagreed were heretics.

So the Church of Buying and Selling transformed everything into a product or the means to sell a product. The activities we call art, science, sport, inquiry (from scholarship to journalism,) public discourse, politics and government, weren't of this nature. But beginning in the 80s, they were embraced and adjusted, assimilated and converted.

The Church of Buying is also the Church of Selling, of advertising and public relations. Today these activities determine the form and content of information in all popular media and most of cultural life. To offend the Church of Selling--the advertiser--is to commit a mortal sin punished by banishment, the casting down into the pits of poverty and irrelevance.

The Church of Buying and Selling tolerates no rivals. There is no separation of this church and state. Politics and government have been commodified through corporate special interest lobbying and campaign contributions (which, by the way, we all involuntarily pay for, every time we buy something or even pay a bill.) Independent, disinterested or critical voices supported by the public are not permitted: even so-called public television is starved of public funds, and in the U.S. must rely on corporate funding that selects what it supports and therefore defines what gets seen.

Today the growing consumption industries are fast-food and discount shopping (where the new servant sector grins and spins for minimal wages), entertainment (which turns the beauty of sport and art into no-fault showbiz)and tourism, which pollutes and desecrates places of natural beauty and cultural or even religious significance (such as Native American sacred sites.) But how could that matter when there is only one true religion?

Doth not the Earth exist only to be consumed? And if we use it all up, we will still have our Cyberspace-Graven Images. Everything in nature, culture and history is turned into simplistic reverberate icons, emotional buttons for advertisers to push. Beyond that, they are useless and expendable.

Do not the Faithful work two and three jobs, and push themselves beyond the speed limits of life--sacrificing family, health, reverie, craftsmanship and civility, just to afford all the sacraments and indulgences the church can sell?

Do not the people exist solely to serve the Church of Buying and Selling? Does not all talent, energy, feeling, intelligence and belief belong to it? Are not all relationships secondary to our relationship to this Church? And have not our lives and souls become the ultimate consumables?

See now the congregation assembles for the service. See thge eyes flickering with bliss at Junior Miss. Hear the moans of devotion at Just Pants. Let us all gather by the bank machine--But wait, who is that whispering? Is that heresy we're hearing? Turn the sacred Muzak louder, post a photo of your redemptive purchases on Facebook, and keep moving, from one station of devotion to the next.

The screed above is mostly a piece of mine I'd just about forgotten, published in Adbusters Vol. 2 No. 3 under the title "Graven Images."

The much beleaguered Bayshore Mall in Eureka was humming on Saturday, so what does that say?--see post below.

A Sunny Saturday at Bayshore Mall

Autumn is the sunniest time of year here on the California North Coast, and this Saturday was very sunny--but the warmth of the sun was cut by the occasional cold breeze, so clearly this was one of the last summery days of the year.

So people were out, everywhere we went on our errands--including at Bayshore Mall in Eureka. As chronicled in a local cover story, it's much beleaguered these days. But on Saturday it was humming. At first I thought it was because the one new bright spot--a new department store--was opening, and sure enough, there were long lines at Kohl's checkouts. But people were out everywhere--at Costco, Eureka's only Big Box, and at the small yarn shop in Arcata where clerks said it was the busiest day they could remember.

People were in a good mood, too. I saw shoppers at Costco coax a young woman with only two items ahead of them in one of the long lines. There seemed to be differences, though. The yarn shop saw its known clientele--just more of them in one day than usual. Costco shoppers were friendly and chatty, but it was all about the stuff. The mall was more of a social center. Shoppers in the stores, but in the mallways there were the teenagers in groups, the couples of all ages, families.

Perhaps the biggest difference, though, was the age and race mix at Bayshore Mall. The fastest-growing segment of Eureka's population is Mexican, and there were a lot of Spanish-speakers at Costco, too, but even more ethnic and age variety at the mall. Native American kids from Hoopa, wearing identifying shirts. A junior high age Latina in a t-shirt that said, "To the haters, thanks for all the love."

This is a big difference from the first days of shopping malls in general, when they were almost exclusively white. Now the greatest variety of ethnic groups, ages, incomes, etc. is most obvious at Bayshore Mall.

I haven't been to Bayshore Mall at Christmastime in a few years, but someone who had said that it was even busier this Saturday. One is tempted to see a counter-trend of optimism to the continuing upward climb of the California unemployment rate, but maybe it's more pent-up demand. Or just a sunny Saturday afternoon.

I don't know that it says much about the future of the mall, either, but clearly this mall isn't dead yet. It's still a place people like to go and to be.

This is a model of Xanadu, the mega-mall under construction in New Jersey during what seems to be doom time for the shopping mall. Is it? See the post below.

Sustainable Doom

Once again, the shopping mall is doomed. The death knell has been sounded periodically since the 1980s, even before The Malling of America was first published. Now the sudden and still continuing destruction/reinvention of the financial system and the severe downturn in the American and world economy--the Great Recession--seems to make it certain.

Time Magazine hangs its obituary on the bad timing of Xanadu, the megamall-amusement complex under construction in the Meadowlands of New Jersey. It seems made to order: huge and--by several accounts, including New Jersey's governor--garish and ugly--it is so badly timed that if it did open this year, it would be the only major new mall to do so. (But it won't--the opening has been pushed into 2010.)

Meanwhile, Time quotes predictions that up to 3,000 other malls could close this year, as well as 73,000 retail stores before summer. Another obit in The Week adds more numbers: more than 400 of the 2,000 largest malls have closed in the past two years, and a new one hasn't opened since 2006.

So are they right? Is the shopping mall doomed? Not necessarily, but then I've always taken a different view of what the mall essentially is. As the kind of dominant retail hubs that shopping malls were in the 1980s, they've been fighting a losing battle to the Big Boxes for at least a decade. As new large retail developments that can be plopped down at any highway intersection, clearly those days have been over for awhile. What could be malled in America, mostly has been malled.

What the Great Recession does seem to signal is the end of the kind of psychotic consumerism that gripped this society with increasing frenzy over the past several decades. So as centers of retail that generate huge profits, malls may well be gone with the wind. But the Big Box complexes that have replaced malls in many places aren't going to find the going so easy either.

Many of these changes have been happening for awhile, and some malls have responded to them. The Mall of America in Minnesota--which itself got started during a downturn--merged retail with destination entertainment, which was one new trend, and also self-consciously became a more diversified hub for a community it in part defined. Its proposed expansion was largely non-retail.

But that's not exactly the model for the future either. Malls are malleable--they can adapt. The trends some were slowly adapting to are now likely to accelerate: namely the move away from highway dependence, and a new balance between retail and everything else, including low-profit or non-profit public services. Malls as nothing but artifice, artificially sustained, right down to plants in their gardens that didn't actually grow, are probably over. Malls, like everything else, will have to become sustainable.

Sooner or later, communities and perhaps companies are going to realize that they can do better by retrofitting their dead malls instead of abandoning them, or even better, transforming them while they are still alive. They will have to become part of the green economy, and not simply market rain forest awareness and recycling somewhere else.

And there probably still will be a place for a Xanadu--which is well-located in the New York metro area, and accessible by a new train line. After a few stutters, entertainment is flourishing, as it did in the Great Depression. That doesn't guarantee Xanadu will survive even long enough to open. But it has a chance.

So do malls all over America, if the degree of imagination is applied that the shopping mall's pioneers demonstrated when they began, and again when they went downtown. Probably new models of finance as well as new models of what a mall can be will be necessary. For all the reasons I wrote about in The Malling of America, malls served the needs of people, better than other places, despite their deficiencies. Malls always had a social reason to exist, and not just an economic one.

Christmas at Ye Olde Shopping Mall: New traditions and even nostalgia now locate Christmas memories where, for better or worse, families have been going to celebrate as well as shop... for forty or fifty years.

Mall Nostalgia: Recalling Christmas at Ye Olde Shopping Mall

In what’s shaping up to be a bleak Christmas, thoughts may naturally turn to better days gone by. Holidays often look happier in memory anyway, and since Christmas is so associated with childhood (your own or your children’s or grandchildren’s), the season inspires recollections of magical lights and displays, exciting street scenes and parades, and those first visits to Santa.

But one difference over the years has become: many of those fond memories took place in a shopping mall. Routinely berated as cold, indistinguishable and soulless madhouses of over-consumption, these enclosed behemoths have increasingly become the locations of happy, wistful—and important—memories.

Right now on the Internet, sites such as Livemalls.com and Malls of America.com celebrate days of malls gone by, while others, such as Labelscar.com keep current with fan-like devotion to detail. That so many malls have failed in recent years (catalogued on such sites as dead malls.com), or were otherwise transformed in the course of time, has added impetus to this mall nostalgia.

So people are online sharing their memories of Christmases past that might include toddling past the huge mall Christmas tree to tell Santa your secret desires in the Walker-Scott department store in the Escondido Village Mall, or staring at Santa amidst the splendor of a Colonial Christmas with trees decorated by students of local schools at Montclair Plaza, or dashing through the shaved-ice snow at Fallbrook Mall in West Hills, California.

Or riding the Christmas carousel at South Park in North Carolina, being dazzled by the red and green lights in the fountain at Jefferson Mall in Louisville, or standing uncertainly in front of the Talking Christmas Tree at Midway Mall in Elyria, Ohio.

Real old timers may recall Santa arriving at the Tacoma Mall by helicopter in 1965, or in a tank from the local military base (a traumatic event for one online commenter) at the Edgewater Plaza Mall in Biloxi, Mississippi; or snowballs dropping from Santa’s plane over Northland Plaza in Lima, Ohio in 1967.

There is at least one mall that is primarily associated with Christmas experiences, and it happens to be the mall I wrote about extensively in my book, The Malling of America. A website hosted by Dead Malls.com called Greengate Mall Memories includes over a hundred comments in its “Guest Book,” most of them with recollections sited in the mall, and many of them mentioning Christmas.

These memories are so strong partly for two reasons: because Christmas really was a very big deal at Greengate Mall, and because Greengate Mall is no more.

text continued after photos and in photo captions...

Photos I took of Greengate Mall in 1999, when it was nearly abandoned: (top) outside the old Hornes (later Lazarus) department store; inside at center court, the famous fountain; and in the floor near the fountain, the time capsule, buried in 1985 and scheduled to be opened in 2005, but which apparently "disappeared" during demolition. In it, among other things, was a signed copy of my book, The Malling of America. (click photos to enlarge.)

Greengate was built on land that had been part of a farm and summer home owned by the appropriately named John S. Sell family. (The place even had a name: Sellcroft.) This was an era when a lot of the fresh milk sold in Greensburg came from local dairies and dairy farms. The farm was just west of the town of Greensburg, along the two-lane Lincoln Highway, adjacent to the Mount Odin drive-in theatre.

Then the new four lane Route 30 was built through there, having bypassed the Greensburg downtown. The highway spawned new commercial and housing development, meaning that beginning in the early 60s, it bypassed downtown Greensburg. An early indicator was the K-Mart shopping center that replaced the Mount Odin drive-in.

Then came the first enclosed shopping mall in the county, Greengate Mall. Designed by Victor Gruen, the architect generally considered the inventor of the enclosed mall, it opened in 1965, and after decades of dominance and several troubled final years, it turned off the climate control in 2001 and closed. The building was demolished and a new Wal-Mart opened on the site in 2005.

Greengate Mall, center court Christmas display. Click photo to enlarge. BK photo.

Local news coverage about Greengate’s demise inevitably mentioned its Christmas events and elaborate decorations. (I’d written about the overnight process of setting up the center court tree and Nutcracker theme exhibit, surrounded by a child-sized train ride.) Christmas season at Greengate was popular with the surrounding communities for at least 30 years—long enough for some who experienced Christmas at the mall to bring their own child to do the same.

Many if not most of the comments at Greengate Mall Memories—over a hundred of them—mention Christmas recollections. These memories could be surprisingly specific. I’ve tried to match some of them with images I recently transferred from color slides, which I took at Greengate during the Christmas season of 1981.

“I remember it was where I first told Santa what I wanted for Christmas,” said one. “I always loved going to Greengate Mall with my parents. It seemed like the holidays weren't the holidays unless we had our usual trip to the mall to sit on Santa’s lap.”

“I remember lights in the food court that would change colors (yellow, blue, green, etc) during Christmas as Charlie Brown music would play.” “There was a puppet show that kids would huddle around and watch.”

Many recalled riding the train through the snow-covered Christmas village. “I remember the animated deer with the jerky movements that built toys as kids rode through the display.” Another recalled a young adult perspective, of accompanying nieces and nephews, and watching “how big their eyes would be when they first walked into the center courtyard... Nothing made my parents more happy then seeing [the children] laugh as they went round and round on the train.”

The element of nostalgia is particularly evident in the frequency of comments such as: “Wow, nothing compares to it today.” A department store employee who met her husband there wrote, “We all have very fond memories of Greengate Mall. We especially miss the beautiful holiday decorations!” An ex-employee of another store who remembers “singing on the steps in center court in 1980 for Christmas” with a local high school choir, concludes: “Ahh - Christmas at Greengate Mall - it didn't get any better than that!!!”

When I was first writing about Greengate in the late 70s and early 80s, I often heard similar sentiments expressed about downtown Greensburg in the 50s and before: memories of shopping in the department stores and shops on Main Street, going from store to store in the falling snow, seeing friends and ducking into the Chat and Chew. But Greengate and other malls drew the department stores away from Main Street, and Christmas along with it.

As the malling of America took hold, their size, their concentration on consumption and their sudden omnipresence alarmed many, and their formulaic resemblances to each other brought the malls a lot of scorn. But lost in broad-brush critiques, as justified as they might be on many grounds, was the social and cultural roles many malls played, often defining their own communities.

Then they simply lasted, and thanks partly to years of shared experiences, the local shopping mall often became a real place. And so they became part of memories, and now, of nostalgia. A woman who remembers Greengate as a child (“at Christmas especially. It was wonderful”) has since moved away but visits family in the area every Christmas. She writes: “I'm sad the mall is gone. I would have loved to take a trip down memory lane there by taking my son to ride the holiday train I rode so long ago.”