Exhausted shoppers neglecting their kids as they play on stairs. Overfed customers asleep at food court tables. A Montgomery Ward facade advertising its “going-out-of-business sale.” A JC Penney’s banner claims “the more you buy, the more you save.” An overweight vendor peddling brand-name diet pill supplements, proclaiming “lose weight and feel great!”
These are the images of Herman Krieger’s photo essay “Mall-aise,” which features our very own Gateway Mall (you know, the place that shows the “second round” of feature films for $1.50 or something) in all its splendor.
As I enter Gateway Mall, I immediately feel a sort of superficial, irrational exuberance of unmitigated product marketing. But under that, somewhat more subtly, there is another feeling – one that might be more commonly found in an underfunded nursing home. It is a feeling of the macabre, like I’m walking through a dead city, a necropolis. But here, the feeling remains beneath the surface. In some malls, it is inescapable.
Hundreds of malls across the country sit all but fully empty, in some cases reduced to only a couple anchor stores, and in others closed completely. General Growth Properties, a massive international corporation that owns Gateway Mall, now trades shares of its company for less than a dollar – down almost 98 percent from its price this time last year. Macerich, which owns Valley River Center, has its own shares trading at only 22 percent of its price last year.
Much of this evidence of “mall death” is probably attributable to the massive recession we face. But the symptoms of a departure from malls as our dominant retail form might predate the recent sub-prime decline. As early as 2000, finance magazines began to talk about how traditional, single-use suburban malls were losing favor with shopping consumers. Earlier than that, we saw the beginning of a rise in consumer pressure for more pedestrian-friendly environments, citing both environmental and quality-of-life concerns.
In one 2003 article, Bill Anderson, a financial consultant for a redeveloping mall, explained it fairly succinctly: “Once (the malls) are redeveloped, there is an opportunity to attract the growing number of people who are frustrated with driving everywhere and want more pedestrian areas.” Anderson’s mall was being torn down and reconceived into a “mixed-use center,” a place featuring not only retail stores but offices, manufacturers, and housing. In short, the mall was being transformed into a development form that was once simply called a “city.” Another article in last month’s New York Times profiled the decline of major malls and concluded that the consumer ambivalence toward malls is on a sustained rise.
This gradual conversion of once booming, shopper-packed malls into mostly boarded-up storefronts and corridors that serve as a hangout for bored middle schoolers can be attributed to a confluence of factors, not the least of which is our failing economy. But high-end, economically powerful “green” consumers – mostly hippie children of the 1960s who have grown up into an economically powerful elite of software developers, technological thinkers and organic merchants – have systematically used their purchasing power to drive money away from corporate, car-focused retail operations. Instead, they favor smaller areas dedicated to homey local shops that expound their values in business philosophies. The “unintended consequence” of these consumer preferences has been the emergence of powerful, home-spun “organic and sustainable” economies in “gentrified” central urban areas.
Another factor has been the rise of an “Internet generation” rapidly coming to power as consumers and politicians themselves. The purpose that malls once served so well – generic, standardized shopping of most pre-demanded goods – can be easily replaced by the Internet. Now, the Internet generation looks to retail shops to provide something the Internet cannot: the ability to inspect goods and learn about their features before buying and the opportunity to interact with people socially. The purchasing of goods is no longer just about accessing consumption, which can be done cheaper and more easily on the Internet. It is about having an experience that the urban, rather than suburban form, can more easily provide.
There is also one less-quantifiable change. The perception is growing, however aesthetic it might be, that all this parking-lot-and-highway culture that the mall depends on is simply uncomfortable. The big box stores, drive-thru fast food, acres of asphalt for roads, the kitschy signs and banners, all of it, has gotten frustrating and worn-out. We no longer prefer to be in these places, and if we do, it’s only because it takes less time than getting to and doing business in a cozy, spirited, tree-lined urban district – a place where you might get hassled for money by “some crazy street person,” but are not assaulted by an entire institutionalized system of money-grubbing madness.
So what is to become of the Gateway Mall under this growing mall-aise that Krieger so carefully portrays? It’s probably going to be fine, for now, if its parent company doesn’t close it down in its possible bankruptcy. But each day, downtown districts and their pedestrian streets attract more traffic, and their small shops and apartments grow more lively as the malls seem to fade into history, almost like an auctioneer whose voice has grown hoarse from screaming at potential customers over the billboard noise of other auctioneers. The once booming commerce of malls becomes a weak, outdated hum of dereliction, increasingly easy to ignore.
And not a moment too soon.
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