Dead Mall Porn is a genre of online content that I admit to loving, mostly because I love indoor(ish) shopping places. On vacation I often visit a city’s malls just to get a feel for “real life” there, as most actual residents won’t be at the touristy places. I want to see who lives in a place, what they are interested in, and if their food court reflects the area in any way. I will also probably buy some ice cream.
Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, I spent many cold or rainy days at one of my area malls. I happened to live near one of the premier shopping centers in the suburbs, Oakbrook Center (which happens to be an outdoor mall, as if we were some kind of California town). But suburban kids get bored and have to seek out pastures that may not be greener and may not even have different stores. One of my pastures was Stratford Square in Bloomingdale, IL, which has closed for good as a traditional mall. We went here when we had exhausted our interest in closer malls, to watch people from other suburbs to see what they were interested in and if their food court had different food. Sometimes, you had to go to another mall to see a movie that you missed at your local mall. Or, maybe a far-flung location of a store had a shirt or jeans on hold for you and you have to go there to pick it up because online shopping had not been invented yet.
Malls seem to be closing because of “the Internet” or “the Pandemic” but really, they close because they, too, are exhausted. Some burn out early, such as one in a Chicago suburb that I would love to tell you more about but all the articles I found on the closing of the mall are paywalled because local news is dying a slow death. But here is something more fun and also more indicative of the real story, which is that malls close, and then they are used for movies, and then they are torn down and redeveloped, forever and ever, amen.
So it’s not the store selection or building arrangement or food court array that matters, but the culture. Suburbs developed because certain people (the lighter-skinned ones) wanted to escape from the city. White flight was racist and terrible for everyone’s health but it was much easier to build ranches in the cornfields than deal with urban issues. Malls were actually privatized teen centers, where kids could be corralled, policed, and indoctrinated into consumer culture and adults could see where the kids were and what they were doing. They were “off the streets,” which of course guaranteed that they were not robbing people, doing or selling drugs, having sex, or hanging with people who did these things. Just kidding! We still broke the law and did drugs and hung out with people who were “bad for us” (OK, not me. I was reading In These Times and Utne Reader).
I think, though, that young people have figured out how to find what they need to survive and to make it to adulthood. Did the Internet help kill malls? No, it helped kids and teens find community in places that were not so heavily monitored and commodified. How about the Pandemic? Perhaps, but only in the sense that many young people are afraid to go anywhere now, and I think that is more of a gun control issue, something kids cannot escape because of the continual focus on how to stay alive if an active shooter interrupts their day.
“Corralled,” as used above, is a good word for what one feels, certainly as a teenager. You are constantly being pushed into spaces that may or may not be appropriate for you, but this movement is not one you have control over. I guess that is why I always rejoice when I see young people active in their world, protesting injustices great and small, meeting community needs by starting support groups or services, or even starting businesses (own the commodification, I guess). Adults enjoy malls, too, as evidenced in the article on Stratford Square. But adults can choose where they shop or walk or socialize. Shopping centers attract teens because that is what they were really built to do: bring all the young people together in a place they cannot often escape from (no car) and have them channel their energy into supporting the economy.
During the Pandemic, we told ourselves that kids and teens are resiliant, mostly because we wanted to tell ourselves we were doing the right thing in shutting everything down until a vaccine was available. And this is correct! But resiliance implies an agency that we are mostly not willing to grant young people, so the struggle will continue. We are seeing it at Columbia University today, a place that is getting a massive lesson in how not to in loco parentis very intelligent, involved young adults. While I would like to join in the blessed delusion that kids and teens circling a shopping maze for hours indicates nothing more than boredom (as it mostly did for me), things are never that easy for those just hitting their double-digit years. If part of our evolution as a country means losing large retail centers as more of the population figures out how they can best live in the world, I think I can do without all that sugar in an Orange Julius.
Carol Morency 