The Mall
On the windowless escape from reality
The mall. The windowless, seemingly hollow escape from reality. It’s both a place and an idea. A nostalgic feeling, an annoyance. The mall is everything and nothing, and holds just about the same. It is the suburban dream. The capitalist concrete palace. The great escape.
Like many teenagers, I once longed for the feeling of connection. Underneath pre-teen insecurity and shyness all I really wanted was to fit in. To be like everyone else. I wanted, most of all, to be cool — after all who doesn’t? The mall offered you a place to show off, to be cool, to put on a performance. The mall, for most of my coming of age, was a space where kids could escape, disappear among the masses. Aimlessly walking for hours, shopping bags strapped to your wrists, your shoes squeaking along the linoleum flooring. It was a cultural moment, depicted in endless movies and TV shows— like the iconic Mean Girls mall scene where coolness really did exude. It was a place as much as it was a moment. It was a cultural marker for the early to mid-2000s. It allowed you a reality away from reality.
It stands, in its concrete glory, ominous, welcoming, inviting you into its overly AC’d embrace. It promises food and shoes and clothes and jewelry and the hope to fit in. Surrounded by nothingness, sits the mall. They’re all the same, they all have a purpose, a reason, and a design to fulfill that purpose. They want you to consume, to buy into capitalism, to create yourself into a walking advertisement. But, in all honesty, they don’t have to try that hard to get people to buy in.
The history of the mall is attributed largely to Victor Gruen, an Austrian-Jewish architect who immigrated to the US in the late 1930s. Gruen’s mall aimed to capture the bustling town-squares he had left behind in Europe. And, as Americans were moving into the suburbs, Gruen’s design of the mall allowed people that same connection that was missing in the far spread out homes of suburbia. The mall was a replacement for natural life. It was a performance. In the same way that teens of the 2000s gathered and performed coolness, families in the 50s and 60s gathered in malls to perform too. The mall itself was a stage, or better yet a set and we were all the actors, strolling through, yearning to fit in. Gruen’s original design of the mall allowed post-war suburban families to build connections, connections that were to capitalism. The mall in many ways was, and perhaps still is, a stand in for the American dream, so it’s no wonder it’s now losing its cultural control.
I can picture it now. I’m a freshman, just a few weeks into the first month of high school and I’m in the bathroom stall changing out of my uniform and into my mall clothes, a pair of black leggings and a pullover hoodie. I swap out my black ballet flats and put on a pair of low-cut grey converse. My other newly made ninth grade friends are in the stalls next to me putting on near matching outfits and smothering their lips with the newest shade of Baby Lips lip balm. I leave the stall shoving my uniform clothes haphazardly into my JanSport backpack, fluff my hair up in the mirror and we’re off to the bus stop. It’s 3:30 pm and we’re ready to go find out who’s popular and who’s not, we’re ready to go to the mall. While I’m not so sure this is what Gruen expected to come from his designs, he did create the mall in homage of the city-spaces he lacked and longed for. To take it back beyond Gruen, and to perhaps a very early inspiration for his designs, I am reminded of the agora in Plato’s Greece. The city-centre, where people swarmed shops and exchanged ideas all in a singular space — the mall is quite like a suburban, watered down, uninspiring version of the agora filled with pre-teen girls (like myself at one point) who gathered in this space not to exchange ideas like Plato but to show off. It allowed us space. Space to consume, exchange, wonder, to be cool.
The trip to the mall was always the same. It started by one of the big outlet stores, usually near an entrance, the type of stores your mom would take you early on a Sunday morning to beat the rush. Then came the cool stores, the Abercrombie and Hollister and American Apparel, where shirtless models awaited you. In our Lululemon leggings and chucks we’d wander through those dark elusive cool stores, patting through clothes we couldn’t see the colours of and then leave reeking of perfume — the perfect after school and weekend activity. Then came the food court, where it often felt like time didn’t exist. You’d get lost between the McDonalds and New York Fries, your eyes scanning the place for a free table to run towards, trays in hand, shopping bags clasped to your wrists, your oversized backpack weighing you down, as you found your table you’d pass by other teens, sitting, gossiping, trying to emit their coolness. Trips to the mall had a formula, an unspoken regiment that all teens seemed to follow. And for many pre-teens this after school routine was a ritual. It seemed to be the one way to escape the everyday, the mundane. And I’m sure it also acted as an escape for the suburban families decades before who were looking to build themselves a new life through consumerism. It was the great third space. A place that was built for the purpose of providing easy access to everything you may have ever needed from spanks to suitcases to a quick slice of pizza. The mall was the one place where you could exist alongside others and have the same purpose.
But now, the mall, in all its airless glory, seems to be dying. It is no longer the place for frolicking teens who want to show off, or post-war suburban families who want to build a new life. The mall is no longer the be all and end all place it once was. Its influence and relevance is slowly dying. Could the death of the mall mean the death of coolness, dare I say the death of capitalism? Well no, obviously not. But it does act as a marker in our cultural zeitgeist and it points to something larger, it points to a transformation in the way we operate, consume, and perform in society. The mall is no longer the singular place of connection (I’d venture to say the internet has taken over there). But beyond that, as we lose the mall and the way malls allowed us to buy and operate, we also lose a sense of cultural connection. We lose the stage with which we performed on. We lose one of the most significant third spaces. And where does that leave us? Without the mall how will we survive? I know, it sounds dire, but as we leave malls behind what do we put in place of it? What will become of the empty buildings and three story parking lots? Is the end of the mall the end of us? We’ve been left now, with our screens and new digital realities all of which are filling the void that the almighty mall has left behind. And as our reliance on social media to escape reality grows and grows, malls become less and less relevant. Slowly, but surely, we are knocking out third spaces and slowly but surely we are losing connection. After all, the mall is not just a place, not just a building, it is us.