Meet Me at the Mall?

There’s something jarring about seeing a phenomenon whose rise and fall coincides with our own time on earth. I grew up in Europe, and the abandoned or restored places I explored had ceased to be useful hundreds of years before I was born—or, in the case of World War II structures, at least a couple of decades in the past.

But malls… malls are something else. There weren’t any when I was a child. I became aware of them only in my early twenties when I moved to the States (it took them longer to catch on in Europe, though by the time I left France we were starting to see some hypermarchés). And what a phenomenon they were! One could spend myriad hours there, strolling, eating, meeting friends, playing games, having one’s hair done… oh, and almost but hardly incidentally, shopping.

One of Tana French’s wonderful novels centers around a mall and its importance in the lives of the kids whose schools are nearby, and you can almost smell the food court, hear the not-too-obtrusive piped-in music, see the riotous colors. She’s really captured the sense of wonder these mammoth community centers instilled, especially in adolescents

Romances began and ended in malls. Seniors exercised, young parents juggled strollers and packages, ever on the alert for a kidnapper (because every mall had a story, apocryphal or otherwise, of a local kidnapper), young kids ran about like mad things, bothering shoppers and hooting their energy up to the high vaulted glass ceilings that, along with fountains and greenery, made a stab at assuring people this really was the real world… only better. Neon lights in the food courts gave pre-adolescents the feeling of being in a club, cool and a little dangerous. At Christmas, the malls became secular cathedrals, filled with light and color, bells and decorations, all promising that your wishes truly might come true… here.

Like so many other people, I too spent my share of time in malls and their sometimes-glamorous anchor stores, and like everyone else, I too drifted away. I became less of an avid consumer, for one thing, losing interest as the mall experience had never constituted part of my social life. And then, of course, came the internet…

I’ve always been fascinated with abandoned human structures, but as I mentioned, I’ve never seen any that rose and fell within my own lifetime as completely as malls, and so I find myself drawn to photographs and videos of these gargantuan empty places once echoing with so much life.

One of my favorite documentaries is called Life After People, which posits the disappearance of humanity in one day and chronicles what subsequently happens to the world it leaves behind. There’s one inevitable conclusion reached by the series and documented in the many photographs of malls: life, as Dr Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, will find a way. The wild that we spend so much of our time cutting back, restricting, even attempting to eliminate… the wild returns. The wild will always return. (For some of us, that’s a sign of hope, as humanity seems hell-bent on self-destruction; we may render the planet uninhabitable for us, but the wild, in some form or another, will return.)

Here's one of the entrances to the Montgomery Mall in Alabama. Imagine arriving at the bus stop in the foreground, or pulling into the sweeping parking lot—the arrival, filled with expectations, with anticipation. You turn and see this magnificent curved glass-domed entrance… it must have felt like entering Oz. Who knew what delights awaited within? That doorway promises so much.

And the layering of the malls was so well designed! They were calculated to keep people in, keep them exploring, keep them wondering what new delight was just around the next corner.

One of the carefully planned assets of malls was the controlled atmosphere, a pleasant 70-degrees year-round. You could see snow falling on the skylights and sip an ice-cold drink. I moved to Massachusetts in the summertime and was aghast at the heat and humidity, which I hadn’t experienced at home; I went to the mall whenever I could just to get away from the “outside.” And that was part of the fairytale, wasn’t it? Out there, nature is uncontrollable; in here, it’s all sweet and perfect. We’ve triumphed over nature. We’ve created the perfect world.

(And who am I, after all, to criticize? It’s January as I write this, and my windows are filled with tropical plants, my heat is set at a comfortable temperature, I have a candle burning nearby. Convincing ourselves that the elements don’t really matter is a personal as well as a communal endeavor.)

I write novels about the past because I’m not good at positing the future; I admire and sometimes envy speculative fiction writers. But surely the rise and fall of the malls holds rich material for us both. For something so perfectly designed to become so amazingly popular and then fall into decline within such a relatively short time is certainly a story that’s worth telling.

And it does make one wonder what’s next…