Wednesday, May 04, 2016

A "vanished" world

This is one of those things that periodically shows up on sites like Mental Floss: old footage from times past. (Not so long past, but still, not quite yet MY past):

Scenes from the first enclosed shopping mall.

This was filmed in 1956....which is still 13 years before I was born, but there is something familiar about it - the idea of the enclosed mall with a kind of ugly, kind of functional exterior, that made the interior seem more wonderful.

Just for round numbers, let's say I was visiting malls in 1976 (I would have been 7, so that would have been school-clothes shopping trips). That would have been 20 years later than the filming - and yet, things seem familiar. (Also, it would have been a different mall: "the mall" when I was a kid was Chapel Hill Mall, near Akron, Ohio). There were the big plantings and there might have been a fountain? I think? And there were skylights. And each of the stores had their own distinctive sign.

(There was a JC Penney's, and a Sears, and an O'Neils, as the big stores....and I remember Miller's Stride-Right and there was also a Woolworth's that had a lunch counter and there was a toy store, maybe a Kay-Bee toys? And a record store. And there was a small "cineplex," that maybe had three or four screens?)

Nowadays, 2016 - that would be 40 years on from 1976 and 60 years after the mall footage. I haven't been in an enclosed shopping mall in a VERY long time (I think the last was a quick run, just into the Kohl's at the Eastland Mall up where my parents live now, over Christmas break). The enclosed mall nearest me (Midway Mall) is totally moribund and depressing and I haven't been in there in a couple years; some of the other malls in midsized cities around here aren't always.....entirely.....safe....places to go. (Well, neither is the wal-mart; allegedly a woman was nearly sexually assaulted IN BROAD DAYLIGHT in the parking lot at the one in Bonham. Yeah, home delivery of groceries can start any time now.)

But it does make me sad, and makes the part of me that is getting old and little-c conservative say "This is how everything goes; everything gradually goes to crud." I look at the footage of that old mall and I see several things:

a. People dressed up to shop. I don't know that we did when I was a kid (though I was, at times, kind of a formal little kid and I wore jumper dresses a lot). But we wore decent clothes. ("People of Wal-Mart," as mean as it is....yeah, there are some people who don't dress appropriately for being out in public).

b. Everything looked just, well....nice. (Said in Fluttershy Voice). It looked clean, it looked new. I suppose the decline of a lot of the malls is that the buildings just got old and hard to keep up. (there was another mall in Sherman, the Sher-Den mall, but it was torn down  before I moved here; someone told me it was that there was asbestos in the building and it had to go)

c. Dayton's! And Red Owl (and the fact that there was a *grocery store* in a mall! I don't think Chapel Hill had one, not when I remember it, but the "mall" up near my grandmother had one). And all those vanished stores. (Does Woolworth still live? I don't think I've seen a Woolworth in years). O'Neils, which I've talked about before as the "nice but not too expensive" clothing store of my childhood is long gone; gulped down by Macy's and metamorphosed into it.

(Oh, and Red Owl did parcel pick up - you could buy your food, leave it, and then drive up and have them load it into your car. That sort of thing would be nice but I could see stores like Wal-Mart totally cacking it up - I know lots of people who have complained that if they don't look CLOSELY when the bagger loads stuff into their cart, sometimes a bag gets left behind).

(And yes, there is the standard YouTube comment about "but there are no brown people." Well, I will note that it was Minnesota in the 1950s....the town I grew up in, there was ONE African-American family that had kids in school. ONE. And yes, that low level of diversity is not a good thing, at least if it was low because "different" people were being kept out. Though frankly, I was kind of an outsider in my town despite being the "majority" race and faith....my family had less money than the norm, and class was almost as big a thing as race. But yeah.....more diversity now and more people feeling welcome more places now is an improvement. I will also note in passing that the prep school I attended was WAY more diverse - more African-American kids, a couple of kids with antecedents in India, a set of brothers from Egypt, quite a few kids of Korean heritage....compared to the local public school. Which is why I always chuckle when people talk about the stiflingness of private schools....)

And yeah, apparently Frank Lloyd Wright hated shopping malls, but you know? After having been in a conference center he allegedly designed, where the women's restrooms were terribly hidden, my opinion of Wright is not as great as some people's is.

And anyway: the enclosed shopping mall, as stultifying as some said they were, they served a purpose, especially in places like Minnesota, where it was miserable in the winter (or for that matter, Texas, where it's miserable in the summer): It's NICE not to have to walk outside to go between stores. Oh, I do it - because now the glorified strip mall (I don't know what else to call it, but that's what it is - stores in a line, each with a separate outdoor entrance, and they're HUGE stores so in adverse weather you have to drive between them and find parking each time). I suppose one of the things that killed malls were things like Wal-Mart and Target that claim to carry "everything you need" under one roof (they don't. Or the quality is severely lacking).

And maybe also the rise of online shopping? I know I can often get the book I want faster from Amazon than I can by making time to drive to the Books A Million and hoping they have it (despite their name, I doubt they carry a million books). And maybe just Americans' desire for the New Thing - which now is, like I said, those glorified strip malls. (I can only hope that the next New Thing is a revitalization of the downtowns; ours, after a few brief years of being lovely, seems to be dying). And maybe the enclosed malls became too much of an attractant to rude teenagers; I know one of the reasons I gripe about "hating" the mall is because of the packs of kids that roam around and are low-grade rude to some people. (And it's more than low-grade in some malls; there was one mall in Peoria where fights used to regularly break out between rival groups of kids).

But I look at the footage and I can nod a little and remember what it was like, probably what the planners HOPED it would be like, more than what it was like in the 90s when malls started dying....


2 comments:

Elizabeth said...

I read somewhere that malls fell out of favor because of how expensive it was to heat and cool all that empty space in the middle.

CGHill said...

The original Woolworth Company in the US has been subsumed by a subsidiary: Foot Locker, the vendor of athletic shoes and such.