I remember standing looking at the directory. A giant maze of the building I was in, the big you are here dot in red, each wing of the mall laid out and segmented, with numbers to correspond to the store index below.
It had to be at least 7 feet tall.
I might have been 9.
My mother came up behind me, furious and panicked, with my sister and brother in tow. Apparently I had not told her I was going to explore the mall. She thought I had just gone next door. I had been lost for about 30 minutes or so, and had no idea. I thought I was shopping, asserting my independence, and now I was grounded for a week.
In actuality the mall was just a giant X. Four wings that all converging in the center housing a giant fountain that shot up into the glass atrium ceiling and fell back to the ground with a loud PLOP into the water below. Everyone threw pennies into the fountain, making it a wishing well of sorts. I can't remember how many wishes I made over the years, or if any of them ever came true.
Every Christmas they would cover the fountain with a platform and assemble the 20 foot Christmas tree. We did countless pictures with Santa there, odd since money was always tight, but we did. Hickory Farms would set up as a kiosk, along with countless others, to capitalize on the sales of the season. A painting from the art store still hangs in my basement. Years worth of winter coats were purchased from Sears and we'd walk the aisles of Child World, mentally calculating our favorite toys to find under the tree.
As teens we'd sneak into Spencers novelty store, check out all the gag gifts and naughty cards. We'd don our concert t-shirts, or have custom t-shirts made, and then hit the movie theatre out back for a PG-13 and popcorn covered in artery clogging buttery goodness.
It was not the only mall in the area. When I was 13 they opened another mall, 10 miles closer to home. I worked in the Levi Strauss store, hung around on my days off, and learned to navigate all the back hallways like only a teen in the know could do. Both malls have become ghost towns over the last few years. Even over the Holiday season parking has never been an issue and you rarely wait in line. The mall I worked in has been doing an overhaul of sorts, becoming more of an activity center. It is slated to have the end wing torn down in the near future to make way for attached condos and hotels, which could bring some of the liveliness back.
But the original mall, the one with the fountain and memories, is slated for destruction. Last week was the last time the doors would be open for mall walkers. The Macy's, so I've read, will remain open while they rip down the rest and convert it to an open air shopping experience, complete with fighting for parking spaces and running from store to store in the harsh New England elements.
A new experience completely devoid of sitting face to face in a food court, fountains full of pennies, or hickory smoked sausage.
When I was a child there was only one shopping centre (mall) but when I was in my late teens another one opened closer to us and 40yrs later it is bigger and more popular and I still shop there
ReplyDeleteWe have had much the same. A much nicer mall on the south side closed because that's where the city herded the "high crime" population. The north is smaller, always packed to ridiculousness at Christmas despite the traffic problems, repetitious stores, and high prices- and is adding on over the corpse of the now demolished Sears that was an anchor.
ReplyDeleteThe mall(s) here have been ghost towns for years. We have an open air shopping experience that is lovely...until the holidays hit. Then you can only pop in to the outer stores because fighting through the traffic is horrendous (it's HUGE; so unless you are just going to one or two adjacent stores, you NEED to drive).
ReplyDeleteShopping trends seem to have nearly come full circle. When I was young, THE place to shop was downtown Baltimore. The big department stores had huge picture windows, and they competed every Christmas to see which of them could outdo the others. The first shopping center that was built in our area was a big deal... lots of different stores all in one open-air area. One department store had little monkeys in an enclosed picture-window type display, and another had penguins. (Yes, penguins!) In retrospect, that was a terrible way to treat those poor animals, but in the fifties, everybody thought the displays were over-the-top fantastic. It wasn't until after my husband and I moved to Georgia that we experienced an honest-to-goodness mall, which was built a few years after we moved here. Bigger and better malls followed after that, but most of them are ghost towns now. Now... the big "new thing" is to set up shopping areas like a little village. Kinda like going to downtown Baltimore again... :)
ReplyDeleteThat seems to be the norm these days. Changing to these open air type of malls and believe you me exploring them in 115 degree summer heat is not something I want to do! We live about 2 miles from one of the biggest malls first built here in Phoenix area in the 1970s. Now it is a ghost town when it was very popular. Sad but so much online these days and the retailers hype that up with specials, free delivery, etc., to get us to shop online and sadly these "bricks and mortars" as my hubby calls them won't be so brick and mortar in the years to come.
ReplyDeletebetty
Well, here you are and I didn't know until you commented on my blog. It's so nice to see you writing again. Of all the people who have stopped blogging, you were the one I missed the most.
ReplyDeleteLove,
Janie