I was a difficult child. When I was only 6 months old, my mother took me to the mall for the first time. This was one of the first real outings she had embarked on since I had been born, and it was supposed to be an escape from the confines of a house filled with the detritus of a newborn baby. We left Fashion Square Mall in Charlottesville, Va. only a few minutes later. I had become inconsolable upon entering the mall, screaming with such an alarming ferocity that in order to avoid the judgmental glares of adults unfamiliar with raising young children, she rushed me back to our green Toyota Camry.
I think that my early reaction to the mall was indicative of my need to escape from places where I am uneasy. I am not talking about situations where there is a threat involved or locations I want to leave because I have grown bored; I am talking about ephemeral places like Amtrak platforms.
Gas stations and train stops are transitory places. They are not destinations, but sites we pass through on our way to something better. At such places, I think only about how quickly I might be able to leave — escape, really. Listening to the sloshing of gas as someone fills the tank of a car, I watch other vehicles speed by on a four-lane highway, interstate or back road. The pump becomes a tether, and the gas station feels inescapable: I am waiting, while those other people in their moving cars are not.
I am reminded of the ease of waiting in the stasis of the gas station. How easy it would be to sit down on a train station bench and become like the unscrupulous Bartleby in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” and, when asked to leave, reply, “I would prefer not to.” How easy it is to become scared of the mandatory forward action of life. How easy it could be to sacrifice endless decision making in favor of waiting for it to become easier, waiting for when it becomes preferable.
Yet, just when I think I might understand where my apprehension for these places comes from, I am reminded of the mall. Unlike gas and train stations, the mall is a destination. I don’t think my unease for the latter can be completely separated from my distaste for the former, and so if my discomfort with train stations and gas stations comes from their transitory nature, then I must assume that something about malls also feels transitory. But how does a place built to be a destination become a place defined by such impermanence?
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The first mall ever built in the United States was located in Minneapolis and opened in October of 1956. Following World War II, the simultaneous rise of suburbanization and car ownership meant that retail spaces in downtown areas of cities began to see less patronage. In response, architect Victor Gruen suggested that department stores needed to establish a presence in the suburbs, or they would risk losing a significant portion of their customer base. He was soon hired to design one of the first malls in the United States, Southdale Center, and turned to European cities as a source of inspiration. Gruen sought to create an atmosphere similar to what he had experienced in his birthplace of Vienna where friends would gather around fountains or at cafes while out shopping.
However, unlike many of the European cities that feature communal shopping areas, Gruen’s vision was of a place entirely indoors. He lauded the idea of a perennially air-conditioned complex in favor of fresh air, and Southdale Center was the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping center. In fact, it was not unlikely for malls to be the only air-conditioned places in town in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet, despite Gruen’s strange insistence on building a place devoid of sunlight, his desire to make malls a communal space might still be considered praiseworthy.
Gruen’s earliest vision of malls was of a space that housed civic offices, community centers and apartments alongside storefronts. After traveling around the United States and observing the isolation inherent in the driving culture of the suburbs, he aspired to give American suburbia a third place. Termed by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, a third place is a location to socialize and connect with the community. If the home is defined as the first place and work as the second place, Gruen hoped to make malls a place where Americans, so often cut off from each other, could leisurely intermingle.
From their very creation, malls were a place where socialization was encouraged. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the mall became a place young teenagers would flock to. In the mall, there existed a sort of freedom. Left unsupervised by parents, groups of friends could roam from store to store, from the movie theater to the arcade, the food court to the parking lot.
Growing up in New York City, my friends and I did not go to the mall. Instead, we would often FaceTime for hours. My parents, coming into my room, seemed confused — maybe even worried — about why I didn’t see these friends in person.
My mother, who grew up in Ann Arbor, would fondly recall times when she and her friends would go to the mall together on the weekends. Would I remember these FaceTimes the way she remembered those mall excursions? It certainly seemed doubtful to her, and I had to agree that I wasn’t entirely convinced I wasn’t missing out on something. In the back of my mind, I would wonder about the mall. What had it offered my mother and her friends to bond them together so strongly that even into their 50s, they are still in regular contact?
Oldenburg suggests that the importance of the third place lies in it being a location where one can entirely put aside familial or work concerns and enjoy the company and conversation around them. However, if my FaceTime calls with friends were often made from my own room, it seems unclear whether the digital world can really count as a third place. It is not a location entirely separated from where we live or work — we so often reach for our devices in these very spaces. It seems possible that younger generations lack a true third place in the way that my parents so clearly had when they would trek to the mall.
Even so, I detest the mall every time I go. I think the reason starts with the fundamentally clear fact that the mall is no longer what it once was. It is not a place of socialization, and it is not a place of leisurely shopping. At most, it is where one might go to make in-person returns or buy a last-minute gift. It seems easy to attribute the mall’s slow demise to the rise of the internet: With the ease of an Amazon search or click of an Instagram ad, one immediately negates the value of a physical retail space.
Yet, despite the mall’s growing loss of vitality, it remains present in much of the media we consume. Every few months, I seem to come across an article about the slow demise of the mall, and TV shows like “Stranger Things” and movies like “Mean Girls” represent the mall in ways it might have appeared in the 1980s and ’90s. So, even though I rarely enter these behemoths of cold tile and fluorescent light, I feel like I still might know what the paragon of a mall is supposed to be like.
I think this is why it is somehow always a surprise when I walk into places like Briarwood Mall: I am waiting for malls to be something they are not. I am waiting for them to become “revived” — to be how they were remembered, so that I can understand what they meant to people from my parents’ generation. Or maybe, I am so pointedly awaiting their demise that I am always surprised there are still people drifting between stores. Malls seem to remain trapped in a horrible in-between state, dying but not yet dead. The melancholy of a place that does not know what it wants to be transforms it into a liminal space where temporality reigns because, ultimately, one outcome — death or revitalization — must prevail.
And so, in malls, I am once again reminded of the stasis of life. Malls themselves are waiting. They are the Bartleby saying “I would prefer not to do anything and remain here as I am.” I dislike gas stations and train stations because I feel the pull of how easy it could be to give up on moving forward in life. I dislike malls because they are a literal representation of this stasis; they represent something that has given up, something that has refused to move forward, either toward revitalization or death.
Statement Correspondent Olivia Kane can be reached at ohkane@umich.edu.