An Introduction to Mall-ology

The three qualifications of a mall are:

(a) Suburban in character, that is motor car accessible;
(b) Enclosed self-contained unit in which all stores can be reached without going outside;
(c) Its anchor (major tenant) store must be retail, dry goods, not a grocery store.

In New York, I am reluctant to grant mall status to enterprises within the city limits of New York City or its boroughs. Thus Kings Plaza in Brooklyn and Queens Plaza in Elmhurst, fail criterion one, even though they are motor accessible adjoining a major highway.

I am not quite so strict with regard to malls in smaller cities. In the City of White Plains, roughly 30 miles north of New York City, the Galleria's plant for parking automobiles is little different from Kings Plaza. However, malls are a suburban preoccupation to recover a sense of community lost in the migration from the great cities.

Malls must generally be enclosed. I am aware of the Austin Texas mall, which is inside Texas' capitol, in an entirely open area. I am reluctant to give it true mall status. A mall should be self-contained, its own universe. Grocery stores even if subleasing to other tenants puts the supermarkets enclosed with other stores, do not qualify. Food shopping is a drudge, not a liberation.

And above all malls are an American middle class pre-occupation. The invisible 1% at either end of the economic stratus are not mall-people.

The ruling class at the tip of the spectrum have no need to buy for the sake of having possessions.

The lower fringe would be chased off by mall security.

The mall would have recreated the old downtown in a cleaner brighter setting. The classical mall of the 1960's often invited community groups to gather and high school bands to parade.

A classical mall had two anchor stores, large chain department stores at either end. The major stores were joined along the central avenue on which fronted the usual small shops: the mom and pop pizzeria, the candle store, the wicker store, and the pet shop.

All would have been right with the world under a plastic heaven, except that the recreation of a central business district invited the very ills that drove the middle class away from the central city: vagrants, soap box political activists touting the obscure grievances associated with radical causes and trade union organizers. In many of the United States, if a mall allowed the Boy Scouts to urge people to vote, certainly a noble advocacy, the mall was there by opened to the KKK to tell people different. Paying customers might tolerate the former but abhor and avoid the mall for the later.

As the mall entered its halcyon years of the Val-Girl Era, community rooms and community activities disappeared from the scene.

As we skate a head from the black recession years of the late 70's to the Reagan glitzkrieg era, the mood in the country and the mall changed. The poster said 'Poverty Suck;' the theme was elegance and the dress returned to the preppy collegiate style though it was called 'punk.' It was the time of the Val-Girls.

Much as Prince Charles expressed a horror at the fractured English of Val-Girlisms such as bodacious (boldly & audacious) and jarble (jargon & babble). The Val-Girl, the well-dressed teenage girl in designer clothes, carrying her cell phone, then a status symbol, drove up to the mall in a red sport's car (ticket magnet) to shop until she dropped. "Narly!" It was the liberation of spending turned mad into a festival of consumption. Dungarees formerly clothes for a servile class bore designer labels. Sneaker prices soared. Neatly coifed hair replaced the scraggly book of the 60's and 70's. Materialism had for the moment triumphed.

Mall cuisine expanded as the simple pizzeria would no longer do. Food courts offering a variety of allegedly fat free nourishments. Val-Girls had to dangerously approach anorexia.

Despite the tough urban sound of 'Punk,' the Val-Girl's consort, the Val-Girl was a child of the suburbs not a transplant from the city. The mall was their playground not only for shopping but also for socializing. And of course, where there's a need, a merchant will provide. Arcades with the chiming bells of video games cropped up in the mall to take advantage of the teenage presence and spending power generated by a super-heated economy.

The acclamatio of materialism was short-lived. In late 1987, the U.S. stock market with its watered stocks supporting the excess collapsed sending reverberations through the economy, felt even today, much as economists, using the Val-Girl's genius for language, try to sugar coat the disaster away. Upon his inauguration, the short-lived President Bush, the elder, noted that he didn't expect his administration to be characterized by the rampant materialism of his predecessor.

Among the sugar coated words of the 90's were 'retrenchment,' 'downsized,' and 'give-backs.' In the 90's the broad walkways and the central atrium disappeared into sales space. The once wide aisles which stretched to infinity were now clogged with improvised kiosks, a mallish version of the push carts and street vendors of the old central business district. Service vanished; the objective was entirely bottom line. Those who wanted to read a paper and watch life go by found that most benches were removed. Mall art whether of the macramé's or the twisted steel variety faded away.

As the administration of the first Bush tottered in economic collapse and Bush landed over to Clinton, the malls faced for the first time tough competitors. The Reagan Era had brought gentrification to the cities; revitalized central business districts were able to compete for the dollar. Outside cities Sam Walmart developed a simple concept for cutting costs, encasing a great Emporium in a simple prefabricated shell easily maintained. Malls appeared for the first time in almost a half a century to be a losing ground.

What is the direction of the mall for the future as we skate on into over time?

I see a return to the entertainment value of shopping to compete with the sights of the city on one hand and the starkness of Sam Walmart on the other. I see the trend set by malls in Canada, which include skating rinks and to malls of America, which has an amusement park attached.