Forsaken Sanctuaries  (or The Death of Shopping)                      

They were places of worship where kids grew up, got their first jobs, and spent their first paychecks.  Places where families went for the day to catch a movie, have lunch, spend money and above all – people watch.  The Mall: that was the place to be, a mecca whether you were a pre-teen or a senior citizen.  Everything you needed was in one convenient, temperature-controlled environment: food, clothing, music, a warm pleasant environment, and other people.

On a particular warm, crisp, and bright morning, I found myself driving around North Versailles.  North Versailles is situated east of Pittsburgh, with the famed Lincoln Highway (Route 30) running right though town.  This town is mostly residential; visible are the remnants of many defunct businesses.  While cruising around the various shells of commercialism’s past and the  small squat 1940’s- and 50’s-style one-story homes nestled and packed into the typical western Pennsylvanian hilly landscape, the view opened up and I suddenly was confronted with the hulking New Eastland Mall.  Imagine a wide expanse of empty and decaying parking lot, and, in the center, a large blocklike structure, almost like some sort of overgrown Stonehenge.   

The Eastland Shopping Plaza was built in the early 1960s, changing its name to Eastland Mall after a 1973 fire led to extensive renovations.  The flea market has been a mainstay at the mall for the past 15 years, but in accordance with natural mall evolution, it was closed early in 2005.  A few cars can be seen here and there, either using the parking lot as a short cut or parked for unknown reasons.

I then set myself to the task of spending time in this location, understanding it, learning about it, and really looking at it. 

I spent most of the summer of 2005 photographing and painting on-site and, ironically enough, being thrown out of the site twice for “loitering”.  Apparently, though pretty much abandoned, the Mall still had a caretaker who took it upon himself to drive around in his van making sure the local riff-raff stayed out.  In spite of  the place being locked up tight and having no real reason for anybody to be there or even want to be there, people were told to leave.  As a result, all photographs and paintings were done of either the exterior or by peering in the windows, while keeping an eye on the caretaker’s van.

I did manage to enter the old movie theater via the back door, which had been previously pried open.  As is apparent in the photographs, the style and decor of the theater is in the exact same style of the New Eastland Mall, although it is a separate building set off from the rest of the mall.  The interior was demolished with remnants of the business of the theater everywhere.  The smell of mold ran thick through the entire structure.  While in complete and utter disarray, everything was intact – seats, posters, counters, right down to the strewn empty popcorn boxes over the rich red carpeting.  The individual theaters (there were only two screens) still had all of their seats and screens, yet these areas too were severely damaged.  Oddly enough, seemly the best composed photograph of the whole place was taken blind.  The camera’s flash was turned on and then pointed into the dark theater at random.  Only by processing the photos did the deep interior of the theater become visible for the first time.

Back outside, senior citizens could still be seen doing “laps” around the mall for exercise.  That was allowed as long as you kept moving.  The deep irony of the “walkers” was that they were no longer allowed to do the traditional climate controlled laps around the inside of the mall like they had for years.  Now they were relegated to doing their laps on the outside – around the edge of the parking lot.

Another strange aspect of this mall was the absence of graffiti.  There was not a mark anywhere on this structure despite the hundreds of square feet of clean and open potential tag space.  The presence of a caretaker who was at the site on a part-time basis at best was not a graffiti deterrent.  For graffiti artists, he would be easy to avoid.  It is something else that keeps this place devoid of any kind of life.

All this leads to the inevitable question: what happens to large spaces such as this now that they stand empty?  Some of them get demolished, but others just remain a blight on the suburban landscape. Invariably, each mall goes through the natural evolution of "mall death".  Stores start pulling out of their leases, less than upscale stores take over for a short while, local stores hang on.  Eventually, there are more empty stores than full.  Then the obligatory Flea Market arrives and takes over the space on the weekends.  For the owner of the mall, any revenue is better than none.  Eventually, the flea market goes away and we are left with an empty hulking space.

While some malls are still thriving and others are merely hanging on, the majority of these types of malls are abandoned now.   Large sprawling buildings surrounded by equally large parking lots sit in the middle of suburban wastelands.  How these places came to be deserted is no mystery.  The "big box" stores offering very cheap prices and a high selection of items drove the malls right out of business.  We all go to them: Wal-Mart, Target, Ikea... the list goes on.  The one thing that these box stores lack is what the malls offered: a place of social gathering.  While every square inch of a Target store is coordinated with merchandise and no space is wasted, missing are places to sit, relax or socialize. 

Indoor malls had open social communal areas.  The first indication that malls were on the decline was the appearance of merchant kiosks that sprouted up in the communal spaces.  Mall owners found it harder to keep revenue coming in, and it wasn’t working as well as it used to with the traditional store format.  As damage control, they began to lease “spots” in the hallways for kiosk vendors.  Go into any mall today and those formerly open communal areas are all jammed with kiosks of small vendors.  The sad part about it is that in some malls, the kiosks are standing empty just like many of the stores.  So gone are the communal spaces; customers need to get in and get out so the stores can maximize their profits as much as possible.  People who hang out are just taking up space.

The New Eastland Mall is not an oddity.  This is happening to malls all over the United States.  Malls that are still in operation and were previously financially strong now show signs of struggle.  One mall that is starting to exhibit signs of decline is the Monroeville Mall.  Upon a recent visit to this mall, I noticed a large amount of empty stores and unused kiosks.  This mall is still officially “thriving”, partly due to its location – Monroeville is a huge draw for all kinds of shopping, from strip malls to fast food restaurants to big box stores to traditional indoor malls. But upon a recent visit inside the Monroeville Mall,  I counted ten empty store spaces upon a stroll down one level of the mall – not a good sign for such a large shopping icon of Monroeville.  Throw in the fact that Kauffman’s, Southwestern Pennsylvania's sophisticated shopping juggernaut, recently left the mall to be replaced by a Boscov’s Department  store, a kind of Kohl’s-meets-JC Penney-meets Sam’s Club.

So what does this mean for the mall, shopping, and ultimately, human interaction in general?  Small stores and boutiques are pretty much  doomed from the get go.  Our society is looking for products from a larger, cheaper, quicker venue.  Traditional “shopping” is dead.  Our society appears to be finished with the casual, interactive way of shopping in years past.  Shopping has now to been transformed  into researching what we want on the internet, hopping in the SUV to the big box store, getting the item(s) and returning home as fast as possible.  A large portion of society (myself included) skips that last part entirely and will wait for purchases to arrive in the mail, thus eliminating any last thread of social interaction available by going to a traditional mall.  (The reader can feel free to substitute the word “shopping” with the phrase “human interaction” anywhere in this piece.)

Is this a good or a bad development? The jury is still out.  What is obvious is that there has been a change – a shift in our habits.  Because of this change in habits, we are left with are large areas of suburban blight that just sit and decay.  Unsuitable for sale or renovation, these buildings are sometimes razed, perhaps for home development, assuming that the particular tracts of land they occupy are in desirable locations.  Most of the time, they are not.   Suburban blight is unlike urban blight.  Urban spaces often have the flexibility to change, to be renovated to suit a current need.  Dead Malls don’t have that luxury.  They are specific spaces, built so large, and often in a very particular style, that it is almost impossible to renovate them for new purposes – the cost would be phenomenal.  It is easier just to raze these structures and reallocate the space they occupied for something else.

While the malls stand as forgotten fossils, they are also testaments to what we  are: consumers.  These relics mark an end of an era.  The phasing out of social interaction and time spent with others gives rise to a "get in, get out, get it done, and move on to something else" mentality.  This would imply that we are a busier society.  This is a myth.  We would like to think we are “busier.” It makes us feel more important, more productive, somehow better than our predecessors.   We have, however, just shifted our priorities more from the social to the individual; from personal interactions to the self check-out; and from calling on others for help to checking out BN.com for the latest self-help book.

Shopping at a local mall takes time, patience and just a little bit of legwork.  Our society today has less patience and is growing larger and larger in girth.  We are looking for a quick fix, a fast pill, or a drive up window to solve our issues with one big gesture.  It appears that we have lost the understanding of one big basic principle that our mamas told us:  in life, you gotta’ shop around.

For more information on dead and dying malls, check out the following links:

www.deadmalls.com

www.laforum.org/deadmalls/

www.easternct.edu/depts/amerst/MallsHistory.htm