Tag: death of

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The death of dead malls

Back in 2016, I wrote a giant eulogy for Concord Mall in Elkhart, when they planned on bulldozing the place to put in a strip mall. And I wrote a part two in 2018 when those plans didn’t happen. So now, a few owners and many vacancies later, there is a plan to “reimagine” the mall by building new housing around the perimeter, and turn the mall itself into light industrial space. And the natural conclusion here is that I’d write a giant part three about this. Right?

Honestly, I can’t. I can’t do any of this anymore. I need to take a big step back from this.

* * *

I’ve always been asked what my deal is with malls, why I liked going to them. Even before I worked in malls, even when we were “supposed” to go to the mall in the Eighties because that’s what the zeitgeist told us to do, people wondered why I liked malls, usually in the same tone as if I told them I enjoyed casually drinking turpentine every morning. I never really thought about it at the time, mostly because I liked a lot of things that kids in my class or my neighborhood didn’t like, and vice-versa. They could enjoy the poetry of Johnny Cougar and I could enjoy spending all Saturday at a Waldenbooks memorizing the Dungeons and Dragons manuals.

When I was in college and I no longer had the excuse of working in the mall and my contemporaries found it appalling that I’d want to go to a shopping center and buy nothing instead of going to a sports bar and listening to Johnny Cougar on a jukebox (sorry,  John Cougar Mellencamp), I tried to unravel this a bit, and I posited that a mall was calming to me. It wasn’t a social hub for me; the food wasn’t exactly compelling; and I found myself buying fewer things at the mall. My literary tastes extended past Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy, and Musicland wasn’t embracing the first wave of Swedish Death Metal, so I had to shop elsewhere for my media purchases. But there was something relaxing about walking a lap or two through the College Mall in Bloomington, even if I wasn’t shopping or hanging out with friends.

And the lens of nostalgia has a very nonlinear focal length for me, especially as I age. I started working on my first book, Summer Rain, in 1995, because I was nostalgic for the summer of 1992. Right now, the summer of 2020 feels like it happened fifteen minutes ago, and I can’t imagine being nostalgic about it. But the years between high school and the end of college felt like decades. Summers lasted years. I made a joke about my summer starting because I just finished school, then couldn’t remember what month it was, then realized kids are going back to school next week. Time has collapsed on itself. But back then, I could easily be nostalgic about a time that had only happened a matter of months before.

Anyway… so I bugged out of the midwest, and malls became more important to me, because they were a tie back to my past, my life in the middle states. When I lived in Seattle and Seattle was too much and I needed to regress and think about the past and college and how much I liked not having bills or corporate responsibilities or whatever, I would go to Northgate Mall and walk a few laps. It relaxed me. It was a neutral place, but more importantly, it was a connection to my former life. I could ignore the present and think about happier times.

And it wasn’t just malls. I would have these other ties to my Midwestern roots. Drop me in any city, and the first thing I’ll do is look for a McDonald’s, or see what’s at Taco Bell. I’ll look for the pieces of Americana that are deep-rooted in my DNA. I lived in New York at a time of exponential growth and radical change and a million unique cultural opportunities, but would take two MTA trains and a PATH train for an hour and a half to walk around a Sears in New Jersey and buy nothing. I remember one time walking an hour at night deep into Queens to go to the only 7-Eleven within the greater New York area. Me and Joel used to go to the only Taco Bell at the time on West 4th, even though it was infested with rats. I remember having a dream once that I found a secret Kroger store hidden in Fort Lee, and I could walk across the George Washington bridge to shop there. I don’t know why this stuff was so important to me. And yes, it’s all commercialized generic corporate garbage, and it’s stupid to pine over getting a Big Gulp when I could get a large vat of Coke virtually anywhere. The Coke wasn’t important. The teleportation to the past was.

* * *

Thirty-some years pass. I live in four or five different cities. I visit a half-dozen countries, and almost every state. Right around the time I start looking for places to log my daily ten thousand daily steps in the FitBit, I seek out a few malls in the area. They are my teleporters. They remind me of the past. They relax me. I like that. But… there’s something wrong with it. I ignore it. I wrote about it here about four years ago, as an aside, but still ignore it.

What is wrong?

* * *

In Greek, “nostalgia” literally means, “the pain from an old wound.” (I stole this from Mad Men, which is not only a nostalgic look at the Sixties, but aired in 2007, which itself is nostalgic for some.) I have a lot of problems with nostalgia. I burn a lot of cycles trying to remember old things, look at old pictures, dig up newspaper articles and videos. It is tranquil, soothing. It’s like a drug to me. I get that little kick of dopamine every time I see a picture of Concord Mall and imagine it’s 1987 and I’m just getting off of work and walking to my car to listen to the new Anthrax album. Flipping through a stack of photos from thirty years ago is sometimes like tucking a half-tab of Ativan under my tongue and letting it melt into my mouth. It’s chemical. It’s amazing.

But there is a pain to it. You can never go back. You can never be that person in the past anymore. You aren’t them anymore. And maybe you never were them, or at least you weren’t what you think they are now. And do you really want to go back? And what is the end goal of swallowing your own tail like this? Where does it end?

I would find myself chasing this too much. I would subscribe to newspapers dot com and become so compulsive about finding stuff, I would need to force myself to unsubscribe. I had to install software on my Mac to prevent me from looking at Zillow and eBay during my writing time, or I would spend hours looking up places I’d lived and things I used to own. Like any drug, each successive hit was just a little less potent, and the next one was just a touch harder to find.

They built an entire empire on this horrible chemical trick: social media. Facebook and Instagram are designed to make you feel bad the more you use them. They are made to pull you in. They pump you full of these images of panacea as fast as possible, but intersperse them with things that piss you off, like when junk food makers found that mixing sweet and salty made you eat ten times as much. When I would fall into these nostalgia holes and scroll and scroll and look for more, my emotions honestly got far more worse than they would be abusing any physical drug. And never mind all the stupid social situations and arguments and drama I ended up in.

And in the meat-world, all the escape hatches were being boarded shut. Malls shuttered. Stores closed. I used to hate Sears as a kid, because I worked at Wards. Suddenly I was deeply saddened because they were all vanishing. I would feel a profound malaise every weekend when I went to Stoneridge Mall in Pleasanton to walk my laps because I would pass this big dead Sears and remember how just a couple of years ago, I’d walk a lap through there and see the Christmas stuff and the tools and the appliances and I really missed all of it. I never worked at Sears. I never shopped at Sears. Prior to the end of 2016, I’d never set foot in that mall or the Sears. Why was I so bent out of shape about this? When Hilltop Mall closed a few years ago, I was so upset about it, because it reminded me so much of the long-gone Scottsdale Mall in South Bend, even though the two don’t look anything alike, and I probably only went to Hilltop maybe a dozen times in a four-year period.

Westgate is pulling out of San Francisco. Hilltop is getting turned into a Prologis warehouse. Stoneridge has two dead anchors and just sold its JC Penney and half of its parking lot to people who want to carve out apartment buildings. Sunvalley is about one bad Macy’s quarter from losing two anchors, and the other two are Sears and a JCP that was already slated to close once. Tanforan got sold. Honestly, any Simon indoor mall is in imminent danger of being sliced up into a “lifestyle center” full of generic 5-over-1 apartments.

Why am I attaching my well-being to something that is collapsing? Why do I think I was happier in the past? Why am I defining my joy with a road to nowhere? Why? Why?

* * *

I’ve come to a realization about this. For me, nostalgia is a trauma response. It’s a form of dissociation. I don’t want to be in whatever I’m in, so I walk a lap in a mall and I’m not in my current depression. I’m in 1988 and I’m ten steps from a Karmelkorn and I can get a corn dog and a cherry coke and sit at the fountain and everything is gone. It’s a nice feeling. It’s an escape.

The problem is that I’m escaping to a time that was arguably worse than now. I grew up in an abusive, xenophobic, myopic, poverty-stricken place. When I was 17, I wasn’t thinking about how wonderful it was in Elkhart. I was thinking about how much I needed to get the fuck out of that city, that state, away from those people, my abusers, in any way possible. I knew I had to get to college, but I also fantasized that if I didn’t, I would just hitchhike to Las Vegas or LA or Seattle or somewhere, and vanish, start over. I absolutely needed to leave, and I did. So why do I want to go back to that?

I don’t mean this to be a big shit-on-the-Midwest thing. For obvious reasons I won’t go into because I don’t blog about politics, news is a big problem for my mental well-being. Dwelling on the news, reading the bad news, keeping up with politics, it’s basically the same as the nostalgia thing without the upside. And when I read the news about what’s going on in Indiana, it bothers me a lot. I don’t live in Indiana. I don’t have any need to spend time there. It’s best if I avoided reading about it. Yet… I have a coping mechanism that involves me thinking about it? I feel a need to make myself better by going back to my abusers and my trauma, because it was “a better time?” This makes no sense. Why am I doing this?

* * *

I need a new hobby. I can’t deal with this anymore. If I want to create and I want to have a life and grow and become a better person, I need to turn myself around and stop looking back. I need to be a better person, and I need to surround myself with things that make me happy. I can’t keep dwelling on a memory that didn’t even happen.

I’m done. This is over. I have to move on.

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general

Death of the Tanforan Mall

So, another one bites the dust. Tanforan Mall (aka “The Shops at Tanforan”) in San Bruno got bought for $328M recently, and will be razed to build a mixed-use biotech research campus and housing.

Tanforan has a weird history. It was a horse racing track at the start of the 20th century, and Seabiscuit used to race there. It was also occasionally used as an airfield. Then in 1941, they used it as an internment camp, housing Japanese Americans in the old horse stalls as an assembly center until they moved everyone to more permanent relocation centers in 1942. Then it became an Army camp, then a Navy base, then a racetrack that burned down, and then in 1971, it became a mall. It underwent a major reconfiguration and reconstruction in 2005, and they added a large movie theater in 2008.

I moved to South San Francisco in the fall of 2008, and for the year I lived there, this was my default mall. I drove past it every day on the way to work; I shopped at the attached Target pretty much weekly. The giant Barnes and Noble was the place for skimming computer books, and I bought my first iPhone there in 2009. My dentist was (and is) there, and the Petco was the usual place to grab cat food and litter on a regular basis. I also remember watching a ton of movies at the theater there.

It’s weird because the building itself is physically in great shape without the usual deferred maintenance problems you’d see in a shuttering mall. They basically rebuilt everything from the ground up except the anchors in 2005, and the structure, especially around the food court atrium, looks incredibly modern and new. But it’s not that physically big – the main concourse is maybe eight or ten shops long. And it’s had all the usual exits from national chain bankruptcy and degradation: Forever 21, Toys R Us, Old Navy, and most notably the death of their Sears, which was probably 30% of the total square footage of the place.

All of this area around South San Francisco is exploding with biotech campuses and identical-looking housing complexes. This mall is right on a BART train stop and very close to the confluence of multiple highways, so it’s super valuable land. This project won’t be one of the usual ho-hum de-mall jobs where they slap down a strip mall or a fake “town center” and then 95% of the stores sit vacant forever. I’m pretty sure that in a year, it will be crammed with science fiction buildings that sprouted up instantly, like the long stretch of glass towers of science lining the 101 now.

I was just in the old neighborhood last month, and it’s amazing how the bones are still there, but wide swaths of old sprawl have been instantly replaced with 5-over-one buildings with goofy names and slogans. (“Cadence apartments – where life, style, work, and play come full circle!”) We vaguely looked at buying a townhouse or condo in that area in 2009, and I can’t imagine what it would be like living there now.

It’s dumb and typical that a mall where I spent so little time has such a nostalgia hold on my brain. I’ll be sad to see this one go. Also, I need to find a new dentist now.

 

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Death of the Astor Place Kmart

So the Kmart at Astor Place in Manhattan finally closed. I honestly did not know it was still open. I think Kmart only has a couple dozen locations still remaining in the US, and none of them are anywhere near me. I haven’t been back to New York since 2013, and probably won’t be returning any time soon, since I switched jobs. But I still have a lot of random memories of the place from the years I lived there.

Like I mentioned in Death of a Kmart, I was a Kmart kid. (Or K-Mart, rather, before they dumbed up the name for Y2K.) By the time I was in high school, Kmart was a joke, the place where poor rednecks shopped for school clothes and electronics that would break in a month. And by college, it was an ironic place to go. You actually shopped at Target, but you went to Kmart late at night to make fun of the muzak and the bad clothes.

So when I got to New York, Kmart was a strange callback to childhood in a city that was a completely alien landscape to me. There wasn’t a Target or a Best Buy or any big-box store in Manhattan at the time.  It was almost comforting to go back to a store with big aisles and cheap housewares and prices that ended in a .97. I spent most of my time in haphazard bodegas and crowded mini-groceries, where I couldn’t find anything. Kmart was filled with giant-size everything.

The store itself was giant. The only big stores in Manhattan then were places like Bloomingdale’s or Saks. The main floor that opened up from the Lafayette street entrance seemed cavernous, like the ceiling was two stories high, held up with giant pillars, a giant Valhalla filled with Kathy Ireland clothes and the Martha Stewart collection. An insanely long escalator took you up to the second (really third) floor, where there were more home goods and a cafe. Or you could go to the basement, which had electronics, toys, seasonal goods, and as much junk food as you could possibly imagine. And the basement was even directly connected to the 6 train.

I arrived in New York in 1999, a few years after the place opened. I remember first hearing about it because the band U2 played a live show there. At the time, I hated the band U2, largely because I had an ex a few years ago who worshipped them, and I probably wasn’t over her at the time, so I found the whole ironic Bono stunt a bit silly. There are videos of it on YouTube, which are so incredibly 90s, they give me horrible flashbacks, but would be a big hit with the vaporwave folks.

Anyway, here’s a bulleted list of a bunch of random memories of the place:

  • My first celebrity sighting in New York was seeing Gilbert Gottfried there in 1999, trying to buy an oscillating fan.
  • The store had a Big K Cafe on the third floor. Despite the bad food, it had a very nice view of Astor Square from the giant windows on the front of the building, and was a great place to sit and relax, until everyone realized it was a great place to sit and relax.
  • Everyone seems to mention that there was a public restroom by that cafe. Nobody seems to remember how dirty it got after a few years. Every Kmart has horrific restrooms. I think it’s because of the merger with Sears, because every Sears bathroom anywhere in the United States smells like it was painted with a thick coat of raw sewage.
  • When I lived in Seattle, I got addicted to Slurpees. Every night, after I hit my daily writing quota, I would drive to 7-Eleven and get a Coke Slurpee. Then I moved to New York, and there were no 7-Elevens. The Kmart Icee was an imitation Slurpee, and I could never figure out why they were inferior – maybe not enough syrup – but it was almost an acceptable substitute. Also, corn dogs were for some reason rare or hard to find in Manhattan, but they had them at the cafe.
  • In 2000, I met someone online and we had a long-distance thing going for a bit. When she came down to Manhattan to meet me for the first time, the public rendezvous point was at that Big K Cafe.
  • Kmart had holiday stuff disturbingly early, or what seemed disturbingly early then. (Target probably has Christmas trees out already now.) When I was at Juno, they told us we could decorate our cubes for the holidays, so I went to Kmart and bought an unnatural amount of Christmas lights, like a Clark Griswold amount of strands, including ones that played carols and holiday music through a cheap little speaker. They probably stayed up until May.
  • This was the era when Kmart was trying to be a “hypermart” and had an almost full line of groceries in the basement. You typically had to go to the outer burbs and rent a car to get any giant multi-pack staples like this. I could never hack grocery shopping there and dragging everything home on the train. But it was always awesome to buy snacks in bulk and bring them to the office. Either you could buy a candy bar for a dollar at a bodega, or you could buy 96 candy bars at Kmart for like five dollars.
  • I bought a lot of cheap home goods at Kmart, because I could never find them at other places. Like any time I needed a dish drainer or a bathroom plunger or whatever, I normally stopped there first. I had a fluorescent light fixture in my kitchen, and the only place where I could find the special circular bulb was at Kmart. I also remember buying a new toilet seat for my Astoria apartment, and ten years after I left, I saw some realtor photos for the place, and it’s still on there.
  • I also loved wandering around the basement level, looking at all the weird stuff you could only find at Kmart in Manhattan. Like they had a full aisle of fishing gear, in case you wanted to fish for dead bodies and toxic trout in the Hudson river.
  • I talked about this in The Replay but that Kmart was a pivotal memory in my 9/11 experience. When I walked home that day, I stopped at that Kmart to develop my pictures (remember analog film?) and buy a pair of sneakers so I didn’t have to wear my messed up dress shoes home. I ate corn dogs at the Big K Cafe and watched the destruction on CNN while a large armada of office workers all bought new shoes to walk home in.
  • After not going there for years, I stopped in to use the restroom and was dismayed that the Big K Cafe was gone, converted into a makeshift furniture overflow area.
  • My last memory: in 2007, we had packed up everything for our move to Denver. All I had left in the apartment was a week of clothes, and I didn’t have a bag to put them in, because the movers had packed and shipped my luggage. While I was taking a shower on the last day there, one of us who may not have been me (trying not to blame anyone here) turned on the automatic oven cleaner and almost burned down the house. The entire apartment filled with a dense smoke and the fire department showed up. My week of clothes now smelled like they’d been in a house fire, which they had been. So on my last day in New York, I went to K-Mart, bought a large gym bag. a couple of pairs of Wranglers, some generic t-shirts, and a bunch of multi-pack Hanes socks and underwear, plus some junk food and extra toiletries. That was my luggage on the flight to Colorado, and all I had to wear until our house showed up on a moving truck ten days later.

No big surprise on the store going away. Aside from the greater death of everything Fast Eddie Lampert got his dirty hands on in the Sears/Kmart empire, pretty much everything in New York changes every year or two. Within a stone’s throw of that store, there’s been a complete turnover of damn near everything, except Starbucks. And that Chase bank is doing okay. (So’s the six other locations within a thousand feet of there. too.) Anyway.

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Bourdain

Usually, these things don’t get to me. But for some reason, this one has.

So Anthony Bourdain is dead. Suicide, hotel room, 61. I feel some need to extrapolate on this, front-loading this with a lede of what he accomplished or why this is so tragic, etc etc. I have no energy for that. You can go to Facebook and see that 50,000 times.

I’m trying to figure out why this bothers me so much, and I think it’s because of when I became connected with his work. I remember exactly when and where I first picked up a copy of Kitchen Confidential. There was a book store called Coliseum Books in Columbus Circle, and I’d go there every Friday after I went to my shrink. (She’s also dead, I found out recently – lymphoma, I think.) I think I read the New Yorker article, so I picked up his book. This was back when I spent hours and hours on the subway, and was single, lived alone, had no cable TV, so I would plow through books, reading a book a day most of the time. But while I read a lot of forgettable work back then, his stuff had a real resonation for me.

My kitchen career was low-level and short-lived. A summer on the Taco Bell drive-through; a couple of months washing dishes at an old-school Italian restaurant; part of a semester doing the same at a dorm, with the very brief and slight promotion of being the dude who stocked the milk and juice bar in the front-of-house. But when Bourdain described the camaraderie, the in-the-trenches slog of working the back half of a restaurant, I immediately related. I’d never aspired to cook or even stay in the business long enough to do anything other than collect a small paycheck, but I’d spent enough Friday nights at war with the dinner rush, completely slammed with a wall of dirty pans and plates, and no way out. I got it, and it pulled me in.

Bourdain had a persona, and I think it grew much more when he became a TV personality, picking fights with other chefs, with vegetarians, with food chains. His work as that persona was good, but it’s easy to forget he was a hell of a writer, and that’s what drilled into my brain. It wasn’t that he was a good brand; he was a guy I knew, someone telling stories and shooting the shit and talking war, a war I briefly fought. There’s something about any writing about a very involved job like that – it’s the reason I probably go back and re-read Bukowski’s Post Office every other year. Bourdain had chops, but he also had the ability to figure out what to write from such a career, and to do it in a different template than all the other stodgy food books up to that point.

I think he’s also a very intertwined part of the early 00s and New York for me. I was not a foodie, and spent far more time at McDonald’s than at any French restaurant. But if I had to make a list of the things that made up the background of my time in New York from 1999 to 2007, he’d be on that short list. I used to walk home down the back alleys of south Manhattan to avoid the tourists and bustle of Broadway, the Broome to Jersey to Mulberry to Prince to Bowery route, the interior of the blocks that were grand and exquisite on the exterior, but I’d be seeing the service entrances and freight elevators. And that’s where I’d see the chefs, always smoking, always preparing for a battle that was about to start when I was heading home from the cubicles. And that always made me think of Bourdain and other chefs, and the underbelly of the city, and those folks who took the long train from Jackson Heights or Hoboken to cut up fish or wash dishes for minimum wage in a city where bankers earned millions of bonuses in the W years.

It’s weird because I feel like I knew Bourdain, although I didn’t. When I stop and think about it, I think, wait, did I know him? Like did I meet him at a signing, or have a friend of a friend that worked with him, or run into him at some point? I didn’t, but it feels like it, because his writing got so in my head. I don’t have a connection to the TV host who jetted to France to eat oysters with someone famous in the food world. I mean, good for him that he got the money and the opportunity, and it’s fun to binge-watch on Netflix, but that’s not what did it for me. He somehow burned into the background of my brain, and that’s why his death bothers me.

There’s also the usual thing I do, where I look at him at 61, and me at 47, and I’ve wasted a lot of time on 401K calculator sites that all tell me I have to keep this optempo going for another twenty years, and I feel like I want to retire in 20 weeks, and who knows when I’ll even get started with this writing thing in earnest. He broke big because he wrote what he knew and he wrote as a person, and I’m so burned out and sick of writing what I write. So I keep thinking, well maybe next week I’ll reinvent myself, and do everything different. But the clock is ticking, and when someone goes, it puts that in perspective.

I’m not going to go into the why of how he did it, or if this is some epidemic, or if prescription drugs played a part, or what 800 number you should call, or any of that shit. You’ve probably seen it a million times already this morning. Just like how I couldn’t think of a snappy paragraph to open this, I don’t have one to close it. Just wanted to get down my thoughts now, because it seems like I never get to do that anymore.