Old Malls
Still wip, will be made available via a link on the blog page once finished
Table of Contents:
Intro
Community centres are reflections of their community. Even in the age of the car, land and retail space in high foot traffic areas are highly valued. Whatever businesses or entities that stick around are undoubtedly important to at least some members of the community. While we might associate this with downtown properties, a similar statement can be made of spaces within a small mall or community centre. Pretty obvious but I bring this up because I find it interesting to look at small malls and community centres whenever I come across them.
REDACTED Centre
REDACTED Centre, hereon referred to as "the centre" with capitalisation as deemed appropriate, is located on the edge of two towns.
Its neighbours are a car dealership,
a non-profit home improvement and donation center,
and a plaza of warehouse spaces with a select few having been turned into storefronts.
There is one (1) grade separated transit connection with rather abysmal frequency, scheduling, and interoperability with other transit connections.
Most who roam the area do so by car.
The roads are as wide as they are sprawling,
distending to a disgusting 5 or even 6 lanes at times with developments having parking to match the expected flows,
and yet it all remains empty.
The centre is neslted in the middle of all of this.
I would describe it as equal parts quaint and meagre,
a combination resulting in it being equal parts unassuming and unappealingly so but with an odd charm.
If that sentence reads like a mess, that's because it is and this is like your one chance to back out now before we get too crazy.
The Center owes much of its quaintness to its selection of storefronts, community entities, and structure as well as some of its other more superficial elements.
Description
From the outside, it's this plain, brown brick structure. Its precious few unshuttered and uncovered windows typically avail little if anything about the goings on therein. Most are instead covered by adverts and other posters put up by the business owners. Aside from the ocasional little business willing to show their storage or backrooms to the world, this place is pretty closed off from the outside. The entrances, like the windows, are framed with these red, sunbleached to a kind of orange, accent pieces and a welcome sign whose design has just the perfect amount of negative space to feel off-balanced, off-center, and awkward but still intentional. Inside is more of the same aesthetically, white walls and some faded yellows, white square tiles small enough to look busy and monotonous enough to be monotonous looking, recessed light fixtures of the fluorescent-tube-array-behind-a-diffuser-panel variety punching up the meagre lighting capabilities of the centre's small skylights.
The first thing I want to draw attention to on the inside with regard to the storefronts is the food court setup since I think it serves as a pretty good tone setter for the rest of the centre. The food court setup consists of a row of asian restaurants, some boba shops across in the cubicle style store lots, a low-b/high-c tier pizza chain across the way on the other side of the mall but still within a reasonable distance of the food court where if you're at the food court you'll probably still be considering it, a mini Filipino (seemingly redundant combination of words) grocer/snack shop in a similar position to the pizza chain, and a random hair salon between the food court and the pizza.
The row of asian restaurants is, as you might expect of a place like this, fucking fire. They have the fucking stained up, sunbleached (even though we're inside which might make you think that these came from another location but no, to my knowledge these restaurants all originated here so I don't know why they're so sunbleached) , revised to hell and back using stickies and markers, war torn menus plastered all over the windows so as to not let any light in. Photography as unappetizing as it is amateurish for some 40 odd numbered chinese-american fusion food dishes ocassionally broken up by like 5 handwritten signs in English and Mandarin outlining the day's specials. Some of the shop names are a little hard to read, the neon signs are a bit uneven in their lighting and have this uncanny ability to shroud the adjacent normal embossed signs in shadow which makes them harder to read. There's like, this one specialty Filipino food place and a Japanese place that are a bit different. The Japanese place seems to be trying hard to use the aesthetics but seems to be in a similar state of disrepair to the others. The Filipino food place looks like it's trying to be a Sonic, no further comment, A+. Everything is cash only too, so don't even try it tax man, your fed powers don't work here.
side story: So I uh didn't have any fucking cash the first time I came around here so I went to go use the atm there. There was like just some random fruit slush sitting on top of the atm and a big flashing led sign above the atm saying "ATM". The interface was laggy and bizzare looking, the type of shit where you reasonably expect that you might have to call your bank later in the evening just to make sure things are alright and inevitably be charged some service fee at the end of the transaction.
It's great!
The boba is similarly pretty scuffed. Their battlescarred menus have a thick lamination layer at least but still just stuck haphazardly to walls and boards outside of their store space because yeah you can't exactly fit their boba operations inside of the cramped ass retail space they're locked into. The three competing boba shops all sell the same tofu dish and fish balls which I just love for them.
The pizza place is just about no one's first choice for pizza, low b-tier is pretty high praise for that joint. Nothing there is unique, it's got the same energy as like random ass pizza joints named Johno's Pizza or mf PIZZA TIME. The only other thing of note about it is that, like the boba shops, it too struggles to fit within its space!
The only places that seem to fit within their allotted space are the asian restaurants and the Filipino snack shop. I thought the place was unmanned for a little bit. But no. The owner was just behind the register.
"The storefronts are even better!" is what I would say if I could confidently vouch for them. They were all mostly closed for midday on a Saturday which doesn't bode well. I get that hobby stores are a bit of an unemployed energy type place but I don't think that means some random weekday like a Tuesday would be their peak hours.
Does that make sense? Am I switching tense in my writing?
There are quite a few clothing stores with merchandise on racks just flowing out of their storefronts for people to peruse. The pieces range from bland to knock off to interesting but the quality across the board is pretty meh. 20:80 cotton-poly blends, fake chanel, fake kaws, fake coach, and plenty of fake designer slikscreens that were giving 0.25-ply public school certified toilet paper.
The aforementioned hobby stores, there being like 3, were all pretty cute from the outside looking in. Sunbleached 90s anime posters in the window, unlicensed super saiyan vegito on the sign, and various figures looking out like Toy Story characters looking out into the world.
The rest of the stuff strike me as more essential stores and entities. Furniture, appliances, law practices, tax services, tutoring services, dry cleaning, holiday decor, and office space. Just about everything you need in a short walk of each other.
Structure
Not wholly moving on from the contents, I want to discuss more about the structure of the place. It feels meagre in a way that I can't quite pin on any one single aspect.
The natural skylights are small and dim, requiring artficial lighting to bring it the rest of the way there but even with their combined efforts there's still many a dark spot within the centre. Many of the retail spaces are closed most days and a few are just left vacant with a hastily scrawled "for rent/lease" sign on the glass or in the plastic of the rolling door. The storefronts that are open seem to fit awkwardly in their spaces, ranging from the appliance store struggling to fill out its space to the clothing stores spilling out into the halls.
Some of the storefronts occupy a strange type of space located somewhere between a proper inline retail space as one would expect of a mall and a kiosk. If you're familiar with Markham's Pacific Mall then I'd liken it to the stores on the first floor except a bit closer to an inline. They're substantially larger and more built out with walls and a sort of forehead on which to place signage but still retain a sort of cramped feeling as these cubicles need to leave clearance for the second floor landing but have no ceiling.
The second floor is similarly limiting. Constructed as a figure 8 with a large landing in centre, the floor space surrounding the holes in the 8 is constricted in order to render the skylight more effective on the bottom floor. This decreased floor space makes shops on the second floor much less approachable and the area much less wanderable (totally a real word). The third floor looms above with no windows or open space to look above or below making the openings to the sky in the ceiling feel bare.
Why Talk About This Place?
It's hard for me to place why exactly I find this place so charming.
In a way it reminds me of malls and similar centres that I grew up with and see others reminiscing about on the internet. There's a very real comfort that I derive from being within its walls and thinking back on it. An unearned sense of familiarity in its layout and aesthetics, an intimacy with its cold metal benches and diffused lights. I've been to so many places like it and despite having spent so little time there I can safely nestle it away in the same part of my memory as those places I've spent far more time with. In a sense I kind of treasure it all the same. Somewhere quiet and comfortable and that I find more than a bit nostalgic.
I also just like these sorts of anachronistic and decrepit feeling places. I'm no shiey or whatever but I'm a really big fan of going through buildings that have fallen into disuse, disrepair, or even outright abandonment. Seeing where people liked to go and where they liked to relax from the wear patterns of tiles and flaking on the metal benches. Sure it's not shiny and clean but the signs of human life get to persist in the absence of a dedicated maintenance crew.
I didn't mention it before because I wanted to mention it here but, there was this shop whose only products were a ton of burned DVDs in plastic sleeves, such a quintessentially pre-digital era institution. Physical media might have died and dvd players got turned into a feature for the home console but this place was still trucking along which I think adds to the anachronistic feeling
Redacted Mall
REDACTED Mall,
hereon referred to as "the mall" with capitlisation as demed appropriate,
is in nowheresville suburbia's approximation of what a downtown might be in a strange alternate universe.
Nestled between the local college and combination casino and racetrack,
the mall's parking lot stays mostly empty these days similar to its neighbours in the upscale grocer, office supply shop, buffet, and other smaller businesses.
All the money seems to have dried up from the area,
drained into the combination casino racetrack whose long overgrown and undeveloped fields have seen new attention of late.
It appears that the owners of the land, seeing a lack of traffic to and in the area for their mall and casino realized that they needed to do something new. They needed to build another mall. But this time it's a more integrated part of the casino and not requiring a trek through 2 football field parking lots and crossing a 4x4 lane intersection by foot.
But we're not here to talk about that new development. Give it like 10 years for that one to die too and maybe I'll make a follow up post. We're here to talk about the original mall. And what a mall it is.
Structure
The mall has a 2-floor, 3-armed design with massive skylights all throughout the space providing a majority of the lighting throughout the day. At the end of 2 of the arms are 2 floor department stores, one closed and one half-open. The remaining arm has a a movie theater on the first floor and the food court on the second. In the center of the mall is an open area with benches and a massive cicular skylight that many use to relax or to congregate around during mall events. By the center is the entrance to an indoor amusement park on the second floor with a smaller, till now unmentioned, arm on the first floor beneath it.
Interesting Sights
I guess the first thing worth addressing is the indoor amusement park. Back in its heyday it was a real sight to see. I remember it always being packed to the brim, all the rides running at full whack, the insane volume, and some incredibly expansive climbable structures for the children to run around in. At the I visited most recently I was high and didn't really want to see it in the state it most likely fell into since my last visit. Instead choosing to let its memory live untainted in my imagination, rides full of screaming children and happy families crowding into the ice cream shops and restaurant within.
All over the mall are posters showcasing plans for its redevelopment. Featuring a 3-part megatheatre, new condos, expansion of store spaces, a convention center space, and a standalone waterpark. It's clear to see that it will never happen. The posters, like the mall, are in a state of disrepair. The larger ones literally coming apart at the seams revealing their construction as several other smaller square posters on fabric pinned together. Exuding the same level of professionalism as three kids in a trench coat. Evidentally they've been up for a while and none of what was listed has come yet. Scanning the QR codes and looking at local articles, construction on this was meant to happen pretty soon after the posters were put up and results would start appearing as soon as 2020. Little did they know huh?
It kind of reminds me of those end of the world graffitis you would see in L4D2 or TLOU. Got a laugh out of me like those L4D2 ones.
Some of the shops are just funny. I'll show those now.
2 clock shops.
Sure, why not
The guilded guardian guards nothing.
You're eyes aren't deceiving you. That IS in fact Zellers in modern day. For the non-Canadians readers, Zellers was a discount department store chain that basically died in the 2010s. The few remaining stores that they owned were turned into liquidation centres for a different store owned by the parent company. After a while they seemed to just vanish from everywhere which makes this a shock to find. Then more recently they returned as a section inside of that different store. But now that different store is filing for some brankrupcy related thing so :/
Now for my favourite stores of the whole visit.
You can't make this shit up. Two of a kind was closed so I can only assume that after that failed they thought to open three of a kind. These 2 stores are right across from one another by the way. The kind of store layout I expect to see in an indie game as a joke but no it's just here in my city.
It was kind of a weird and surreal experience going through Three of a Kind. The shitty overhead speakers were blasting some electronic music, eurodance songs where you can kind of make out the english that they're trying to sing but it doesn't make any sense anyways so you just let the synths and vibes carry it. It's like listening to E-Rotic while high. Not a European radio station either by the way, it was a local station and the DJ just decided to put on his eurodance mix.
The stuff in there was mostly what you would expect. 20:80 cotton-poly-blah-blah-blah. Materials determine a lot and there were a lot of tags in there that read "85% polyester 10% rayon 5% elastaine" which translates to "100% plastic and 0% worth your time and money", not to mention the fact that a lot of the materials spread their material so thin that they made heroin chic look curvaceous. They had jeggings. Can you believe that? Jeggings in modern day. I hadn't seen jeggings in years but they had stacks of it. And lowkey there were some cute things somehow? There was a cropped and lined faux fur vest with a hood with kemonomimi ears on it. Plastic fantastic for sure but still interesting. There's also another section just dedicated to swimsuits whose lighting is seemingly just turbo-cooked.
The most interesting pieces of clothing I found were on a mannequin however.
Truly one of the outfits of all time. The base outfit without the jacket and hat is kind of giving Velma Dinkley. Like Velma Dinkley in a brown mini pencil but definitely still Velma Dinkley. But then on top of it is a camo jacket and camo hat? Getting "this outdoor paintball shit gets serious" type of accessories to go with your cute Mystery Incorporated outfit. I kind of love it. I would love to smoke weed in a thicket under an underpass or go to a shitty open decks show with whoever would be wearing this outfit.
I hope you'll still be down to read my future posts on fashion after whatever that was.
the hand
There are some pictures I can't post without basically doxxing myself so I'm just going to describe them here:
-
a shop whose name is just telling you to buy shit with the tagline "cheaper than cheap"
- it's all open boxes on pallets
- several closed stores that just have their eviction notices in the door still
-
an open women's clothing store named "Society"
- They had a Stranger Things backpack in the window
- A closed store called "LITTLE GUYS HOME" with christmas trees in the window
To give you an idea of what the surroundings of the mall are like, I'll describe 2 nearby locations.
There used to be a home hardware and supplies store with an integrated autobody shop and gas station nearby. It always had plenty of business with people getting their cars serviced and refilling on gas. That place is boarded up now and the gas station area looks as though there was never anything there to begin wtih.
There is a former bank which is now blacked out and lacking any signage whatsoever. The windows have floor to ceiling blinds, the any on-building signage has been removed, and the sign that used to show what was in the lot has been whited out. The thing is, that place is still used. In the morning when I passed by there was a truck, white van, and McLaren parked out front then when I came back through the area just a short while later the white van and McLaren were gone and replaced with a C3 Corvette. Money deals may still go on, but not through any banking facilities that's for sure.Combination KFC Taco Bell
Nestled in the corner of the food court next to the washrooms sat an abandoned combination KFC and Taco Bell. I don't remember much about the signage or surroundings aside. The inside was mostly empty, only the sink and a few tables remained. At least I thought so until I looked to the side at a wall that's normally hidden unless you get really close to the counter at the right angle.
My eyes went up the wall of hand washing instructional infographics, action plans, and schedules to see a whiteboard. It long outlasted it's frame, held still to the wall with duct tape. On the white board was some company slogan about working as a family. Surrounding the white board was something I didn't expect to see in a place like this. Group photos of holiday parties, random group outtings, and the odd candid of what looked to be their bosses in uniform at work, printed and placed lovingly around the border of the whiteboard and in the center where it prompted placement of a picture. Hand written notes addressed to one another saying their final goodbyes. A mini collage commemorating what was and wishing one another well one last time.
This wall,
their memories,
a thin Manila folder inside of another folder tucked away in a cabinet somewhere at REDACTED Inc's office in REDACTED,
and probably some files on a server somewhere are all that remains of this crew.
No one came back for these photos or these notes.
They were just left here,
perhaps forgotten or maybe left as a fleeting testament to their time spent working there.
A simple "we were here"
Reaching out through time and space to let me know. And now I do the same to you.
Me and the Mall
In truth, the mall is an old haunt of mine. I used to go there with my parents as a child and I have many a fond memory in its halls even though it's changed so much over the years to the point where it's near unrecognizable in some respects. I can still recall very vividly going to the amusement park, walking past the expensive ice cream shop I could never go to, the girls' clothing stores that always held a strange allure to me as a kid, the game store where I got my first ever figure (Artorias from Dark Souls), the theatre's beautiful mural and poster set up, the fast food burger place where whose chicken sandwiches I lost many baby teeth within, and all the stores that I never got to visit but wowed me every time I passed by.
I can't help but feel a bit forlorn and sorrowful about the place. Some of what I listed off is still there but most of it is gone. Covid did a number on the storeowners here and seeing it empty like this is just tragic, akin to seeing someone you once knew laid out on a hospital bed sick as a dog. Or well, I wouldn't say I'm that torn up about it but it's a sad thing to behold regardless.
I think, to some greater or lesser extent, eery time I go to a mall I try to recapture a bit of what I first experienced here. And to see it gone like this is like losing a record of what once was.
Get Real
Time to get real here.
I'm a firm believer of the idea that even in the digital age where we're more well equpped than ever to learn about and connect with just about anyone with an internet connection, many have only really grown more isolated. That, while it's understandable that when presented with the opportunity to connect with others online that some among us would prefer to connect in that fashion and thus the in-person connections may lessen as more time is devoted to the online, many of us have failed even that resulting in isolation even within our digital vicinities. The supposed ease of connection online has become an excuse to sever a connection in person but its benefits are often not fully realized.
I'm no luddite. my hobbies, interests, and career path all hinge on technology and I believe we're generally better for its introduction. I only bring this up to show how even if the deck is stacked in our favour technologically (which I'd argue that it really isn't anymore due to mass privitization and centralization), that the other factors effecting loneliness and isolation are so much more powerful than our much beloved and "all-powerful" "information super highway".
Regardless, I come to lament how we've let our physical spaces for comingling and just plain existing without expectation atrophy like this. And the kind of apathy that people express when this is brought up.
I get it though, modern life has everyone down. The average person has seen their workloads rise, paid work hours go down, and wages stay stagnant amid skyrocketing inflation. Even those who are doing well for themselves are still locked into their daily, inflexibly scheduled grind that isolates them from anyone who has a different job scheduling from their own. Lately it seems that no one is safe from job insecurity either, Lifelong careers and decades of toeing the company line only to be let go in the next round of layoffs. To top it all off, so often we end up pitted against each other to compete for scraps from the top, a zero sum game where we all only stand to lose by participating but what else can we do.
And yet, places like these still exist. Places where I can look around and see how people live. It's unassuming and meagre for sure but the more I look around the more I realize that there is life to be found in these halls. I see it in the community bulletins with half the phone numbers torn away. It's in the elderly taking their grandchildren around the mall for a weekend stroll away from the heat. People with $10 and an empty stomach grabbing something quick to eat on the way back to work. Older guys popping into businesses to chat with the receptionists and owners before continuing on their walk around the centre. There's that sense of decay underlying it all with some of the outdated and unmaintained superficial aspects as well as with the overabundance of old people, but it's not like I can't imagine young people coming around to hit up the hobby shops, getting clothes, drinking boba, and grabbing some random movie to take home. Community persists.
Amid the endless asphalt and in-and-out car oriented development, places built to a human scale slip through the cracks and exist despite it. A mighty weed standing proud in the sidewalk. Faint signs of life in an area otherwise devoid of it.
Recent visions of the apocalypse, most recently inspired by nature's healing amid the covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns though it is worth noting that speculative fiction has been on this wave for a good while now and an earlier spike in interest in this particular image of the apocalypse can be traced back to anxieties regarding climate change and the ensuing climate crisis though this topic is nuanced the recency I refer to in my use above is subject to interpretation also thanks for reading this far, see a world overgrown and taken back by nature. Many a colossus of steel and concrete and glass brought to its knees by roots and vine and moss and fungi. Where there was once a scant few weeds growing in the pavement there is now nary a sight of asphalt in the ocean of native green ground covering.
I hope for a future like that. NOT apocalyptic or world ending but one where these kinds of places are everywhere. Places to live and to exist within.
Maybe this is a bit much, thinking about the end of the world and the state of the society after going to some low foot traffic retail spaces.
But I think it's worth thinking about.
Thinking about doing some more writing about malls and community centres I've visited and will visit in the future. Might be interesting.