Old Malls and Community Centres (WIP)
Still wip, will be made available via a link on the blog page once finished
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, 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 in their own personal set of 4 wheels.
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.
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 or 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-pannel 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 with 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. 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 is 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 linen shirts 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.
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 limitting. 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.
I don't really know why I find this place so charming. Part of it is definitely that I like these weird little fucked up things, liminal spaces, and a lot of other shit that makes my tastes pretty basic by internet standards these days. I'm no shiey or whatever but I'm a really big fan of abandoned buildings that have fallen into disuse and disrepair as well as the kinds of architectural anachronisms that you find in older, more neglected parts of towns. 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
Time to get real for a second 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".
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.
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.
---Thinking about doing some more writing about malls and community centres I've visited and will visit in the future. Might be interesting.