I haven’t set foot in a mall in years, but when I was a kid growing up outside of Washington, D.C., in the late ’70s and early ’80s my family would visit all the local malls, mainly because wandering around a shopping center was a cheap way for my mother to entertain two kids. There was Capital Plaza, where my father had worked at Montgomery Wards between his stints in the army; Prince Georges Plaza, around the corner from my family’s church, where I would buy model rockets at the Kaybee Toys; Beltway Plaza, where my mother, brother and I stood around for an entire afternoon to see “The Empire Strikes Back” because all the matinees had sold out; and Landover Mall, which was the big kahuna back then, but has now gone to the great closeout sale in the sky.
Over on the Virginia side of the district, where my grandmother lived, there was Seven Corners and Tysons Corner. When we visited in the summer we would take her shopping in our station wagon so she could buy things that were too big to carry home on the bus. We would also go to Ballston Common, which in a previous incarnation used to cover the three-story wall of windows on its front side with huge temporary seasonal-themed murals, such as a jet fighter for the Fourth of July.
When I moved to North Carolina in the early 1980s, the town my family settled in was too small to have a mall. We had to go to Raleigh or Fayetteville for such big city excitement. In my teenage years my friends and I would drive to Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh, where we’d get chased out by the rent-a-cops, but by that time malls had a lost their magic for me. We were there because we had nothing better to do, not because we looked forward to visiting the mall itself, like I did when I was small child.
It’s been many years since I gazed with awe-struck eyes upon the temple of materialism that is an American shopping center. The last time I felt feelings like that was, oddly enough, when I lived within walking distance of a low-rent shopping center and would end my shopping expeditions at Maxway or Connelly’s with a grilled cheese sandwich and ice cream cone at Mayberry’s.
Big-box stores like Walmart or Best Buy just don’t have the same aura as the old-school strip shopping centers of the 1950s or the fabulously tacky malls of the 1970s. Maybe that’s why people don’t shop anymore; it’s become a chore, wandering the endless aisles of a Home Depot just to pick up a package of screws. And there’s less people-watching, too; shopping centers drew everyone from bored teenagers to senior citizens, who would mingle in the common areas, giving a least the appearance of an actual community.
We were a different country then, too. It’s hard to imagine now, but for the people who grew up in the Great Depression and the rationing years of World War II, shopping was a big deal. Gathering dozens of stores in one place accessible by automobile was an example of this nation’s dynamic ingenuity and the sky’s-the-limit possibilities of living in the world’s newest, shiniest superpower. The people who only a few years before had been standing in bread lines or military induction centers must have though they’d died and gone to heaven. Nowadays, of course, we take it for granted – or at least we did until the economic crisis reminded everyone of what a life without malls is like.
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