The last time I went to a mall was pre-Covid, and it was a quasi-sociological visit to see how far the once-ubiquitous institution had fallen. (Except as a kid, I’ve never liked the generic collection of stores and fast-food joints at malls, although the 1980s are considered by some as a peak of American culture, back when we had “a proper country”. That and Pizza Hut!) This mall, in Towson, MD, was a shambles: little traffic at around noon, “for rent” signs nearly out-numbering open outlets and a disconsolate mood enveloping every floor. The Apple Store was pretty busy (it’s leaving soon) and so was a Burger King. My son Booker and I left after 25 minutes and didn’t buy anything. On a bench near the exit, we saw a confused elderly man waving his arms, unimpeded by passersby, and he looked just like the late novelist John Barth. Unlikely it was him, but just the thought disturbed me, although it was an apt summary of that brief Towson Town Center foray.
Newspaper articles began appearing this year extolling “the return of the mall,” every dog-institution has its day, spurred on by luxury stores and Generation Z youths asserting themselves, working/playing double-time to show up apathetic Millennials. Hooray, I say, since an uptick of any kind of business bolters the economy, and although I won’t join in, let 1000 new Tiffany’s huts sprout nationwide!
One problem, however, as Kate King reported last week in The Wall Street Journal, headlined “Teens Helped Bring Malls Back to Life. Now They’re Getting Banned,” incidents of teen rowdiness (fistfights, robberies, vandalism) have led to some landlords to refuse admittance to anyone under 18 who’s not accompanied by an adult. A spokeswoman for GGP, a large mall owner (including Towson Town Center) told King the “chaperone policies” are regrettable but necessary. King: “In late April, dozens of teenagers swarmed the company’s Willowbrook Mall in Houston, and police detained two girls who had been fighting while a group of onlookers yelled and recorded the scene on their phones.”
Houston’s Zane Miller, president of the National Youth Rights Organization, told the reporter: “Parents are busy, they don’t want to take a bunch of teenagers to the mall. And teenagers don’t want to have to ask their parents to go to the mall with them and their friends.” That’s sensible. No chaperones!
Is “dozens of teenagers” a swarm? (If so, hire more security.) Doesn’t sound like it, and I remember isolated occurrences in the early-1970s (without the video recordings) and it probably merited a page-two story in the community paper, and that was that, except for a nominally juicy story—embellished—to tell my pals at high school. As noted above, in the 1980s and 1990s I loathed the malls that were so popular: I didn’t go much, preferring the standalone record and bookstores, restaurants and haberdasheries, but sometimes around Christmas, it was a convenient, if torturous, one-stop shop. One time, in the late-1980s, at a “fancy” mall in Baltimore County, I set out to find a pair of Ferragamo shoes, and felt so claustrophobic, surrounded by generic stores that could—and were—be anywhere, and my friend Joan and I made a hurried departure, hightailing it to Pigtown for a relaxing Mexican meal at The Cultured Pearl. Talk about an imaginary “brown acid” fuck-up! I was in New York a few weeks later, and took care of my shoe requirements.
As a squirt, I often made the trek (by car or bus) to the Walt Whitman Mall in Huntington (opened in 1962, it was the first indoor mall in New York), and it was thrilling, the way of the future in a Jetsons kind of way. It was anchored by a Macy’s and Abraham & Straus, but my first stop was always Sam Goody’s, which in the mid-1960s sold LPs for $1.99. It was worth the trip because no serious record store was around in Huntington Village (until the “hippie” outlet Kropotkin Records [https://www.splicetoday.com/music/what-year-is-it-180] opened in 1970 on a low-rent stretch on New York Ave). On the rare occasion I was flush, a stop at Cooky’s Steak Pub for a burger was a treat, and I often went to the adjacent movie theater; one time seeing a double-feature of M*A*S*H and Patton. And across the street from the mall there was a Korvette’s which sold “old” (the 1950s) for a Flatt & Scruggs song.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023