Meet Me At The Mall
On the rise of malls in books, music, and culture in the 2020s.
The malls are the soon-to-be ghost towns Well so long Farewell Goodbye
Modest Mouse released “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine” in November 1997. It’s a nearly 7-minute long song about the changing face of Issaquah, Washington, where lead singer Issac Brock grew up. Issaquah had about 8,000 residents in 1990, and by 2000, that rose to over 11,000. Brock foresaw how much the city would explore in population based on the growth of things like malls, and he wasn’t wrong. Issaquah in 2010 had 30,000, and 2020, over 40,000 residents.
That kind of explosive growth mirrors that of the town I grew up in. But while Modest Mouse sang about grabbing an Orange Julius at the to-be-dead malls in 1997, the mall was one of the few places I was spending my free time as a teenager from about 1997 to 2003. We had two malls just one town over from where I grew up–a town that itself went from a population of 7,000 in 1990 to 15,000 in 2000 to 19,000 in 2010 and nearly 20,000 by 2020. Those malls were safe spaces for white suburban kids like me to hang out, to spend money, and to be teenagers while our parents either sat in the car in the parking lot, wandered the mall themselves, or simply dropped us off with a designated time to come pick us up again.
Those malls changed a lot even between 1997 and 2003, when I graduated and left the state. But a lot of memories about them remain. I remember how that was a place I felt comfortable driving by myself when I got my license and could borrow a car. I recall the exact side of the mall where I’d park–downstairs at the Kohl’s at the mall that went from a traditional indoor mall to an upscale strip mall–and I remember the candy store being one of the few places at the time to put a restriction on how many young people could be inside at once. It was in that Kohl’s parking lot where my friend first told me she was dating another girl and that they’d broken up and me, naive, thinking they were just very close gal pals the whole time. This moment did a lot for me in understanding not only other people’s sexuality but also my own.
Things got much more hostile in malls during the 2000s. Countless stories in my early adulthood outlined how out of control teens were causing damage and stealing left right and center at various Milwaukee area malls. Malls implemented curfews and rules and policies to police young people. Whether or not the damage or theft claims were true, it was coded language for something else. It was code for keeping young people–especially young people who weren’t white middle or upper class–out of the mall. The mall had for generations been a social spot for teens, and in the early 2000s, this was especially true as spaces for teens to simply exist continued to disappear before our eyes.
As I was doing my regular routine of reading the most depressing stories about libraries and book censorship recently, I was struck by just how flipping widely Jonathan Haidt was able to market his latest book The Anxious Generation. I was not looking for anything about the book, but even researching book bans led to scads of stories about how cellphones are the reason young people are anxious. Just look at this single screen shot of part of a first page of search results from one week of news stories.
This flood of marketing with a catchy hook about Kids These Days* neatly fits into another Kids These Days story about cell phones making the rounds of social media: it’s a graphic showing that Kids These Days don’t ever leave the house anymore and they’re lonely. It’s Obviously The Phones, one writer proclaims.
These arguments about how phones are why anxiety is high and also that phones are why social isolation is high lack tremendous nuance. A lot of that very critical nuance amounts to the reality that there are few, if any, places where young people can be that are not actively hostile toward young people. Kids today do not have malls. They do not have parks. They do not have community centers. A lot of it is systemic, in that because (white) teens are the not economic powerhouses like they were in the 50s and 60s, these spaces no longer make room for them unless they’re actively spending money.
It’s systemic in other ways, too. Young people need to work to survive, and they’re working the only hours when they might be able to engage in other activities. Their free time might be between 10 pm and 1 am and I don’t know, but it seems like having teens play on their phones then is much better than roaming the streets. Young people are also beholden to their parents’ work schedules, which are themselves not aligned with the schedules of young people. Teens go to school from, say, 8 am to 2 pm, and parents work from, say, 8 am to 5 pm.
In those three hours of difference, what do people think teens are even able to do?
It is not “obviously” the phones here. The phones are pacifiers in a world that is actively hostile toward teenagers and young people more broadly because they’re not yet sucked into the capitalist and consumerist machines that keep their parents and guardians trapped. I’m tired when I’m done with my work day and the last thing I want to do is leave the house and hang out with people–it’s not obviously the phones. It’s capitalism.
Malls keep coming up in pop culture and the media, in books and research and academia. It’s 2023, and I don’t remember a time when the mall has intersected with my life more since my teen years. I don’t know the last time I went to one, and my child has never been. The mall nearest to me just closed its doors for the last time this month–an event which ignited a going away party marking the end of an era, where folks who once or currently worked at the mall reminisced about it together before leaving it forever. In the week of writing this newsletter, another nearby mall announced its own closure.
The mall is an icon of capitalism in and of itself. The whole purpose of bringing together a bunch of stores in one space is to make buying a lot of things easy and convenient. Slowly but surely malls were not only places to do business in one space but they turned into de facto community and town squares. Everyone from town could be in the same space and experience the same stores, smell the same salty pretzels, hear the crinkling of plastic bags. You might ask a neighbor what she bought and learn of a good sale at one of the anchor stores, then elect to go spend money you don’t have on a new bed set because it was right there and it was on sale (and you could keep up with your neighbor to boot).
Malls were endemic to suburbia, and that makes sense when you think about how their rise mirrored the rise in suburban housing. Where there’s familiarity in suburbia, there’s familiarity in the mall.
Oh, I miss the feelin' of losing myself Dreaming big 'cause my problems were small When life was as simple as finding yourself As a dot on a map at the mall
Matt Nathanson released a new song in late March called “Map at the Mall.” In it, he talks about how as we grow older, our problems feel bigger because we ourselves are bigger and understand the world through a different lens–ideally, of course, as we know that there are plenty of groups of people who refuse to let themselves do just that.
The song conveys complex nostalgia. There’s something beautiful about your biggest problem being getting lost at the mall and knowing there’s going to be a kiosk there to help you. But there’s something tremendously limiting about it, too. If you only ever live by a single map designed by other people, then you’ll never be able to make your life your own. You might not want to admit that it’s your job to take things into your own hands because it’s easier not to. It’s easier to dig your heels in and believe that puts the brakes on an always-spinning world.
Mall maps never went away, but malls themselves changed. We all have that one mall we can think of which do more than serve as a shopping center. These are destination malls, packed with everything you could never imagine at a mall. For me, that was the Mall of America in the Twin Cities; I never made it there, despite dreaming at one point that that would be the coolest place to go as a kid. I’ll likely never make it because the idea of being inside a building like that makes me itchy and uncomfortable now. My anxiety skyrockets just thinking about it, and that’s not because of my phone. It’s because enclosed spaces like that are just not what I consider fun anymore (let alone safe or secure).
“Destination malls” became the way of post-recession building. During the 90s, somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 malls were being built per year, which is mind-boggling. In 2007, not a single mall was built, thanks to the changing economy. This was right after I graduated college and moved to Texas, where I did find myself visiting a mall on the outskirts of Austin several times. It wasn’t because I liked the mall but instead because I lived in a city without a car and where public transit was pretty laughable. It was easier to go to the mall periodically on the bus and get everything I need–shoes, work clothing, and so forth–in a single stop than it was to spend a whole weekend catching several busses to hit several different stores. The years following, I noticed every time I went back to my hometown to see my mom and grandparents that the mall of my childhood kept changing. Since when did my teen mall have upscale stores inside? Since when did my teen mall feel like it priced me, a full grown adult, out of it?
It was happening nationwide, though. Malls went upscale post-recession. Some of the few new malls built, including American Dream in New Jersey, were meant to be places for those with a lot more money than the average person to go (it’s right there in the name!). Upscale malls led, of course, to more exclusive demographics enjoying them. Teens, unless of the upper class, were certainly not welcomed. The “community” space of the mall now meant community for only those who could afford the entrance cost–which, despite being $0, was anything but.
Obviously, it’s the phones.
If you happen to see a photography series on malls now, it’s probably centered on abandoned ones—images that traffic in unheimlich ruin porn, working the poignant seam where memories of ballyhoo meet obsolescence and decay. How shivery and sad it can feel to look at what’s left of these vaulting, vertiginous retail behemoths that seemed, like the Titanic, built to last. From the vantage point of our digital era, with its monetized suspicion of hanging out (Nest cameras, hysterical Nextdoor posts about teen-agers in hoodies) and its DoorDashing, remote-working, Internet-enabled social isolation, malls seem more benign than some of us imagined them to be in their prime—an IRL bonanza of fortuitous human encounters.
Margaret Talbot’s “A Begrudgingly Affection Portrait of the American Mall” hit the New Yorker in early March, and it’s a nostalgic trip through the work of Stephen DiRado, who dedicated several series of photographs to malls. Talbot quotes several passages and insights gleaned from a wonderful 2022 book called Meet Me At The Fountain by Alexandra Lange. It’s a cultural history of the mall and one I highly recommend. You might not think you’re interested in learning why so many malls are called South/North/East/West Gate, but it’s entangled with the idea of the mall as community hub, as suburban staple/destination.
DiRado called the mall artificial and cold and overwhelmingly fake, inorganic. It scared him as a child for these reasons, which is why it made it the perfect backdrop for portraits. He picked a mall that, like so many of the 80s, became town centers, overtaking actual town centers.
The photos are moving and complex, real and fake, a study in contradictions aided by his choice of black and white. They’re timeless and they’re time capsules.
It’s a boy named Ridge that shakes 12-year-old Michael from his otherwise rote suburban existence in August 1999 (this undersells Michael’s tough experiences, as it must, since that comes back again and again through the book). Ridge is a time traveler from the future and wants to come back to this era in this particular space for a reason: to experience Y2K and to visit the mall. This is the premise of Erin Entrada Kelly’s latest middle grade book, The First State of Being. It rocked me as a reader as someone who, despite being older than both Michael and Ridge in 1999, could connect with the experiences they had. The weird stress over a technological bug and the belief it might undo the entire world as we know it. The ability to go to a single place and shop, socialize, and enjoy a slice of greasy pizza without grown ups to monitor your every move for a few hours.
Ridge has a few secrets. One of them is a book of what the future will look like. Michael is obsessed with finding out, even when he pretends not to care, but Ridge tells him over and over that perhaps he might chose not to worry about that next state of being and instead, live in this one. Entrada Kelly does something fascinating here. At once, we’re in the first state of being, which is right here and right now. But we can simultaneously live in other states of being, be it in the mall of our nostalgia or whatever the mall looks like 20 years from now. But does living in either the past or present particularly serve us in this moment? Does it solve the problems we are experiencing right now?
Because even if the mall has a map, that map only serves to help when you’re in that particular space. In that first state of being. Moreover, because you didn’t create that map, it can only help you if you’re able to step into the mind or parameters laid out by someone else. Someone you may never know.
We’re living in the after of malls, even if malls still exist around us. We’re in the after of third spaces, commercial, manufactured, or otherwise. And it’s perhaps here we pause and recognize that the longing and nostalgia bubbling up over the mall comes not because we care about the mall as an institution. It comes from what the mall represented. It was capitalist. It was consumerist. It was done with purpose–we know that paint colors were selected to encourage eating and that the sales were never actually good since the stores artificially inflated the normal price to make the sale look excellent when really, the sale price was just the real price.
The mall, though, was real. It was tactile. It connected with our senses. It grounded us in a real place and space. This is partly why the dead mall genre has such power on YouTube. We see it and we’re fascinated by it because we lived those big moments and can experience their death in a way that so rarely we get the chance to. We know the smell of those food courts. The clank of metal hangers on metal racks. We can hear the ambient noise of other humans laughing and talking.
To understand the uptick in mall talk, mall nostalgia, mall longing, mall core as an extension of missing third spaces and recognizing that even manufactured and constructed third spaces were important for us as humans is to reject the simplistic explanations for why we’re all lonely, anxious, sad, and disconnected. We have no place to be with others except on our phones or the internet, and that’s in big thanks to the mall and how mall culture rendered us a culture dependent on cars and public transit to meet our basic social needs. The mall isn’t what we miss, even when we name it. What we miss is having a place we know we could go that, sure, expected us to spend money, but did not actually require we do so to be there.
Malls let us see and be seen.
That’s the role phones took up, but only because malls did it first. Only because our culture is so entrenched in capitalism that until we talk about and actively dismantle that oppressive system, nothing will change. How do we dismantle such an insidious system though? The thought is overwhelming because the answer isn’t individual.
We will continue to be nostalgic for that simulacrum of freedom and connection, told through artifacts that no longer exist because no one person can change what led to this moment–and even tens or hundreds or thousands of persons can’t do it when suffocated by a system where our healthcare comes from our employers and our free time is dictated by PTO allotments.
And the televisions gone Go to the grocery store, buy some new friends And find out the beginning, the end, and the best of it Well, do you need a lot of what you've got to survive?
Notes & Further Reading
Malls are not and have never been an exclusively American phenomenon. I cannot recommend enough spending some time going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole (and associated linked citations) of global malls. It’s fascinating. Although stated in the piece, it should be clear that the primary beneficiaries of freedom within mall culture were white people. Talbot’s piece does a solid job of further articulating the way Black, Brown, and disabled individuals were and were not seen at the malls.
If you want more post mall era mall-themed books, I’ve got them. First is one I adored (but, like many of her non-Jessica Darling books, did not garner the attention they deserved) is Megan McCafferty’s The Mall. There’s Kate Leth’s recent Mall Goth comic, as well as Dead Mall by Adam Cesare and illustrated David Stoll. Natalie D. Richards takes on the dead mall, too, in her thriller from last year, Four Found Dead. I’ve also had Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s Candelaria on my to-read for a while as well, with portion of the book taking place at an Old Country Buffet at a dead mall.
You can also seek and find your way through Let’s Go to the Mall, just published in February for adults.
I’d be remiss, of course, to not note here that Taylor Swift has her own post mall era mall referencing song in “august,” from 2020’s folklore.
I do wonder how much a mall-themed library program or community event would go over. I think there’s such potential to scratch nostalgia the same way that an Adult Book Fair does (maybe without the barriers that make an Adult Book Fair not great, like the fact that we’re not all little anymore and cannot all enjoy the book displays simultaneously because inevitably Tall Guy and Girl With Fifteen Bags of Books need more space than you do to also browse).
Another little thing I couldn’t neatly tie into this piece but so badly want to include is this: we have not even noticed our goods become far less “cunty” since the 90s and 00s as it happened, much as we failed to see just how the mall helped us shape a sense of self, even if, like our cunty phones, it was more symbolic–more nuanced, complex, multifacted–than actual. The discussion of “cunty” goods has not left my mind since first seeing this TikTok video and the numerous TikTok videos and essays over the last few years about how we have lost color as a culture.
*It’s unfortunate how much marketing leaned into this particular topic because this kind of book is 100000% my kind of book. But I lost interest after seeing this topic served up again when I wasn’t even looking for it. I won’t be reading it.