2000-06-06 - 22:19:07

The oddness continues unabated. What is going on with me? I am mystified, but cautiously joyful.

I now have a story that has nothing to do with anything! This will be something of a relief after last night's adventure in evisceration.

Last weekend the Manager and I were out and about, and we decided to take a visit to Mudhook Mall, the only shopping mall that Frown Town can really call its own. He was very excited about this visit, he wanted me to see something.

Because Mudhook Mall is a dead mall. I don't mean that it's boring in a not-very-hip sort of way, I don't mean that it has a couple of empty stores in it. What I mean is that it is about two steps away from being demolished. For several years I have been calling it Mudhook Mausoleum. This irony is wearing thin.

If I recall correctly, it was built in 1970. I remember it when it was brand new. I thought that it was a glittering palace, built just for me. Along the promenade there were these round demi-streetlights with sparkles on them.

And there were stores that I actually wanted to go into! A toy store! A record store! A hippied-out stationery store! And of course, Spencer Gifts!

Oh what a treasure trove of early-seventies goodness Spencer Gifts was! Oh, the junk I bought there. A roll of smiley-face stickers! A giant rainbow decal! Clear plastic flowers! An ink stamp that said: BULLSHIT! Black light posters! It was too, too much.

These days, I really hate shopping malls. I think that their net effect on society is a bad one. Think about it, people: they are mainly alien commercial motherships, designed to suck money out of the area you live in. How many high paying jobs do you think are in there?

Also they have had a terrible effect on downtowns all over America. As things stand now I could walk stark naked through downtown Frown Town on a Saturday afternoon and there would be nobody there to see. And that would disappoint me terribly.

And most importantly, malls have taken the central meeting place of our society, the marketplace, and made it private property, not a public space. A very jealously guarded private space.

In my mind, the words that crystallize my dislike of these sprawling commercial cancers came from Xeney, who called them: "Evil shrines to conformity, stocked with slave-labor produced products." An admirably precise phrase; I worship language like that.

Also, they are great places to go if you definitely want to pay too much for just about anything!

All of the above were conclusions that I came to as an adult. However, ten-year-old Uberhamster thought the malls were neat! Especially compared to shopping downtown. All the cars, all the people, all the dirty dim stores stocked with uninteresting items, like rusty lug-nuts. Yawn. I'm bored. Mom, can we go home yet?

Pretty early on it became obvious that Mudhook Mall was not well put together. Not much more than a year after its grand opening the roof would leak every time it rained. It was a consistent problem.

I'm trying to remember when it became obvious that the mall was not flourishing. I think it was when I came back from college. As malls go it was actually kind of small, and there were bigger commercial establishments in our neighboring city, only ten minutes away.

Also, the mall reflected the declining fortunes of Frown Town itself.

Stores came and went. Even the anchor stores began to wink out as the commercial activity started to move down the road.

The mall began to look more and more pitiful. The percentage of empty stores began to climb. The layout of the mall was archaic: there was no "food court," the movie theater had less than ten screens.

When the McDonalds left, it was clear that the end was on the horizon. Stores kept leaving, and none came to replace them. On occasion, pitiful local businesses began to move into the empty spaces, with jury-rigged fixtures and hand-painted signs over the stores.

The place began to look ghastly. It was now more empty than full. Things would break, and not get fixed for months, or not at all.

The Manager hates malls even more than I do, and he displays his disdain in creative ways. That's a story I will tell here eventually, if he says I can. All I will say that his quixotic jousting with The Man in these crackerbox palaces make me proud to know him.

So it was with some glee he took me to see what's left of this former commercial apex.

There are only a couple anchor stores left in the place, one of them a big book/CD store. The rest of the mall is empty. It is half-lit by flickering florescent lights. The two or three surviving stores look like a live limb on a dead tree.

A couple of years ago, to try to save money the mall management essentially abandoned the north wing of the mall. All the remaining stores were moved into the south wing and the north wing was just allowed to fall apart. This was what he wanted to show me.

The Manager was bitterly disappointed. When we got there the north wing was walled off clumsily with some plasterboard so the public could not get in. When he last saw it, it looked like the set for a movie after an atomic war: gaping holes in the ceiling, wires dangling and big puddles on the floor, rubble everywhere. Only a really cheap and poorly built place could have fallen apart so easily.

Most eerily, they are still piping tinny commercial Musak to soothe the now non-existent shoppers.

Somewhat disappointed, we wandered through the south wing which was still open, although it is just as empty. The old logos are still over the dusty, empty stores reminding us of what used to be there.

The last store to close in the mall was a poster place. In fact, it had only closed two or three weeks ago. Many framed posters were left in piles behind the steel grating, abandoned in the rush to leave the sinking ship. Faded, askew signs announced going out of business sale bargains.

There really was not much left to see. I did find a couple of CDs at the megastore, though.

As we left, we looked at another charming aspect of this dead mall: there is a dead bank out in front of it. It looks like a blank walled brick obelisk, sitting incongruously in the middle of the pot-holed parking lot. Around the base of it, weeds have grown into scraggly unkempt trees.

What's so odd about this shopping ghost town is that it is completely surrounded by suburban sprawl, densely packed. Was a neutron bomb dropped on this site?

For years there have been rumors that Mudhook Mall is going to be bulldozed. Supposedly it was supposed to be turned into an office complex, but nobody appears to be in any hurry to make this happen. Until that day it will remain there, a moldering wreck, a monument to shoddy construction and failed suburban dreams.