I love theme days. Hat tip to Thinker for sending this along.
Via Gizmodo
This Abandoned Wasteland Was Once America’s Largest Mall
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The life and death of the American mall is a familiar story by now. A few decades ago, these shrines to consumerism dotted suburbia, only to be denied relevance by a push back towards city centers. But few images express the scale of this trend as much as those in Black Friday: The Collapse of the American Mall.
The photos that fill this new coffee table book by Seph Lawless are arrestingly empty. That’s probably because one of the malls therein, Ohio’s Randall Park Mall, was once the largest malls in America. “[Mall culture] was such an intricate part of the city that the town is represented by the two shopping bags appearing in the municipal seal,” Lawless explains in the book’s introduction.
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Randall Park Mall and Rolling Acre Mall, which is also pictured in the book, were both Lawless’s stomping grounds as a kid, a detail that adds an eery relevance to the derelict buildings. “We all remember spending time there and for the most part it was in happier times,” Lawless said. “I remember visiting Santa Claus as a kid at these malls during Christmas and eventually getting my first job at the mall. The mall had character and the architecture was beautiful.”
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And, like other photo sets of abandoned malls we once loved, there is a deeper message, one that hints at a darker history. “It’s a powerful symbol of America’s economic decline,” said Lawless. “I used to visit these malls often growing up. I remember eating cotton candy underneath the escalator and the sounds of people laughing and feet shuffling as the gentle sounds of falling water from one of the many fountains surrounded me. This was America.”
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All images by Seph Lawless
Seph Lawless is the pseudonym of an American artist and activist. His first book Autopsy of America (2013) chronicled the devastation of globalization on American cities, and he continues to explore these topics. His personal website can be found here and you can Like his Facebook page here.
One of the bloggers I follow, recently visited a mall in Spokane-
” Are malls dead?
The girls and I were in Spokane yesterday doing our usual “city day” errands. One particular errand took us near a mall. We had a little spare time, so on impulse I asked the girls if they wanted to walk around. Malls are far away from us and we seldom set foot inside one, so this was a rare treat.
But the inside startled us. It seemed barren, with empty storefronts everywhere. Keep in mind this was a Thursday afternoon, about 1 pm.”
http://www.rural-revolution.com/2014/05/are-malls-dead.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RuralRevolution+%28Rural+Revolution%29
How sad. I remember going to the Montclair Plaza Mall as a kid. Man, was it cool. Two stories, with an atrium and an elevator with a window in it!! Stores filled with unimaginable stuff from all over the world. The Big Thing in HS was to get a job at the Mall. Was back there this fall for a home visit. What a difference. At least 1/4 of the space was empty, it was full of gang-bangers and the quality of the stores was poor. We’re talking So Cal here which is increasingly looking like Tijuana anyways.
How soon until the rest of the country starts to look like Detroit, or this mall in Ohio?
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Sad and ugly… so many resources, financial and physical, shoveled into the development of structures often built only because the developer arm-twisted the local government into giving them a tax abatement or a TIF district, and the minute that max in tax-funded gimmes was extorted from the municipality, usually about 5 years, went and built another one 3 miles down the road to compete with the first.
There is such a glut of these one-use structures that in another decade or so, most of them will either be empty and deteriorating like this sad structure, or will be shelters for thousands of suburbanites rendered homeless by a rapidly sinking economy incapable of employing more than 20% of its available work force, if even that.
The lucky survivors will be the more attractive and centrally located ones that stay up on maintenance and don’t gouge their commercial tenants, who will be much fewer and more difficult to attract and retain. But there won’t be very many because Consumer Culture as this country has known it since WW2 will be mostly over.
Wonder why they let these malls rot .They could be used to shelter homeless people.
I believe Wal Mart wiped out malls, in addition to every “main street USA”. Not the original Wal Mart, but the Wal Mart super-centers that contain everything found in a mall. They even have food courts like malls, hair-cut places, medical offices, optometry, and banks, all in the front of “main street Wal Mart”. And half the people that shop at Wal Mart are the FSA that get free food and goods with their SNAP and EBT cards. Malls don’t cater to the FSA, and so they’ve closed up.
Now people can’t even afford to shop at Wal Mart, all except the FSA. Most super Wal Marts have adjacent strip malls, with “dollar tree” stores were everything in the store only costs $1. Imagine what’s going to happen when we lose reserve currency status, and the price of everything further skyrockets.
The two malls in my town are still open, but in eerily bad health. They still have many open stores, and empty storefronts are covered up with ads and “coming soon!” signs, but both of them are basically destinations for people with nothing to do, and a few genuine shoppers who will go to one single store and leave as quickly as possible. They are probably 2-4 years from being abandoned.
I remember Randall Park mall as a has been over 25 years ago. The area turned into a FSA zone with mass fights and other illegal activities. Then as the population with money moved away Randall Park and Rolling Acres went into a bad decline. Euclid Square mall has been dead for 15 years plus and there exists and outlet store but the same problem, FSA zone. Not much to add further but here is slide show on the old Parmatown mall that was demolished earlier this year.
http://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/15-vintage-memories-from-the-soon-to-be-re-landscaped-parmatown-mall/Slideshow?oid=3771658&slide=15
http://deadmalls.com/malls/parmatown_mall.html
A more in depth showing a the dead Euclid Square mall.
Just accept that mall won’t come back and blame Walmart and Amazon. Besides the next big decline will be these strip stores that won’t make it. JC Penney and Sears will soon go away as the Admin analyzed it.
I see the death of these malls as the final symptom of the death of production in America.
It wasn’t Wally and Amazon that drew away the shoppers. The way I see it, it is twofold:
1. Our kids don’t need to “go” ANYWHERE to be entertained. They devote 50% of their lives to talking about themselves, and others, on their phones and tablets. They devote another 40% to chasing and emulating celebrity. The money spent at the malls has been shipped to Tmobile, Apple and Verizon. Please, Wally didn’t do that shit and “smart”phones and internet access strips thousands of dollars from families now. That expense did not EXIST 30 years ago.
And 2, It was the shipping of our materialism to Asia that wiped out the family supporting jobs that used support the customers that used to support these malls.
When a small factory shut down, most people didn’t realize that not only did the town lose the $10 an hour production jobs, they also lost a portion of their Office Depot revenues, the insurance company revenues, the tech and service companies, the local car dealers, etc., etc. Plus local taxes, which are then rediscovered by upping the homeowners’ and landlords’ taxes.
Walmart providing $7 an hour jobs to replace Mom & Pop’s $7 is not what caused this.
Of course at this point it no longer matters that we refuse to uncover the actual causes of our demise. This puppy is going down one way or the other.
Blame Amazon, blame Wally, blame Ob ama, truly doesn’t matter if you are right, or wrong, the end result is going to be the same.
Actually, I see the BIRTH of these malls, and their cancer-like proliferation over the past 30 years, as a final symptom of the death of productivity in this country.
The mall thing started in the 60s, but really picked up steam in the 70s, at just the moment when we began to bleed productive jobs to foreign markets. In the late 70s, auto and steel workers began to be laid off by the tens of thousands, as German steelmakers and Japanese car makers cut deeply into our market. Bumper stickers that said HUNGRY? EAT YOUR JAPANESE CAR or NEED A JOB? GO TO TOKYO blossomed on half the cars in my city. All the huge steel mills that were humming 24/7 as of 1970 sat silent and shuttered by 1982.
That was when our pols said that we were going to become a “service” economy, or, to paraphrase Lee Iococca’s famous quip, that we were gong to henceforth make a living selling each other hamburgers and insurance. Or burritos and real estate. Or haircuts and stocks & bonds, not to mention the 700,000 or so newly invented financial “products” that were really just ways to layer leverage and act like 2-4 could be made to equal enough money to set you up for life.
In the late 80s came the deep cuts in defense spending, the government spending on which the whole economy of southern California, not to mention Detroit, St Louis, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and other old ‘steel’ belt burgs, had been based on. Hundreds of thousands of jobs at Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, Northrup, and the rest disappeared, and the men who did them, mostly of the silent gen and baby boomer generations, never recovered from the loss and were never again to approach the wages they made in defense.
By 1986, the steel belt had become the rust belt. And the more our industrial based deteriorated, the more retail proliferated. A granular examination of the mall boom and later, the power center & big box booms, of the 80s onward, would likely show that at least 50% of all retail development post-1980 was driven by local tax-funded “gimmes” aimed at stimulating “economic development” as desperate municipalities engaged in a race to the bottom to see who could throw the most money at mall developers and big box retail.
Now, we’re an economy in which we make a living selling each other crap from the dollar store, used stuff from Craigs List and Ebay, and selling each other health care.
TE/everyone else –
I have been telling folks for some time that the issue re manufacturing isn’t that manufacturing is dying, or that manufacturing is going overseas. The issue is that manufacturing is proving ever so productive – each year it is getting more productive, and more is made with less. The following charts prove my point, but I suspect there will be those that deny the facts. What the US has failed to do is replace the lost manufacturing jobs with other high paying jobs.
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As can be clearly seen, the US has outperformed every other major manufacturing nation exempt China. US real manufacturing output has grown steadily until the 2000s, where a confluence of issues bit, including the financial crisis, the wars, 9/11, etc.
China is slaying all before it, but the real issue is that the US has replaced manufacturing jobs with service jobs. That is a losing strategy.