Posts Tagged ‘Abandoned America’
“We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.”*
Through the second half of the 20th century, the mall became more than a fixture of American life; it became a hub. And, as Matthew Christopher explains, while malls remain, the bloom has come off of the “rows”…
I’ve visited hundreds of abandoned places in my life—factories to asylums, schools to churches—but suburban malls might be the most surreal and striking. They captivate the imagination in a way few other types of environments can: with an almost imperceptible layer of fog that forms between the first and second floors of an atrium, endless reflections of vacant storefronts, or a chance encounter with a groundhog in the remains of a food court. Stripped of signage and wares, they are nearly perfectly liminal spaces. Malls have become a part of the modern collective unconscious, through both the haze of half-buried memories of any American over the age of 20 and their ubiquity in popular media. They reflect the American consumer’s identity, and to see a suburban mall in ruins warps nostalgia into something nightmarish and forlorn in a way that abandoned factories, hospitals, or even churches don’t quite do.
We are all, to some extent, intimately familiar with the mall experience. Many of us in America had an indoor shopping center that was “our mall” at some point in our lives. Those memories are shared, because even though we weren’t all going to the same mall, we were: franchise stores—Auntie Anne’s, Sbarro, The Gap—share the same layout and inoffensive color palette and logo lettering across the country. To know one of these malls is to know them all. It’s a powerful magic I’m not sure I can fully explain, even after wandering the deserted storefronts of many vacant shopping hubs.
Much has been written on the phenomenon of the collapse of the American mall and the reasons for it. The most obvious—the rise of online retail—is undeniably a significant factor, but it also masks a rot that had been spreading before Amazon gutted brick-and-mortar. It’s hard to think of any comparable social institution that cost so much and covered so much physical space and then imploded so quickly. As always, the story is far more complex than any tidy summary can encompass…
The indoor suburban shopping center is a special kind of abandoned place; read on for more of the story and more photos: “The Life and Death of the American Mall,” @AbandonedAmerica@mastodon.social in @atlasobscura.
* Bill Bryson
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As we fool around in the food court, we might note that today is Teddy Day, a celebration of Teddy Bears…
The Teddy Bear appeared in a shop window in Brooklyn, New York, on February 15, 1903, but the story of the cuddly toy began a few months before that.
It really started when President Theodore Roosevelt took up an invitation to go bear hunting, in Mississippi with the Governor of the state, Andrew Longino, in November 1902. I can tell you two things about President Teddy Roosevelt – 1. He hated being called Teddy, and 2. he was an avid hunter – he had trophies and hunted for both meat and sport. That first day of his hunting trip, he was really disappointed because he and the governor didn’t find any Bears, but the governor DID NOT want to disappoint the President, so he had the hunting guide go out and find a bear, which he did. He found an old bear and tied it to a tree; they brought the president, but he didn’t want to hunt a trapped bear – it was unsportsmanlike.
Whenever any President does anything, it’s kind of newsworthy, and Clifford Berryman, a cartoonist heard the story, made the old bear a cub, and made a cartoon of Teddy freeing a Bear Cub from a tree. The cartoon made the rounds and inspired Morris Michtom and his wife Rose, to make a little toy bear cub, just to decorate the window of their hand-made toy shop. Most toys were handmade still in the early 1900s. A bunch of people offered to buy it, but he didn’t sell it right away. He actually sent it to the President and asked permission to sell what he called The Teddy Bear. Teddy Roosevelt approved, with no strings attached, so the Mitchums started making them, and put them on sale.
The Teddy Bear really represented the start of more than just the first stuffed non-human toy with arms and legs, it changed the whole toy industry. The earliest toys were usually something with wheels, a ball, a human baby doll, or sports-oriented. In 1892, there was a cat toy, basically the outline of a cat with stuffing, called Ithaca Cat (US patent 483727A). It was more like a shaped pillow, they still make reproductions today. That caused a mini-craze for other stuffed pillow toys like bunnies, kittens, puppies, and the Teddy Bear came out at just about the right time.
The stuffed Bear was the biggest toy of the last century. Change a few things, and give the bear a personality, and the toy becomes Winnie The Pooh, or Paddington Bear, Teddy Ruxpin, The Care Bears, or Corduroy. Teddy Bears introduced the whole idea of anthropomorphic toys- animals having human features and personalities.
The Mitchums went on to found the IDEAL Toy Company, which up until Barbie & GI Joe, was the largest Toy Company in the World. IDEAL is also the company that gave us The Rubik’s Cube in the 1980s. If the Miitchums didn’t start by giving us the Teddy Bear, we’d probably still be rolling hoops (hooping) with a stick like people did for most of the past 2000 years…
“The Teddy Bear“
We might further note that a recent incarnation of the Teddy was an avatar of late Mall culture: Build-a-Bear Workshop… which, from its founding in 1997) grew to over 500 (largely mall-based) locations around the U.S… but that has now moved aggressively on-line.
Among the ruins…
Photographer Matthew Christopher has been intrigued by abandoned structures since he was a child. His site Abandoned America collects the fruits of that fascination.
We live in a time where every spare plot of land is being developed and redeveloped, a time when cookie-cutter, prefabricated homes and businesses are the general rule. The failures of the past are being ignored and repeated, and many valuable pieces of our common past are falling to the wrecking ball every year. This process may be considered inevitable but it speaks of a certain carelessness and wastefulness on our part not to acknowledge and explore these fragments together while we still can. There is also a responsibility we all share to confront the horrors some of these sites are witness to. While we teach and reteach certain historical atrocities like the holocaust (and rightfully so), most people are completely ignorant that asylums and institutions on our own soil came close to being as horrific and lethal to those inside. Likewise, every factory complex that is demolished erases a valuable part of the heritage of the community it helped create, and an opportunity to understand the sometimes brutal working conditions, class struggles, and the economic devastation created by its closing is gone forever. While I love archaeology, I am dismayed at the prevailing blindness in scholastic circles that prizes a handful of nails or pottery fragments from an early colonial settlement but ignores sites that are still above ground and critical to preserving the accounts of accomplishments and missteps over the last century.
Beyond that, there is an undeniably artistic element to decayed sites, and an immense number of social, theological, and philosophical questions they pose. Abandoned America’s aim encompasses not only the historical and photographic cataloging of such sites, but also on a larger scale a eulogy for the lost ways of life they represent, a statement of their emotional, spiritual, and metaphoric relevance to our everyday lives, and a sense of the visceral experience of entering a parallel universe of silence, rust, and peeling paint…
Many, many more mesmerizing memorials at Abandoned America (from whence the photos above, all rights reserved to the artist).
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As we tread carefully, we might send a lightly-but-carefully-composed birthday verse to Lawrence Ferlinghetti; he was born on this date in 1919. A translator and writer of fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known as an author for his poetry, perhaps especially for A Coney Island of the Mind (1958). He is also justly famed as a pioneering publisher: he initiated the “Pocket Poet” series, publishing his own verse, and works by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Marie Ponsot, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, William Carlos Williams, and Gregory Corso. He published fiction by the by the William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski; non-fiction from Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn; translations of Bataille, Brecht, and Goethe… and Neal Cassidy’s “memoir,” which might arguably fit into more than one of those categories.
But Ferlinghetti is perhaps best known these days for his base of operations, San Francisco’s famed City Lights Books; established in 1953, it was the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country. Given its stock and its publishing activities, it quickly became the “clubhouse” for the Beats, and a center of challenging thought– a role it occupies to this day.
“Poetry is the shadow cast by our imaginations.” – These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993
Ferlinghetti, reading at City Lights
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