Posts Tagged ‘Teddy Bear’
“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.
“In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse”*…
The estimable Genevieve Bell looks back beyond Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash to the deeper-than-you-might-think history of “the metaverse”– and explains the importance of understanding it…
…histories are more than just backstories. They are backbones and blueprints and maps to territories that have already been traversed. Knowing the history of a technology, or the ideas it embodies, can provide better questions, reveal potential pitfalls and lessons already learned, and open a window onto the lives of those who learned them. The metaverse—which is not nearly as new as it looks—is no exception…
I think there are even earlier histories that could inform our thinking. Before Second Life. Before virtual and augmented reality. Before the web and the internet. Before mobile phones and personal computers. Before television, and radio, and movies. Before any of that, an enormous iron and glass building arose in London’s Hyde Park. It was the summer of 1851, and the future was on display… The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, as the extraordinary event was formally known, was the brainchild of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s beloved consort…
Just as there is a straight line from the Midway to Coney Island to Disneyland, there is a straight line from the White City to the 1939 New York World’s Fair to the Consumer Electronics Show. We can also draw a line between the Great Exhibition and today’s metaverse. Like the virtual world that the metaverse’s promoters promise, the Great Exhibition was a world within the world, full of the splendors of its day and promises about the future. But even as it opened up new spaces of possibility—and profit—it also amplified and reproduced existing power structures through its choices of exhibits and exhibitors, its reliance on the Royal Society for curation, and its constant erasure of colonial reality. All this helped ensure that the future would look remarkably British. The exhibition harnessed the power of steam and telegraphy to bring visitors to a space of new experiences, while masking the impact of such technological might; engines and pipes were hidden underground out of plain sight. It was a deliberate sleight of hand. If Brontë saw magic—not power, xenophobia, and nationalism—that was what she was intended to see.
I think our history with proto-metaverses should make us more skeptical about any claims for the emancipatory power of technology and technology platforms. After all, each of them both encountered and reproduced various kinds of social inequities, even as they strove not to, and many created problems that their designers did not foresee. Yet this history should also let us be alive to the possibilities of wondrous, unexpected invention and innovation, and it should remind us that there will not be a singular experience of the metaverse. It will mean different things to different people, and may give rise to new ideas and ideologies. The Great Exhibition generated anxiety and wonder, and it alternately haunted and shaped a generation of thinkers and doers. I like to wonder who will author this metaverse’s Bleak House or Alice in Wonderland in response to what they encounter there.
The Great Exhibition and its array of descendants speak to the long and complicated human history of world-making. Exploring these many histories and pre-histories can be generative and revelatory. The metaverse will never be an end in itself. Rather, it will be many things: a space of exploration, a gateway, an inspiration, or even a refuge. Whatever it becomes, it will always be in dialogue with the world that has built it. The architects of the metaverse will need to have an eye to the world beyond the virtual. And in the 21st century, this will surely mean more than worrying about ancient elm trees and the tensile strength of glass. It will mean thinking deeply about our potential and our limitations as makers of new worlds…
To understand what we are—and should be—building, we need to look beyond Snow Crash: “The metaverse is a new word for an old idea,” from @feraldata in @techreview via @sentiers (soft paywall). Eminently worth reading in full.
See also “So what is “the metaverse,” exactly?” (source of the image above).
* Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
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As we stew over simulacra, we might recall that it was on this date in 1903 that Morris Michtom began selling stuffed bears in his toy shop on this day in 1903. Earlier, he had asked President Theodore Roosevelt for permission to use the president’s nickname, Teddy, to which the president agreed. Soon, other toy companies were churning out copies of their own “Teddy Bears”– still among the most popular children’s toys (and also popular as adult gifts signifying affection, congratulations, or sympathy).
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