Scenes From A Mall

This is a long article from The Cleveland Plain Dealer last month. It's a good read, and worth it.

Scenes from a mall

A glimmer of hope at Randall Park

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Joanna Connors
Plain Dealer Reporter

Randall Park Mall may be on the endangered list at the Web site deadmalls.com, but it is not dead. Reports of its demise have not been all that exaggerated, but they're not quite true, either.

People talk about Randall Park the way you might talk about minor TV actors of the 1970s. First: "Remember that guy from 'Rockford Files'? You know - that guy. What was his name?" Then: "I heard he died, like, a few years ago."

Back in the '70s, Randall Park Mall was no minor celebrity. It was a star, a superstar, even before it was built. When Youngstown developer Edward DeBartolo Sr. announced in 1973 that he would turn the former Randall Park racetrack into a "shopping-living-entertainment center," the Cleveland Press put the story on Page One, topped by a headline in a type size once reserved for the declaration of war: "LARGEST U.S. MALL DUE HERE."

Three years later, in August 1976, DeBartolo stood at the entrance to his 2.2 million-square-foot mall. Crowds waited. Cameras flashed. Dina Merrill cut the ribbon.

Dina Merrill? Wasn't she an actress or something back in the '60s? Blond? But she's dead now, right?

(For the record: No, Merrill is not dead. But yes: She was an actress. Or something. In 1976, she had guest roles on both "Quincy M.E." and "Hawaii Five-O," but still had to explain to a Cleveland reporter that she was "a working actress.")

That's a useful phrase for anyone: working (blank). Randall Park Mall is not the glamorous star it once was. It has to take bit parts now. But in its new incarnation, something strange and almost hopeful has happened.

The mall stands across from Thistle down race track in North Randall, forlorn as a stray dog. Before we go in - before we pass the concrete planters filled with rainwater, cigarette butts and a floating Diet Pepsi can; before we inhale the aroma of onions and antique grease; before we even consider taking a look at the restrooms - let's take a minute to think about the mall, and America, and What It All Means.

It is hard to defend the mall - any mall, even the mall that has Banana Republic and Restoration Hardware and smells like $150 perfume.

It is harder still to love the mall. It represents everything Americans would like to forget about ourselves; it is the family snapshot that we tear up because it makes us look fat, or shows our nose from the exact wrong angle.

The mall is all about our appetite for stuff, our greedy habit of consuming more than anyone else in the world. It is about our relationship to cars - off the freeway, with plenty of parking! - and our abandonment of our cities. It is about our infantile attention span, our embrace of the artificial, our transformation from a country that makes things to a country that buys things. Things we do not need.

AGGGHHHH! Tear it up! Now! Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, Victor Gruen did not mean for his creation to lay waste to civilization. He wanted to save civilization.

Gruen, an Austrian architect who came to the United States in 1938, designed the first fully enclosed shopping mall, Southdale, which opened in 1956 in Edina, Minn., near Minneapolis. After that, nothing was ever the same.

Not being a born-and-bred American, Gruen had the crazy idea that his invention could be about more than just shopping. He was a socialist - in the '50s, in America - who envisioned a place where commerce and community would meet, a utopia of climate-controlled gardens and cafes, shops and living spaces, where we could all just get along.

So, indeed, did DeBartolo (though he was definitely not a socialist). When he announced his plans for Randall Park, he laid out five phases. Phase 1: the Holiday Inn. Phase 2: the mall. Phase 3: a 4,500-seat theater-inthe- round for "the performing arts." Phase 4: four 14-story office towers. Phase 5: high-rise apartment buildings.

Gruen died in 1980, and thus was spared the spectacle of Phase 6: the dead mall. A 2001 study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Congress for the New Urbanism came up with a count of 2,076 traditional, enclosed malls, 140 of them stone-cold dead and 249 on life support.

Those figures inspired a Los Angeles competition a few years ago that challenged architects to come up with new uses for the dead malls. One of the entries: a minimum-security women's prison. (Which is what malls always were, anyway, right?) W e are inside Randall Park Mall now, walking through the darkened empty spaces, our footsteps echoing like Gary Cooper's at the end of "High Noon." We pass a row of planters, one with a single green shoot struggling toward the light. We pass the fountains where kids used to throw coins for good luck, dry now, the bright-blue paint peeling. We pass the escalators, unmoving and barricaded.

This mall once had nearly 200 stores and five anchors. Now it has 66, including three anchors:Sears, Macy's and Burlington Coat Factory. The other stores, scattered through the wings, sell flash and youth: urban fashion, nail salons and jewelry shops, almost all of them with banners proclaiming: "We Make Gold Teeth."

It may be hard to love a mall, but it's easy to feel sorry for one. What happened here? Over in the food court, the old folks who have been coming here mornings for 20 years, to walk and drink coffee, name the usual suspects: the "near-riot" of 1992, when an encounter between a couple of white security guards and black teenagers turned into a clash between 50 police and 200 kids. The time in 2002 when a Dillard's security guard beat a suspected shoplifter, who later died. The shooting at the Magic Johnson Theater in 2000.

People in the eastern suburbs started calling it "the black mall." But racial tensions were not the only, or even the primary, culprit. More dazzling malls opened, farther out. Wal-Mart and Target took departmentstore business. The unsteady economy of recent years took its toll.

Robert Young, who is 96 years old, holds court at a long table while Mamie Giles passes around a plate of homemade cookies. His theory: "It was the young hoodlums." The hoodlums don't show upso much anymore, after the mall beefed up security. There was a robbery at Kay Jewelers a fewweeks ago; the guy stole a diamond.

Still, Young and his friends feel safe; they keep coming. "I just come out for a couple of hours to keep from staying home," Young says, but if you sit with him and his friends for a while, or walk past the jewelry shops into the shadowy wing that once ended at Higbee's, you might see something else - something more hopeful struggling toward the light like that slender green plant.

There's Pulse, a fitness center, where co-owner Barbara Board counts out killer crunches for one client - "23! C'mon! Give me 24!" - while co-owner Patrice McKinney tells another that she'll never lose weight or build muscle if she skips breakfast.

Across the way, kids with backpacks head into classes at North Coast Academy, a charter school. Next door, Church 'N the Mall is quiet, but come Sunday you'll hear the drums and electric guitar backing the gospel choir.

At the other end of the mall, next to Sears, Cleveland Merchant Music Family just opened a month ago, with recording and dance studios, classrooms and a pool table. Like Gruen before them, director William Lynch and CEO Barbara Coffer-Bell are dreaming big, utopian dreams: of a place where parents, children and grandparents make music together, where kids come after school to learn to be electricians, or poets.

Over at his jewelry kiosk, 33-year-old Yuri Poklyak, who came over from the Ukraine at 18, is at first confused when asked what he thinks of the mall's reputation for having racial troubles. "Race? You mean the Pakistanis and the Indians?" he asks, looking around at the shopkeepers: Muslims and Hindus, Sikhs and Jews, Russians and Vietnamese and Koreans.

"Back home, nobody would be friends," Poklyak says. He does not see Randall Park as a place where racism divides people. "Business at the mall made everybody peaceful. It's a perfect world here, a neighborhood," he says.

Maybe he's onto something.

Randall Park certainly isn't the mall that anyone envisioned when Merrill cut the ribbon in 1976.

But maybe it is becoming the mall that Gruen envisioned in 1956.

What makes a community?

When Americans were settling the West during the Gold Rush, three things made a camp into a town: a church, a school and a saloon. Randall has those - if you count the food court as a kind of dry saloon. You can even catch a card game there.

The towns had outlaws and sheriffs, immigrant shopkeepers and shoppers, old-timers and kids. As for the gold that brought them all together, Randall has that too.

"We Make Gold Teeth." And so America reinvents itself, once more.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This all started with a friend sharing a video that had footage of 3 dead malls in it - Randall Park was the 2nd mall of the three. I couldn't believe the footage - the emptiness. I had planned on paying a visit when I was supposed to be in the area last August. That trip never materialized, and maybe it's for the best, as seeing that in person would have been sad indeed.

It's no secret to most who know me that I'm a mallrat. I love malls. I also have a strange affinity for dead malls. This mall, however, was not dead by a long shot when I hung out there in the early 90's. Spent a lot of time there with my then-boyfriend-now-husband. The first time we held hands was there. The first gift he ever bought me came from the Things Remembered there. As it dies, a part of me dies with it in some way.

Retail Centers have come full circle. They started out as open air plazas, then came the indoor mall in the late 1950's. Now, everyone wants open air centers again.

For me, and many of my generation, we have an affinity for indoor malls. They were a destination. They were a place to meet and greet. A place to network. A safe place to hang out. Malls were once thoughtfully designed, and had beautiful architecture. Now they are a stale, bland, sterile environment.

I was discussing this topic, and the decline of Randall Park with a co-worker and fellow mallrat. He had this to say, and it's better than anything else I can say:

Very sad. Not just because they are so vacant, but because online buying has put an end to one thing that I (and I'm sure you) hold dear from the 70's
and 80's, and that is the mall.

It used to be a major Friday night event, where me and my friends would meet and "hangout" for HOURS! Oh, the arcades and just the feeling that you had a safe place to go.

I love malls, as does most of our generation. The architecture in that video is priceless and should be preserved. I remember the same "feel" at the York mall and Park City.

There should be a law that keeps iconic malls in place. It is a sad commentary on what the computer age has done to personal interaction. Ironic that the most popular place to buy a computer in the mid 80's was...the Mall!