The human species will never again be able to live through the era of the quirky masterpiece of 90’s/00’s mall culture, and its quintessential perfection in a pre-social-media time must be preserved. Allow me to elaborately paint the picture.
A random picture of a mall, reminiscent of the one we went to as kids.
There were quite a few scenarios where you’d end up at the mall. A boring Saturday or Sunday. After school. During the week in summer. Driving there was a half hour trip if we were coming from home. We’d survey the parking lot outside Barnes and Noble (where else would you start your mall adventure but Barnes and Noble) and park delicately. Walking up to the entrance always carried mixed emotions of anticipation and excitement. We weren’t necessarily here to buy anything at all, it was an adventure more like a zoo than the shopping center it was designed to be. We knew we wouldn’t be disappointed, but probably couldn’t articulate exactly what would be so interesting - the shops would mostly be the same, and if anything new popped up, it was a silly kiosk or another t-shirt, sneaker, or jewelery place. The feeling was almost knowing that you’d be “non-disappointed”, “neutral, but happy”, “rather satisfied”. There were no huge zingers, no intense emotions, just casual casualness.
So, as we walked, sometimes for the better part of a minute or two through a huge parking lot, passing rows of dirty cars, shiny cars, SUVs and trucks (albeit smaller than today’s monstrosities), we’d aim directly for the Barnes and Noble before crossing one road area where people would drop each other off at the entrance before finding parking themselves. The actual entrance to the mall, about 200 feet to the left, was entirely useless: it just plopped you into a stale hallway with a fake-bourgeoisie restaurant and maybe a gumball machine or something, but it was nothing like entering in through the glorious, book heaven of Barnes and Noble. You might as well enter through Panera Bread if you couldn’t find a spot close enough to B&N. All the colors of the books, the smell of the paper, the coffee shop in the corner, the quiet hum of people flipping pages, the high quality (“high quality”) notebooks and Moleskin items all set the tone of mild extravagance, organization, shopping, and colorful hodgepodge pursuit of complete neutrality that marked the quintessential mall experience of the 90s and early 00s.
Some days, we would hang out in the bookstore longer than others. You’d never want to actually buy something right when you’d arrive, because then you’d have to carry it the whole time. We’d expect to be inside the mall for at least an hour, but it didn’t ever really matter because time didn’t exist inside the forbidden city of the indoor shopping complex. Upon exiting B&N, we’d be greeted with a fresh display of natural lighting from oversized skylights, a small array of awkwardly placed palm frond plants, a random set of sofas for people to sit on, and an immediate 3-way choice, (!) a choice to define the adventure that would change everything: left, right, or upstairs? The escalator quietly hummed its way up and down in front of us, and a GameStop waited above it. To the left, a long hallway through kiosks amidst scattered shopping opportunities. To the right, a slightly shorter walk before reaching the escalator to go upstairs at the end of the hallway, and more stores. Most times, we went left and stayed downstairs, or went upstairs and made a big loop. The top right portion never really had much to offer, whereas the left seemed to hold all the gems. Fabio’s - the store with all the expensive Supreme gear, was never that interesting to us on the bottom right. We were here for the real gems: Newbury Comics, H&M, more thrift-like places and quirky, unique shops. Upscale fashion? Give me a break, I want to see the cheap plushies Newbury has on display, and flip through full sized records I know I’ll never buy, just to see the art.
Along we went to meander in a dotty pattern around the stores that fit our tastebuds. A tepid ambient humming noise fit the cool A/C air. The faint smell of cologne got stronger and stronger and then started to fade as we finally passed Abercrombie and Hot Topic. Kiosks of various foreigners' t-shirt designs, dodgy watch repair, mini drone toys, hacky phone repair, glittery, cheesy phone cases, and necklaces sit idle but not awkwardly in the middle of the hallway. I worked at one for some time during high school. One day I showed up, and it was gone. I found my boss about 15 minutes later - he had rolled the kiosk into the back warehouse exit of the mall because so many people were returning his products after the holiday season (it was cheap electronic crap). He shut down the store that day, and my job was over. It wasn’t a total loss… the job was boring. We pass Lids, the hat store, where I made friends with a few of the employees during weird evening shifts after school. We browse H&M and shift through it for a bit, but I rarely bought much. The one time I did buy something, I paid $3.50 for a $20 shirt, somehow, due to some promotion. Ben was jealous. I got lucky. Beginner’s luck, I suppose.
Newbury Comics comes around, and it’s a no-brainer to go in and explore, fiddle with cartoonish trinkets and artsy music- and pop-culture items. POP bobble heads and Green Day graphic t-shirts are all the rage. Pokémon plushies and little desk items galore almost exude a solidarity feeling that we were part of pop culture by understanding what all this stuff was - or at least part of it. Brookstore sits opposite this area, with its overpriced bougie collection of foot massagers, alarm clocks, and electronics that were anything but quality-made. Its limp attempt at luxury found itself in the shadow of the cultured paradise of Newbury Comics, the real treasure that brought soul and life to the place.
The mall spaces itself were odd, like the empty spaces were purposefully filled to be wacky. A weird juxtaposition of thousands of dollars in merch next to vapid airy hallways with the occasional bloated eccentricity of a kids ride-able game or an overstuffed massage chair filled internal mall spaces. Natural light glimmered through awkwardly placed palm frond plants next to escalators. The bottom floor exit of Dicks Sporting Goods lingered somewhere nearby, and the colorful carpets and outdoor-themed items caught the eye. We go up the escalator, slowly gaining altitude and enjoying the view as the balconies of the second floor shift in perspective. JC Penny and Macy’s provided… something… for somebody out there, who knows. To us kids it was a useless, massive store of work attire, ties, belts, and flimsy work shirts in strange blue, white, cream, brown, and khaki color patterns. If an office cubicle had to dress itself, you’d find it at a JC Penny. Those stores smelled like what I imagined an office would smell like too - a clean musty smell of carpets feigning bleak professionalism.
Along the balconies we find GNC supplements, a candy shop of cutting edge whey powders, creatine, probiotics, and god only knows what. A man with visibly inflated muscles, in a rolled-up long-sleeve shirt, blinks at you as you try to ignore his searing presence. You become self-aware of the diameter of your 15-year-old noodle arms. Passing Journey’s, we feel old for a moment, with its clumsy “hello fellow kids” attempts to sell cheap Vans skateboard shoes and such. A few other sneaker stores were discount shops. Rows and rows of boxes stacked 5 feet high provided a maze for us as kids, but now that magic is almost gone as we can see over the top shelves. Outside the stores on the second floor, you could look out over the balcony to see what was happening below. People leaned onto the sides of the glass that separated the balcony floor from the kiosk-ridden abyss beneath.
At the top center, a food court’s bustling clinking and baby cries lingered. The food was cheap Sparro pizza, Subway, an ice cream shop, and a few oddball Asian places that were too confusing for the average American to order from. I think there was a hamburger joint of some sort that was the most popular option. All the families either hang out here, or get their food from here and sit by the kid’s playground - long gone once I was in high school if I recall - which Mom never let us play in because there “must be a million germs from all those germy kids”. True, honestly, it was like a fruitcakey play pen full of weird plastic animals and slides and such that all the kids licked or something and spread with their hands and feet all over the fake grass-colored carpet and whatnot. Some families are trashier than others, but not obscenely. I peek over the balcony towards this playpen, and spot a lone massage chair just chilling out in the open next to the escalator. The chair placement is simply batty. Someone is trying to figure out the oversized control button array to make it run, or vibrate, or catapult them and their tired spleen across the room, who knows.
I look back towards the food court. A carousel - yes, a whole freaking carousel, with fake horses and all that spins around - is tucked away behind the dining area. Every once in a while, if it’s busy enough, it would run and the kids would all hop on as it jingled and the animals would slide up and down on poles in a sine wave pattern of pure kid bliss.
I scan around the other size of the balcony and witness the irregularity of the place in its full essence. At the edge of one hallway, I glimpse a tiny fake Jeep-style car that bobbed up and down for 1$ in quarters. A few stores down, a Victoria’s Secret. A few feet above, a Yankee Candle. Random, nutty kids have broken free from their parents and are meandering with ice creams or fruit roll-up candies. Parents hold bags from different stores, proudly displaying the amount of money they’ve wasted in the last hour or so. In between, teenagers, young adults, wanna-be thugs, skateboarders, and other characters flaunt a variety of styles, DC skateboarding shoes, baggy jeans, Jordan shoes, Blink 182 graphic t-shirts, and other apparel. My brother and I are in some variant of the classic Sperries. A massive, glass see-through elevator hums up and down every once in a while beneath the skylights.
If we took a left out of Barnes and Noble to begin with, went down past Newbury Comics, up the escalator, around past GNC and the food court, we’d normally stop at the skylights for a moment to rest. The journey was almost over. There wasn’t much at the right end, and we knew we could either go down the middle escalator and back through Barnes and Noble for one final hurrah - and maybe actually consider buying a book on our way out - or take the chance that something interesting would happen on the shorter, right side of the mall. Sometimes we would wing it and walk the whole route over, going all the way back towards Newbury Comics. Most times though, we were tired at this point and passed GameStop to ride down the escalator that plopped us out facing B&N - our starting and final destination. Sometimes we would actually take the real entrance/exit out - a cold hallway to the outside world to say goodbye to the curated experience of mall shopping.
We almost never bought anything. What was there even to buy that we needed? We were there for the whimsical roundabout of it all, to pass the time on a weekend maybe, the culture, the exploration of a different world with its own norms and lack of them. The casual hustle and bustle, the ambient noise, the murmuring of the food court, the mixture of conversations all added to this quasi-sanguine experience that you knew you were a part of, but you know you could just relax… there was no requirement to participate and actually spend money. Being there as a broke teen was normal. So was being there as a rich traveler or bored youngster. It was the largest set of unique personalities in one place that we could experience as kids. Where else would we hang out? What would we talk about, if not for Newbury Comics to provide strange gadgets that relate to TV shows and pop culture, bands, and celebrities? Where would we flaunt our style? There was no other place to go out in public like this. No other serendipitous, yet curated, wonderful, quirky, real-world entertainment that existed.
During the holiday season, the mall was truly a zoo. The place was packed. Husbands, wives, aunts, uncles, grandparents, children all whizzed around to fulfill their gift-giving duties. The parking lot was full. A massive decorated tree reached nearly to the skylights themselves. Extra security was present. The place was alive with an army of regular people searching, sifting, picking and choosing what would be best as a present. It was a city in and of itself. A bustling metropolitan area.
It is dead now, of course. Malls are a ghost town. Some part of me is sad, but some part of me understands that their actual functionality (as opposed to intended use) was more born out of boredom than a desire to purchase, at least for us. I have no idea how some of these places stayed in business as long as they did. It is nostalgic to look back and see what we were like back then though. It felt like you got what you got, and there was no other reality to live in, unlike now, everyone has their own reality happening in cyberspace. Malls capture that essence of gritty reality, smelly cologne, randomness, and class. The memory of mall culture will always remain a treasure of my childhood.
Happy meandering,
Daniel