Hello Shoppers!
When I pitched the idea of bringing back the Special Feature to Pine Hills Review, my immediate idea for a theme was The Mall.
As a Long Islander, if you aren’t in the suburbs, on a beach, or on the road—you’re at one of many malls, strip malls or shopping centers. It’s an intrinsic part of life in the two counties that make up Long Island ‘proper.’
My mall, the one nearest me and what immediately gets conjured up in my head when the word ‘mall’ is said, is Roosevelt Field Mall. As of this writing, it’s the largest shopping mall on Long Island, the 2nd-largest in New York, and the 8th-largest shopping mall in the United States. It’s also a significant part of my personal history. The mall parking lot is where my parents first met, back when JCPenney still had a restaurant inside. It’s both where my parents took me shopping as a kid and where I worked retail jobs after graduating from college retail into the 2008-9 recession.
While other malls across the country are dying, if not already dead, Roosevelt Field changed in order to survive. In 2012, the mall went upscale, bringing up the overall price point of the stores inside. Gone are most of the non-national brand stores that used to be tucked away in odd corners. Gone was the glass elevator (the one reminiscent of the one in Hunger Games) that kids loved to go up and down floors in. Gone was the mock Zeppelin, the main focal point of the food court on 2nd floor. Asian Chao and Wendy’s survived, but Johnny Rockets got replaced by The Little Beet.
It all looks very nice, but it had strayed too far from Victor Gruen’s original vision of the mall as an indoor downtown. The concept is that of a third space, a public space to congregate that is neither one’s home or a solely a place of work (like an office), that brought together all sorts of people that might not typically comingle. I couldn’t imagine my parents ever interacting in this version of the mall, nor could I imagine it as the same place where I had worked alongside people of various stations and situations.
When I pitched the theme, I had imagined some pieces dealing with 1980’s and 1990’s nostalgia or some tales about the grind of working retail. Just enough threads and thoughts to inspire writers and artists to contribute. But, perhaps, I was subconsciously looking to celebrate, criticize, and memorialize what I saw as a space for contradictions.
The work included in this feature captures these contradictions, either within the pieces themselves or by being juxtaposed with one another. We have the hollowness of dead malls amongst surviving malls that, perhaps, have way too much. We have stories about shopping and laments about working retail. We have the structure of the mall itself and the people existing inside. We have the mix of magic and marketing that is the mall Santa. We have then, we have now, we have everything—which sometimes includes nothing.
Enjoying reading and then meet me by the food court–they still have a Dippin’ Dots.
—Alex J. Tunney, Editor
Image: “Oxford Valley Mall Postcard 2” from Found Images
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