The first mall I ever set foot in after moving to Cleveland was Westgate, at the corner of Center Ridge and W. 210th, in Rocky River. It instantly reminded me of some of my favorite malls -- built 30 to 50 years ago, half-empty, half-full of weird, marginal stores selling bizzare crap -- like the Lakewood Mall in Lakewood, WA, circa 2000, or the mall in downtown Odgen, UT, which had a total of five remaining stores. Two of my least favorite things are consumerism and crowds, so the kinds of malls that depress the hell out of normal people put a smile on my face. I can't stand the newer, shinier, more modern mega-malls, full of crowds and "designer" clothing stores and their reek of credit card debt and middle-class, suburban angst.

Westgate Mall

I know it's "hip" to pretend that you're so anti-capitalist that you've never even set foot in a shopping mall in your lifetime. I'd rather face the truth though -- that almost every American born after 1960, including myself, spent a lot of their childhood and teenage years in a mall, and therefore, a lot of us, even though we've been reborn as dumpster-diving, black-bloc freegan badasses, have some shopping-mall related nostalgia. My platonic ideal of "The Mall" is based on my memories of the Tacoma Mall. Allegedly, being built in 1955 made it something like the second or third mall built either *ever*, or on the West coast, or something like that. The whole place was decked out in the height of space-age ultra-modern style -- a lot more practical than the Space Needle or the Pacific Science Center, but not too far from it. The walls were mainly white with lots of tacky gold accents. By far the most memorable parts of the Tacoma Mall for me, though, were the two fountains, both taken out of commission by the mid-'90's. One was two stories tall and surrounded by a spiral staircase that came out of the basement of the Bon Marche -- these stairs always scared the crap out of me, because it was one of those metal staircases that doesn't even look structurally sound. The fountain was surrounded by turquoise tiling that looked kind of like the stuff on the side of the Westgate mall in this picture:


Except with lots of small, squarish tiles in different colors. The best part of the fountain by far was a totally bizzare, 20-foot abstract copper sculpture, that looked either like a rotting log or a torture instrument from Mars. The second fountain was more along the lines of what you think of when someone says "fountain" -- just a big square thing with some water in it, and another, smaller copper sculpture. I always begged pennies off my mom to throw in and make a wish with. Absurdly symbolic in retrospective -- throwing away money at the mall.


The Tacoma Mall was never too empty, and always seemed like it did amazingly well for being in a city with a reputation as bad as Tacoma's. There were a ton of newer, shinier, gimmickier malls in the suburbs (like Auburn's "SuperMall"), but I rarely went to them -- the main reason was that my mom was terrified of driving on the freeway, and Tacoma mall was just a hop and a skip away on some surface streets. Around 2000 Tacoma Mall was bought by some giant corporation that owns tons of malls, Simon, and completely remodeled. The fountains were already long gone -- by the early '90's, they had a completely surreal hideousness and made the mall feel horribly dated. But all the little quirks that made the Tacoma Mall were wiped out -- they added a food court (lots of early malls didn't have them), took down the weird tacky gold stuff, and, basically, obliterated anything that made the Tacoma Mall interesting.


Westgate Mall

I remember going to the mall one morning. Walking across the parking lot from the bus transfer station, I saw *it* laying in the parking lot, all fenced off -- the original 20-foot copper sculpture from the fountain, that I hadn't seen in at least 10 years. The fountain was probably actually still in the mall all that time, walled off, and the remodeling crew re-discovered and removed it. A couple weeks later it was gone from the parking lot, probably moved to some scrapyard somewhere.


Westgate Mall

Westgate Mall never held as much interest for me as Tacoma Mall, and, objectively, it probably wasn't as interesting as Tacoma Mall was, Westgate being much newer, and probably not built with the same space-age spirit. I'm sure if I had spent my entire childhood visiting it that I would have come to know all it's quirks and flaws, and I'm also sure that there's people here that will get as wistful for it as I get for the "original" Tacoma Mall. The closest mall is Great Northern, a newer, shinier behemoth out in North Olmstead, that I personally can't stand to set foot in. I theorize that with America's middle class dissapearing into that famously widening gulf between rich and poor, that a lot more of these older, smaller malls in working- and middle-class neighborhoods are going to go bankrupt and go the way of Westgate, and leave us with nothing but upper-middle class hells full of Body Shops and Banana Republics a la Beachwood. I'm no big fan of malls at all, but I'd rather not see our biggest symbol of conformity and captialism become even more conformist and capitalistic.