A bus full of teens
Posted on 01/17/2024 8:54:30 AM PST by fwdude
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at atlasobscura.com ...
Yes. I recall the first “shopping centers” which were all outdoors, and when they first began to build indoor facilities, like the food court and interior store fronts, it was like a resort sort of place.
Malls can be fun.
But not so much when ferals take them over.
AMEN!
It was illegal invaders saturating an area near where I grew up that did it for the malls, and most other retailers. A Mexican flag now flies on an office tower at the mall of my childhood (there is a Mexican consulate there.)
The big box model minimized or eliminated two of the biggest weaknesses of indoor malls: (1) the enormous cost is heating, cooling, lighting and maintaining common-area corridors and atriums; and (2) casual shoppers who wander from store to store without spending any money.
“..viewed as dangerous—often through white shoppers’ perception of nonwhite shoppers….”
No not “shoppers” but FERALS! This clown would rather call innocent people racist than just tell the truth that is right there in front of all of us. Why read anymore of what amounts to drivel? Screw this guy.
Remember when going to the mall was a form of entertainment? Things have really changed.
“All gone. Everything has gone vertical. The grocery stores have either parking garages, underground parking or parking on street level and the store on the second level. The spaciousness is gone. Where you not long ago had single story commercial buildings set back 50 feet or more from the street, you now have four and five story buildings hard up against the sidewalk. We went from open, livable, breathable spaces to the confinements of Manhattan.”
None of that has happened in the Midwest. For the most part malls were killed by unwanted clientele whose shoplifting and fighting sealed their fate.
Exactly!
Step one: Complaints that there is no public transportation to the mall and that this is “racist.”
Step Two: People protest the possibility of adding of a bus line to the mall. Are called racist.
Step Three: Those people lose. The bus line is added.
Step Four: “Teens” now show up at the mall. They fight, they loot, they’re noisy, they scare customers away.
Step Five: One store after another leaves. Eventually the mall becomes a dead mall. All those jobs are gone. All the people who relied on the mall for shopping are out of luck. I’ve seen it time and again.
Last time we went to the mall was 15 years ago only because the kids wanted to. Hubs and I sat at the food court watching the circus parade by. It happened to be prom night and a certain group was strutting their stuff. Literally, showing off stuff that shouldn’t be strutted in public. Gals in dresses cut down to Christmas Eve and up to Christmas morning with barely enough closure for a ribbon.
They’re set up perfectly. They can be incarceration centers as well as vocational places for the incarcerated. Cambodia-Pol Pot turned the schools into them. Wasn’t hard.
High-rises have the same issue. I’d make the prisoners climb up 20 flights of stairs to get fed. Same with welfare recipients. Good for the obesity crisis.
The video arcades in the malls were huge and always packed with gamers/shoppers. It really was an entertainment destination.
A bus full of teens
“None of that has happened in the Midwest.”
It’s even happening in the once-low Coeur d’Alene, Idaho (where I spend the summer). The City council approved a NINETEEN story mixed use building right down on Front Street blocking views of the lake, the downtown, and the gorgeous Tubbs Hill. The town used to be predominantly 2 and 3 story commercial buildings from the beginning of the 20th century, but the developers got their mitts on city hall and started building 10 story buildings all over town. They used to be at the edges of town to preserve the central district and views, but now they have doubled the height and are building right down by the lake.
It’s a frigging disaster from which there is no turning back. People just don’t want to preserve the heritage and history of a town.
Yes, if I was bored I’d go to the mall and look around and get bite to eat at the food court. Kill a couple of hours. Cheap entertainment.
Roosevelt Field eventually became a huge indoor mall with Bloomingdales, Macy's, JC Penny, and every fake-ass mall store you ever heard of or could imagine.
It is a palimpsest of 1960s American thinking not to visualize malls as indoor and parking lot hunting areas where they, their children, and their grandchildren, distracted by glitter and consumption, would become prey.
There was a late 90s, early 00s incident in New Jersey where a man carrying Xmas presents was shot in the head and killed walking to his car. The news coverage breathlessly focused on how it could be possible for this to happen at an "upscale" mall - but it was so close to what we used to call a "bad area" that you could almost walk.
An era has passed. In first grade, Roosevelt Field was where Lucky Lindy took off for Paris and Glory. Watching the runways dug up and the hangars burning, he fit right in with the Wright Brothers and other lessons about our forbearers who created our homeland.
A recent addition, in addition to Neiman Marcus is this:
A bus terminal for ease of access.
You all know what's coming next.
Most mall stores are supported by a "piece pick" operation where staff in a distribution center break open full cases and piece pick the contents to distribute among the mall stores that distribution center supports because most mall stores cannot fit full cases of product after the initial set of that merchandise.
The deliveries to malls tend to be by small box trucks using rolling carts or hand trucks through a normal sized door.
Big box stores, on the other hand, can receive deliveries by tractor-trailer from a distribution center with merchandise mostly shipped by full cases, using one large truck, one driver, and no piece-pick staff. The items are delivered to a back loading dock and unloaded by forklift or pallet jacks.
The big box stores can also run a back-haul program where the empty tractor-trailer swings by one of their suppliers on the way back to the distribution center to pick up a load going to the same distribution center.
versus
But not so much when ferals take them over.
This just happened recently at Greece Ridge Mall and surrounding businesses in the Rochester, NY suburb of Greece:
Police search for suspects involved in Greece mall disturbance
As you posted, metmom, feral youth are taking over!
Yeah, I saw that snipe. It’s whites’ fault for having “perceptions.” Well, maybe perceptions somehow comport with reality.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.