Shopping, then and now.

When I was a pitiful waif in the city, the little shops along the streets were already in dire straits. Even in the outer boroughs of New York City, the automobile was taking its toll on neighborhood stores. People would drive to Jersey, Long Island, Yonkers to go buy stuff. And when those boroughs got official shopping malls of their own, it was devastating. Local service stores like the barber shop and the TV repairman could hold on, but the dress shops, the record stores, the card shops? Their time was dwindling. 

Everyone knew what the future was going to be like -- the world would be based on a shopping-mall structure, the humans merely consuming drones, the cities dead or gone. 

Science fiction writer Somtow Suckaritkul wrote a series of stories called Mallworld that were later published in book form. Humanity was living in a planet-sized mall that was hurtling toward doom, but all we could do was live mall culture. Howard Chaykin wrote and drew an indie comic called American Flagg!, set in a future where the elites govern Earth from Mars and people live and work in fortified Plexmalls, and the titular hero is essentially a mall cop. Warren Zevon released a song in 1989 called "Down in the Mall" that poked fun at our obsession with mall culture. We were all doomed to be mallrats by 2020 at the latest. 

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to Mallmageddon. 

Everything supplants something, and what Internet shopping has done to our shopping malls makes us wistful for the good ol' days of mallmania. No one wants to admit it. We are willing to admit that the big cities’ shopping scenes in old movies, where people shop for Christmas in little emporia and big department stores, looks pretty cool. But the mall? 

Yeah, well -- it was social, at least. We got out of the house. We didn't freeze while going from store to store. There were plenty of places to look for stuff, so if you couldn't find anything you wanted to get Aunt Hildy, maybe it was time for you to reexamine your feelings about Aunt Hildy, because man, there was something for everyone. Maybe you really just don't want to get Hildy a present. Did you ever think of that?

Also, you could play in the arcade, get a bite to eat, check out new books or records, even take in a movie if your mall had a theater. So maybe the mall had something to say for it. 

The old department stores -- which had supplanted a lot of little stores -- did have one thing that the malls could not match -- awesome window displays at Christmas. 

Lord & Taylor window, 1980. Christmas scene set
in the landmark Daily News Building lobby. L&T's windows were 
always better than Macy's.

Lord & Taylor is defunct, and I don't feel so good myself. 

Oh, well -- the old guard passes etc. None of us wants to give up the convenience of shopping from home, least of all my wife. 

Going out on a present-buying excursion usually entailed some frustration, loss of patience, and possibly screaming kids. But it also could have something that's in real short supply these days -- good, clean fun. Where do we go to get fun back in our lives?