Did You Once Love a Mall?
All about my hometown mall, chronic pain, and the Staten Island mall
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What a terrible time were having in America! What a nightmare of a bill! I’ve always hated Christian Nationalists because they believe they are doing the will of God (ha ha ha, the arrogance of that alone) and there is no reasoning with them, and so here we are today. Boy, did they really rig an already pretty rigged system. I”m sure we’ll all have more to say and lots more to fight, but for now I can only say, gosh it’s a bad time and FUCK ICE FOREVER AND EVER. YOU WILL NOT WIN IN THE END AND WE WILL UNMASK ALL OF YOU, AND EVEN IF WE DON’T YOUR SOULS ARE ROTTED WITH COMPLICITY AND EVIL AND THAT’S A THING THAT DESTROYS PEOPLE FROM THE INSIDE OUT.
Happy hot dog long weekend! That’s pretty much the only thing I will consider calling this holiday, but I hate most holidays except for the the food related parts, lights, and Christmas trees. Fireworks are pretty but now that I’ve become a full-fledged startle kitten, I can’t really handle them. Poor animals every where.
I do appreciate the gusto of my Brooklyn neighbors in their fireworks displays, even though I have jumped and then almost peed my pants about fifteen times this weekend. Go Ocean Hill and Brownsville in particular! You made some full-on shows.
I mostly wanted to say hi to my readers. HI! It’s been a while since I’ve done a regular Carley post because I’ve been publishing my novel, Live at Roseland, here on Substack. The ending, Part 4, is up, and now I can be done with that. Part 1 is pinned and the rest are right there underneath that so if you’re looking to read a book about a small-town woman who tries to save her life by running away with a famous indie band, have at it! It’s very much on on the road kind of book, and it has a love triangle (because Carley) and some hot sex, some celebrity appearances, and a lot of thinking about how to build a life when you have very little and have lost your best friend. Oh, and it has a ghost!
I definitely have thoughts about the process which I’ll maybe write about at some point, but in general it’s been good for my writerly mental health to get this book out into the world. I don’t have to fret over it never having a home. It has one, here on Substack! Voila!
So I published this mall essay a few weeks back, and then snatched in back out of the world because I wanted to keep with the novel before I put an unrelated post up. So here’s some stuff about malls.
Now for malls. I did this for a call on pieces about malls and I missed the deadline for that call ofc, so here it is for you.
The Chautauqua Mall
For a few years, my mom was secretary of the mall. She did the secretarial things of the time—typed, took dictation, attended meetings, and likely suffered fools—for the mall manager, behind a nondescript beige door near the main entrance. My brother and I thought this job was much cooler than my mom did, and in the end it afforded us none of the perks we’d dreamed of like unlimited arcade tokens, discounts at our favorite stores, and after hours access to the puppies in Woolworth’s.
Our mall was garbage compared to the mall in the above photo.
When I text my mom to help me remember all of the stores in our small Western, New York mall, we have fun. I’m often looking for conflict-free topics for us, and it turns out the mall is one of those.
It feels important to say that I haven’t written an essay, a poem, or worked on a novel for almost a year now. What started as a chosen writing break became mandatory as I descended into lower back pain for the last seven months. I’m writing now from my car. Alternate side of the street parking in NYC remains if effect even as our republic crumbles. Streets must be cleaned and tickets must be issued.
In my car, I’m sitting in a position that normally would kill my back, but I’m on steroids for my pain. For the first time in seven months, a doctor, a woman, gave me something for my pain. She also read the x-ray, the previous doctor I’d seen, a tall man in his late thirties, whose boredom with my suffering could only be matched by his inability to do his job, had ordered for me and then misread.
“From the x-ray it looks like you have an herniated disk.”
“Wait, really?” I said, in so much pain that I was crying, and then she laid out a treatment plan for me. None of it involved physical therapy, which I’d been doing dutifully for the last four months at the direction of the male doctor, and likely injuring myself even more.
Chronic pain is not new to me. I’ve been in some form of pain for large chunks of my life. From ages three to eleven before I was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder, with Irritable Bowel Syndrome starting at age forty six or so and ongoing, but much improved. Before I had a small nervous breakdown from overwork, stress, and the disappointment of not selling a novel that got very close to finding a big home and giving me some much needed cash, I had terrible muscle pain all over my body for about a year. When I went on Lexapro the pain went away. Recently, I tried to wean myself off of Lexapro and the pain came back, like an rejected, surly ex-boyfriend. Now this back pain, coming and going, seemingly without reason. I’m not sure if this is a normal or abnormal amount of pain.
What do malls have to do with pain? I first experienced myself as spectacle walking or attempting to walk the slippery floors of our mall and feeling the heat of all of those small town stares. I was in a lot of pain then.
According to a CDC report, “In 2023, 24.3% of adults had chronic pain, and 8.5% of adults had chronic pain that frequently limited life or work activities (referred to as high-impact chronic pain) in the past 3 months.” Americans are also known to experience higher rates of pain than people in other countries. In a 2023 essay for The New York Times, “Why Americans Feel More Pain” Nicholas Kristof warns, “Here’s what we do know: Tens of millions of Americans are suffering pain. But chronic pain is not just a result of car accidents and workplace injuries but is also linked to troubled childhoods, loneliness, job insecurity and a hundred other pressures on working families.”
Like our pain, our malls are uniquely American. We report more pain than most other countries and we have the most malls. Other super American things: white supremacy, lack of access to reproductive care, people in so much stupid pain they think an orange rapist grifter will save them, corn syrup, Hollywood, Puritanism.
Help me out here. What are the good American things? I forget. Ice cream sundaes, jazz and hip hop, malls, New York City, San Francisco. What else?
Malls are mostly an American phenomenon, although they were invented by an Austrian Jewish immigrant architect, fleeing the Nazis, Victor Gruen (Steinhauer). In her fascinating essay about the history and meaning of American malls, Jillian Steinhauer writes that when Gruen arrived in the United States:
He began designing eye-catching shops and other commercial projects in a European modernist style. Visionary and ambitious, Gruen didn’t invent the mall whole cloth, but he did pioneer the form and help embed it firmly in the American landscape. Twentieth-century malls grew in part out of nineteenth-century arcades and department stores, important spaces for shopping and socialization.
I can’t hear the word arcade without thinking of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, which I believe I read excerpts of in graduate school, but never the whole of it (it’s huge right?) It’s likely I didn’t understand it then—theoretical texts baffled me at age 23, when I began my Ph.D. program. Or maybe they intimidated me more than they baffled me since I was often told by the head of the English department that I didn’t belong in the program and shouldn’t be there. I hated him for that and eventually switched into English Education, which was much more reader friendly.
What I pulled from Benjamin later in my teaching life was the figure of the flâneur who I just learned today was coined by Charles Baudelaire in Flowers of Evil. As a writing professor in New York City, I pushed my students to wander the streets and find its history. I was simplifying Benjamin and Baudelaire (forgive me titans of French literature!), and disconnecting the figure of the wanderer from her political implications—her leisure to wander, her consuming nature, her obsessions with history, and the effect that the city has on her psyche. To use the pronoun “her” is pushing it, as most wandering women on the streets of 1920s Paris were likely sex workers.
I was in Prague for work in June (more on that in another post I hope) and I cam across some arcades and I was delighted. I also wandered a lot and at night and truly nobody could have given a shit about me and that was wonderful and a little bit weird, like I am getting old you guys.
Women can never truly wander freely in any public place, until you get older and everybody mostly ignores you because you’re not seen as a fuckable object. In Prague after having too much to drink, I wandered to find a kebab and felt like a low-powered superhero wandering through a series of explosions that would never touch me because I was invisible and of no interest.
The explosions were bunches of drunk teens and twenty-somethings, flirting, yelling, and barfing. I was so relieved to have already done that time in my life and circumspect about my invisibility. Mostly, I was excited to have gotten to know two new colleagues better, in awe of my yummy kebab, and hopeful that the white wine and Negronis would not do me in the next day. I would not advise this combo in the future.
Was the mall an attempt to contain the young woman wanderer? To save her from the danger of her freedom?
And what of my little mother, typing away in the carpeted mall office? What of me, wasting quarters on video games I would never master. Remember the sound Pac Man made when you were too disabled to move the joystick with any alacrity? I can hear the sound of that failure as a type. At least Ms. Pac Man had the sexy heels.
How strange that the ornate glass facades of the Parisian arcades would be watered down and Americanized into a video game arcade. The only arcades I see now are on beach boardwalks and boy do I love flinging a skeeball up into some holes, winning some tickets, and buying a giant comb.
Working as the mall secretary was my mom’s final secretarial job. Like many women of her era, most of her early jobs were clerical. She hated being a secretary to men who treated her nicely or poorly, we’re okay or not very good at their jobs, and who didn’t seem to see any potential in her for advancement. The next job she got was at the Boys and Girls Club where she moved quickly up from a job counselor to Assistant Director to Executive Director. Eventually, she was one of a handful of female Executive Directors of Boys and Girls Clubs nationally. We—my dad, my brother, and I—were proud of her. I still am.
These were heady days for my mom. She had a job that mattered to her and to others, it took up a lot of time, and it exposed the unfair allocation of chores between my parents. My father worked a demanding full-time job and did nothing at home. My mother worked a demanding full-time job and did everything at home. We all know how this plays out to this day.
I wonder how my back will feel when I get out of the car. I hope it doesn’t spasm. I should not be writing in my car, even sitting in my car is a bad idea, but I’m single, and there is no one else I can ask to sit in my car. Also, I miss writing, and I want to write about my childhood mall, and in this brief window of less to no pain, it seems that I can.
It was a big deal for Chautauqua County to get its own mall in the early 1970s. That it would eventually contribute to the demise of Jamestown’s somewhat bustling downtown, is a tale all malls could tell if they could talk.
When I look at the Retro Jamestown Facebook page for the Chautauqua Mall, there’s a photo from the mall’s heyday, when there was a fountain the middle where we threw pennies and made our wishes, a Woolworth’s with a lunch counter inside of it, and fancy restaurant called the York Steakhouse. From the comments (there are almost 400), I remember how important that mall was to the area’s vision of itself, and to the people who lived near it.
Here are a few:
“My family and I would eat at the steakhouse every Friday night so yummy! As a kid I loved shopping at Barbara Moss. So pretty at Christmas time.”
“Fond memories of traveling from Warren [PA] on Saturday night with my parents to go shopping there.”
“Loved that mall. My parents had a camp on Chautauqua Lake from 1983-1994. My mom and I would do school clothes shopping there. We would eat at Woolworth's. Spent a lot of time there during summer months.”
“I met my wife there in 1976. 46 years ago! Still married. Remember the game room by the theater?”
“My baby daughter threw up in my purse during the Woolworth going out of business sale. I rescued my debit card and paid for my huge haul. Had to toss the purse but what a great sale!”
I had to include that last one. Such a small town, love a sale story!
To have a mall meant you mattered. A mall was a place to shop yes, but it was also a whole social world revolving around clothing, food, and hanging out. For families (both local and more rural), it was a Friday or Saturday night out. For teenagers like me in the 80s, it meant you had a reliable place to be that wasn’t someone’s house, and maybe you could bump into other teens you knew or wanted to know. That our mall was technically located in Lakewood, a wealthier, prettier town on Chautauqua Lake, next to Jamestown, meant you could see kids from Lakewood High School. We wannabe punk, indie, goth girls, had decided that the boys at Lakewood High School were cooler and cuter than the ones at our school.
Later, our hang out spot would become a record store/head shop called Discount Discs run by a local D.J. and perhaps drug dealer, but that is for another essay, and is chronicled in what do you know? My novel, Live at Roseland. Promotion is gross isn’t it?
I’m trying to finish this essay lying down on my couch. Writing lying down is not ideal. My computer sometimes hurts my stomach and my arms get tired. My intense back pain has returned, and next week I’ll get another cortisone shot. If that doesn’t work, they’ll burn off the ends of one of the nerves that’s causing all of the pain. They say it won’t hurt.
Update I got the second shot and it’s working pretty well. I’ve revised this essay sitting at a table! Gosh, you can really type fast when you sit up. Now I’m revising it again for the 4th of July weekend! Still sitting up!
My mom and I loved the mall. It was a place we bonded over spending my father’s (the family’s?) money. When my parents were really fighting, my mom would sometimes say, “Let’s go shopping and piss off your father.” It usually worked, and we got new clothes.
When I was younger, I loved the conveyor belt in the grocery store. You paid for your groceries inside, went to your car in the parking lot, not having to carry them, drove up to the conveyor belt which was somehow both inside and outside of the store, and grabbed your groceries. Watching the brown bags go up and down, and in an out, was magic.
I remember the joy I felt when I was big enough to shop at Barbara Moss, where I could buy a matching crop top and pleated pants and then walk down to Claire’s Boutique and find earrings and bracelets of the same color. I was very into a mono-cromatic look.
I got my ears pierced at the Earring Tree when I was 11? It was a kiosk in the middle of the mall, not far from the fountain. The pain surprised me. The holes to this day are still too close to my face. I don’t really wear earrings anymore. They’re too femme for me, and they hurt my ears. But earrings are such beautiful objects—there are billions, maybe trillions of weird earrings out there in the world. My friend Megan bought a pair gold cowboy boot earrings recently. They had tiny spurs on them. Boots on your face. I love that.
Not mine or Megan’s ears, but cute!
The movie theater where for years until they stopped selling it, I got a giant roll of Sweet Tarts for every movie. Some favorites I saw there: Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Full Metal Jacket, Heathers, and Thelma and Louise. As we walked out of that movie, the man I was dating at the time said, “But why did they have to kill themselves?” I looked at him incredulously and said, “How could they not kill themselves?” I think this pretty much sums up where many heterosexual couples are these days.
Going to the mall on a summer night after dinner with my mom, parking at the Bon Ton entrance and only going to that one store. We tried on so many things in the dressing room together. Always together, and then the talk about whether or not it fit well, was comfortable, was too expensive, or on sale. My mom had a Bon Ton card, and there were always surprise coupons.
The giant beepy registers, and how long it took to ring one person up. The Clinique Counter where I bought Black Honey lip stick, still unmatched to this day. Smelling freshly mowed lawn, the car windows rolled all the way down on the way home. We also took the “back route,” which had winding, country roads, and almost no traffic lights. I can drive that route in my sleep.
My dad didn’t really like the mall and couldn’t be convinced to go unless it was for a movie or Walden Books. But our time at those places was special. My dad loves movies and taught me to care about all kinds of movies, music, and books. Genre is somewhat irrelevant to him., which is a gift he gave me too. At Walden’s we could mostly get whatever we wanted. How lucky was that!
I still love a mall. My daughter and I go to the Staten Island Mall a few times a year to get school clothes. Shout out to the intrepid
for helping me love the pleasures of Staten Island. It’s an easy drive, they have some of her favorite stores, and we eat at Shake Shack or Chipotle. I almost never buy anything for myself there, there’s nothing I want and/or nothing fits me because I am the whopping menopausal size of 16 lol. We did a bra fitting there once.Barbizon “discovered” her there recently. Yes, Barbizon still exists and no it’s not a good idea to get involved with them. I never last long in the mall. It’s a sensory overload that I can manage for about three hours max. If we go over that time, I usually get testy about something. Last time it was, “Why do you want so many jean shorts?” A time before that, I said too loudly in Forever 21, “Okay, enough with the bustiers! Can we buy some actual shirts.” You never know what you’ll find yourself saying at the mall when you have become your/a mother.
Sometimes the concrete floors hurt my feet and ankles, and I get a little whiny about it. My kid is sweet and knows it time for us to go. Our times there are special, and uniquely ours and I have Staten Island and Amy Shearn to thank for that. Thanks you two!
Tell me about your favorite mall or a mall you hate.
Tell me a mall story—good, bad, or in between?
Tell me anything.
Love you guys!
Enjoy the typos!
xoxoxo
Carley
I wrote a little about the malls I went to when growing up here: https://baldalienbabe.substack.com/p/malls-and-cities
One other mall I remember was when we would go on vacation to Grand Forks, ND, and we would usually hit up the Columbia Mall, which had such exotic (to me) stores as Target and Suncoast Video. There was also the novelty of how different the music cassettes were from their Canadian counterparts (different manufacturers, often different templates for the J-Cards, especially on the older albums).
My grandparents took my brother and me to the mall, but it was rare. We lived in a small town, so the mall was an hour drive away, and a big deal. I hung out at the arcade (there's an essay on video games in my last book, and I talk about the arcade, the greasy joysticks because there was a pizza place a few doors down, the constant bleeps and bloops and rings from the machines). I still went to the same mall occasionally in my late teens and early 20s--used to hit Waldenbooks and Hastings for books and music, then eat at a restaurant where a cute girl I knew worked. Good times.