Slow Death of a Local Mall

In cities all across America I'd wager that older malls are struggling. The Internet has been taking bites out of the retail model for at least a decade now, and if a mall isn't glittery and new, I'd imagine it would be hurting. Teenagers hanging out won't keep a mall open...do teens hang out at malls anymore?

Well, friends and family might remember Citrus Heights' own Birdcage Mall in the eighties. I'm not sure how it's doing now, but even then, twenty-five years ago, being across the street from the bigger and newer Sunrise Mall which had decimated the consumer base, it was a near ghost town. I also have a memory of rival gangs claiming it, maybe "fighting" over it, but that may just be a false memory.

In Austin, near where we live, there's a tract of large buildings and asphalt called Highland Mall. Before I ever visited this mall was described to me as being "ghetto", full of lame stores or vacancies, or invariably as a dying mall. When I did visit, I can't remember what prompted us to go there, I was surprised. It didn't look like it was a ghetto-dying-mall from the inside. It looked like a normal, well attended, almost busy collection of establishments. I was half expecting to see tiles crumbling off of walls and shops shuttered with literal boards.

One day I was driving home from my day job, and after exiting the freeway and getting on the access road (I've got a whole damn post about access roads and on ramps in Texas, don't get me started) I noticed traffic congestion due to road work. I took a quick right up a side street, and in my own way of getting around the pocket of congestion, I ended up going through the back end of Highland Mall. The street I was on for a few feet had me driving directly towards a poetic image:



I got lost a little staring at it. I rode back on the house bicycle to take some pictures. I'm not totally sure I can represent in words what this image means to me; it's being defined for me in the metaphor part of my brain. The empty parking lot, the ghostly "Dillard's" missing but still visible on the giant building's facade (which you may have to enlarge the photo to see). The Dying Mall.

I've heard that ACC, Austin Community College, has purchased the full acreage of that side of Highland Mall, the parking lot and the anchor department store building, and have plans on bringing another campus to another section of town. Which is pretty cool.