The Banshee has howled for the Silver City Galleria. She's still open, but only at certain entrances. She has a Facebook page, but so do several of my dead friends. Only a fool would deny that the buzzards are circling.
As is often the case with mall deaths, this was a slow bleeding, more Death By A Thousand Cuts than a Jason Vorhees-style decapitation.
The death of a Mall is always a sad thing in the eyes of a child of the 1970s/80s. They are a cultural icon. Fast Times At Ridgemont High opens in a mall. Half of the stuff I owned came from a mall. My first indoor job was in a mall.
Today, we'll look at the reasons for the debacle in Taunton, and the demise of mall culture in general.
Malls exist because A) Americans buy a lot of different things, and B) you can only fit so many stores on Main Street in Smalltown USA.
With a mall, you clear out a bit of forest or swamp in the middle of a region, plop down a building about the size of a junior college campus, fill it with diverse stores and let business take her course.
There may not be a Macy's in tiny Dighton, but the residents
This is important, as old people of rural upbringing can remember when everyone was essentially dressed in the same clothes from the same Sears catalog.
The mall houses local businesses or at least local franchises of national businesses. Some of these businesses can't stand alone... have you ever seen a free-standing Spencer's, for instance?
Shopping malls date back to Rome, but the indoor mall dates back to the 1950s. Sweden had the first one (named "Shopping"), and they were going up in the USA soon after.
Malls dominated American shopping through the 1990s, when 140 were being built per year.
Box stores and online shopping then began to inflict killing blows. All the perfumes of Arabia will not remove the mall blood from Wal-mart's hands, as Wally undercuts the very department stores and niche businesses that malls rely on.
2007 was the first year that no new indoor malls were being built. The mall bubble had peaked, and then it began to contract. That contraction will now perform the coup de grace on the Silver City Galleria.
The first indoor mall in the Greater Boston area was Shoppers World, which went up in Framingham by 1956. The Westgate Mall in Brockton (1961) and the South Shore Plaza in Braintree (1963, enclosed in 1976) followed shortly after.
Highway development and urban strife filled the more rural suburbs. A second local mall boom followed, with Hyannis (1970), Dartmouth (1971), Hanover (1971) and Swansea (1975) getting in the game.
That was enough for almost 20 years, which seems to be a mall's shelf life. By the 80s, the malls in Dartmouth and Swansea were as dated as disco albums. They were poised for usurpation by more modern malls with food courts.
Attleboro had jumped on this opportunity in 1989, a year that Kingston had similarly targeted the mall in Hanover. Taunton was the last (1992) local indoor mall to go up, at least in SE Massachusetts.
The builders were thought to be crazy for building a mall in the Taunton forest, but they were on to something. Sited where two highways meet, the mall became a big hit.
At her peak, the SCG housed 90 stores and a community college. She had a firm grip on Bristol County's shoppers. She essentially strangled smaller malls in the area, formerly successful malls such as Swansea, Dartmouth and Mill River Place.
Life was good for the mall. My use of past tense here is meant to be foreboding.
All that Internet shopping and Wal-mart stuff from a few paragraphs ago evenually touched SCG. The Bush Recession sped up the death roll.
SCG was down to 70% occupancy by 2010. She went through a series of foreclosures, bankruptcies and fleeing stores.
Sears, Old Navy, PacSun, Victoria's Secret, JC Penney, Best Buy... the trickle of closing businesses soon became a torrent.
Add to this a 2016 rampage where some nut literally tried to murder everyone in Bertucci's, and a pall hung over the mall. I used to date a Taunton girl, and her response to my suggesting that we shop at SCG was, "Are you trying to get stabbed?"
I was there Thursday. It was almost empty, save for (de)construction guys and a bunch of old people taking walks. Trading old people for zombies would make it indistinguishable from Dawn Of The Dead, although there weren't as many old people at SCG as there were ghouls in DOTD.
Spencer's, T-Mobile, Dick's, and Round One were the only open businesses. The food court was disassembled, save for the apparently unkillable Bourbon Street Grill.
Most of the parking lot is blocked off, all but one escalator is down and most of the mall entrances were closed. Stores were being gutted, and three workers were disassembling the little carousel.
I had hit the dab pen 15 times before entering, thinking that I would write a mirthful piece. Nope. I was depressed before taking 30 steps inside the building. It was like watching America die.
William Thibeault paid $7.5 million for the mall last May. He insists it isn't closing. However, I shall publish this article on February 29th, and I'd be amazed if the mall is still open on March 1st.
The music world has taken notice.
There is talk of converting it to a distribution center or whatever TF a "fulfillment center" is, and maybe that will happen. Who knows?
While other websites whine about the problem, Cranberry County Magazine takes action to save Taunton. Here are some ideas we came up with:
- Instantly become the laser tag or Air-soft mecca of the world by converting the whole mall to this purpose. The old people taking indoor walks would be collateral damage. Maybe you lose points for shooting them... or maybe you gain points.
- Set up a howitzer in the parking lot, and let people fire a shell into the building for 5000 dollars.
- Hide treasure in each store, fill the mall with traps, bears, carnivorous plants, serial killers and monitor lizards, then charge Ren Fair people X dollars to armor themselves and play real-world Dungeons And Dragons there.
- Leave it untouched, then open a Mall Museum there.
- Turn it into a voc-tech high school to prepare kids to enter the retail economy.
- Take a stab at cornering the retail marijuana market by converting it into a Weed Mall. Put in a dispensary (or perhaps several), and use the remaining stores to sell stoner-friendly stuff like candles, munchies and Pink Floyd records.
- Redesign it as a water park for January through September. For October, decorate it and run it as a sort of Spooky World haunted house. In November, string up a zillion lights and knock La Sallette out of business. Those damned Christians have had a stranglehold on Christmas for too long.
- Demolish the mall, but leave all the signs up. Find a hill with a commanding view and build a bar there. Let locals laugh as shoppers aimlessly drive back and forth, looking for a mall which is no longer there.
- Put SCG on the auction block, where it is purchased for $27US by Cranberry County Magazine, who then begin to make subtle inquiries as to where one might be able to procure a Komodo Dragon.
Jobs will vanish, tax revenue will dry up, nearby businesses will lose traffic and Taunton will lose a little bit of her swagger.
The psychological damage will be immense. Many people's first job was folding sweaters there, some long-married couples may have had their first date there and there are at least two or three generations of locals who will have their Christmas routines altered.
A man might see an icon of his youth meet the wrecking ball and start to think that maybe it's time for him to move on to greener pastures, as well.
Only time will tell. Until then, let's pour out a little liquor for an old friend.
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