When I was young, my shopping experience centered on McKelvey’s Department Store in Youngstown, Ohio. Of course, there was also a department store in Niles. It may have been called Leopold’s, but I’m not sure. I do remember the network of money-carriers strung along its ceiling. When I made a purchase, the clerk would put my cash in a very small box attached to the wire network above my head. Suddenly, the box would zoom off to the central cashier’s office and, a few minutes later, would return with any change left over from the transaction I had made. When I was six years’ old, this was a magical experience. As a teenager, it was no longer impressive. By then, I had shifted my buying site from Leopold’s to McKelvey’s, which did not have the wire-box network. It did have pneumatic tubes! The only place this system might be found in today’s world is at a bank drive-through, but now the distance traveled within the whooshing tube is much shorter than it was at McKelvey’s.
Back in the late fifty’s, McKelvey’s was a major place for shopping. There were six floors, with different merchandise sold on each one. Leopold’s had only two floors. McKelvey’s even had an escalator between the first and second floors. For many years, an elevator, with its own operator, was needed to go to the higher levels.
It was a once-a-month adventure to shop at McKelvey’s in downtown Youngstown. When I was a teenager, a McKelvey’s branch store became the anchor for the newly erected Eastgate Mall between Niles and Youngstown. Bus travel to the McKinley Heights area, where Eastgate was located, was much faster than going all the way into Youngstown to shop. While I was away at college in Kent and later, in Ithaca, my mother worked in the cashier’s office at the Eastgate McKelvey’s. Her major daily complaint was how dirty her hands became because of handling all of that cash. Evidently, it’s true: money is dirty.
I do not recall any malls being located in either Kent or Ithaca. This memory may be due to my lack of funds for shopping at them, even if they did exist. There was also no need to use them for the other major reason for their existence: a place of social gathering. In the fifties and sixties, when shopping malls grew as fast as mushrooms, teenagers and young adults made them the primary sites for gathering every evening. The arcades within the covered malls provided places for them to window shop. The open courts made excellent locations to see others and, more important, to be seen by others. Teens gathered in groups to roam the malls and sit at tables to drink coffee and cokes. The equivalent place for me was, of course, The Hub at Kent State and The Ivy Room at Cornell, where students gathered between classes.
As the years passed, social gatherings changed, for Karen and me, from student union buildings to shopping malls, but this transition took a longer time than might be the case for other young couples. Being college towns, both Hanover, New Hampshire, and Corvallis, Oregon, had limited need for shopping malls for social gathering. I do not recall any for shopping, which was conducted at downtown stores in both cities.
Amherst, a quintessential college town, did not see the need for a shopping center and refused to allow one to be built within its corporate limits. However, the nearby town of Hadley had a different economic view and authorized the construction of one on the border between Hadley and Amherst. As a result, Hadley received the tax benefits and Amherst suffered the traffic snarls. For true shopping, Karen and I would make a significant journey to the Springfield Mall, an hour’s drive south of Amherst. The trek was usually associated with a visit to the orthodontist Deb saw once a month. She may not have enjoyed the outing as much as her brothers did, especially if an ice cream cone was part of the adventure.
The first major shopping center, the first true Mall, that I can recall is Westfield Mall in Wheaton Maryland. Karen and I went there almost every Saturday afternoon, to look and, sometimes, to shop. It was an inexpensive place to spend an hour or two with the kids. They could wander around, always in sight, of course, and do their own, if limited, investigations of seeing and being seen.
Our own time for significant mall-walking did not occur until we moved to Houston, more than forty years ago, when malls were in their heyday. Greenspoint Mall became the place for a weekly visit. The stores and food court were well attended for purchases of necessities and of snacks to eat while looking. We finally stopped going there when the socioeconomic environment started to slide in the Greenspoint area.
We then made Willowbrook Mall the site of our destinations for a weekend drive. The food court often became the place for a Saturday lunch. We finally learned in which arms of the sprawling complex our favorite shops were located and could browse through them without needing to expend extra effort finding them. By now, the kids seldom went with us; they had their own social needs and arrangements. Karen and I merely enjoyed each other’s company for a free hour of wandering.
We continued the endeavor even more so after we moved from the FM 1960 area to Cypress. The drive-time may have been about the same from Longwood as it had been from Ponderosa Forest. The destination was satisfactory for the effort.
Occasionally, we would visit a factory-outlet shopping center. A mall, usually, is a covered, air-conditioned place for casual walking and shopping in comfort, far removed from Houston’s humidity. However, some shoppers who desire bargains are willing to do so outside, although I prefer to attempt this only in early spring or late fall.
We have enjoyed an occasional visit to a shopping center in a foreign country. I was amused to see how international US commerce really is. A walk through a mall in Edinburgh did not differ from one in Germany. The accents and languages we heard may have been unlike ones we encountered in Houston, but the names of the stores and fast-food shops remained well-known. It was difficult to determine exactly where we might be in the world. It was, also, then that I realized covered shopping sites might not have been the invention of American commerce. A glass-covered Galleria in Florence, Milan or Moscow may be a prelude to the one found in west Houston.
Fifteen years ago, with our move to Eagle’s Trace and west Houston, our venues expanded to include First Colony, Memorial City, and Katy Mills, where we learned to look alternately into shops on both sides of the arcade rather than viewing each side independently as we made our way around the newer-designed circle of stores. We continued to enjoy the exercise of walking and its counterbalance of eating snack food as a reward.
Then came 2019. The coronavirus not only attacked people; it also devastated the world’s economy. It may be contributing to the demise of the shopping center, itself. Karen and I have not been in a mall since February 2019. The Christmas shopping displays for 2018 are the last ones I’ve seen in person. Amazon-dotcom has replaced every store which I formerly frequented. This may be equally true for a high majority of US shoppers.
Recent news articles have indicated that a third of the J.C. Penney and Macy stores have been closed in the last five years. Almost all of those owned by Sears or Lord & Taylor have gone out of business. About half of the remaining 1,600 mall-based locations are expected to shutter by 2025.
My comments about my own experience of wandering through malls for both window shopping and real shopping, as well as for pleasure and exercise, may ultimately become a personal history no longer directly relevant to any who read these recollections. It would, indeed, be ironic if the Mall of the Americas in Bloomington Minnesota becomes a site to be visited as tourists currently view the Colosseum in Rome.