Everyone knows the old joke about New Jersey–“What exit?” I grew up just off Exit 4 of the Turnpike, and the entire premise of the gag is ridiculous. People in New Jersey don’t calculate the geographic and social differences among them by highway off ramps. We use malls.
Growing up in Jersey, you were marked by your mall in roughly the same way a man was marked by his accent in Victorian England. The Deptford Mall was for blue-collar Catholics in Gloucester County. Bridgewater Commons was for the rich north-central Jersey kids whose parents commuted to Manhattan. The Hamilton Mall was for the townies on the southern shore coast, who were part of Philadelphia’s sphere of influence. A little further north at the Monmouth Mall people saw themselves as exurban New Yorkers.
I can track my own family’s social progress through the malls. When I was a child, we frequented the Deptford Mall. But as the family did better, we graduated up; by the time I hit adolescence I was an Echelon Mall man. Echelon was white-collar middle class, but not quite as upscale as the nearby Cherry Hill. Like most of my contemporaries, I spent about 15 hours a week at the mall. I’d get dropped off at lunch time on the weekends and would kick around the mall with friends until dinner. On a typical Saturday, we’d order a cookie cake from the Great American Cookie Company in the food court, see a movie, hang around the arcade, buy a couple of CDs, and spend an hour devouring the 20″ by 24″ chocolate-chip cookie once it was ready for pick-up. Then we’d go back the next day and do it all again.
Some of you cosmopolitans are probably horrified, but the mall is a New Jersey child’s birthright, like horses for kids in Wyoming and cornfields in Iowa. Sure, the first enclosed mall in America was technically in Minnesota–the Southdale Center in Edina opened in 1956. But New Jersey has led the way since. The Bergen Mall in North Jersey opened less than a year later. Both Southdale and Bergen were climate-controlled spaces, but they were also tiny. The first large-scale, modern mall was opened in Cherry Hill in 1961. Today there are more than 50 malls in the state, each the home of a distinct tribe.
So the mall is in our blood. Twenty years later, I seek out malls wherever I go; I’ve been to malls in Iceland, Ireland, and Idaho. On my honeymoon in Kauai, the second thing my wife and I did was visit the island’s lone mall. She’s from New Jersey, too, a Rockaway Mall girl, if you know what I mean. At the Republican convention last fall I went to Minneapolis’s colossal Mall of America every day, taking in its splendor. When it was built in 1992, the MOA–locals call it the Mall of Gomorrah–was the biggest in the country. It’s soon to be eclipsed by the Meadowlands Xanadu in Secaucus, New Jersey, with its 4.5 million square feet of space. In addition to shopping, the Xanadu will have a Ferris Wheel, an 18-screen movie theater, a bowling alley, a baseball stadium, and an indoor ski slope. I’ll be there when it opens.
But all is not well in the world of malls. In the last two years, 400 of the nation’s 2,000 largest malls have closed. When it finally comes online, Xanadu will be the first new mall to open in America since 2006. Retail sales are crunched everywhere by the recession, but the financial underpinnings of the big anchor chains–Macy’s, Sears, and the like–have been crumbling for years.
My own Echelon Mall fell on hard times during the late ’90s. I tracked its decline on the tragic, but engrossing, website deadmalls.com. JCPenney and Sears left Echelon, as did the General Cinema theater when the chain went bankrupt. Wal-Mart wanted to set up shop in one of the anchor positions, but residents and politicians kept them out. By 2005, nearly 75 percent of Echelon’s 1.1 million square feet were vacant.
In desperation, the owners demolished much of the complex–the preferred euphemism is “right-sized”–and cut the once-glorious mall down to a piddling 750,000 square feet. Echelon has been renamed the “Voorhees Town Center,” and there are plans to build residential units and an ersatz Main Street where the rest of the mall once stood.
I’d like to think that New Jersey’s malls will survive the troubles mostly intact. Old standbys such as Linens-n-Things and KB Toys have already vanished forever, and the great shakeout has only just begun. What happened to Echelon could happen in Cherry Hill.
If the mall culture dies, you and I might make do with Amazon and strip centers. But what about the children?
JONATHAN V. LAST
