Stay Tuned/Why We Get Malled

There's nothing quite like a visit to the old home town to make you feel ... old.

One of the primary rapid-aging phenomena concerns buildings and businesses being torn down and replaced by other things. In the two years since I'd last been to Baton Rouge, the various seedy shops and hangouts surrounding the north gates of LSU, where students traditionally venture to drink and spend, have all shifted around and changed hands. The Chimes, the only bar in town with the audacity to have a decent selection of import beer in the land of Bud Miller, has tripled in size and now attracts an assortment of too-trendies on top of its usual mix of bohemians and serious drinkers. There is now a Foot Locker and a Blockbuster across the street from the Chimes, the fronts of the buildings unnaturally clean. It gives me the heebie-jeebies.

The other shopping story in Baton Rouge is that Cortana Mall - until recently, practically the only place to do real shopping in town - has been eclipsed by an enormous, two-story Mall of Louisiana, out on the fringes of town where all the brash young couples are raising their brash young kids and spending their brash young money.

Meanwhile, back here in greater Boston, Cambridge's Central Square, a colorful place, is getting a little less colorful as the site of the old Woolworth's magically became a Foot Locker, several businesses were displaced or closed so that a Starbuck's could be put in, and the ancient building across the street from it is being eyed hungrily by developers - people are picketing to keep it intact and avoid an onslaught from the likes of Barnes and Noble.

However, if you're expecting the standard diatribe against the evil corporate barons who are slowly turning all of America into the planet's largest strip mall, you might do well to detour past your nearest full-length mirror first.

I despise Barns Ignoble; yet I just redeemed an ungodly amount in gift certificates there. My family doesn't like to shop for me, since I generally buy what I want for myself and my needs are pretty narrow. That, combined with the difficulty of carrying large gifts on a plane, resulted in a plethora of gift certificates.

In this case, the ubiquity of Bunns and Noodle is its strength: it was a chain which purchasers in Baton Rouge could reasonably assume to exist in Boston. (As we found a few years back, there is no music chain which can claim this.)

And in the case of another chain, Borders, I don't even have the "it was a gift" defense. I genuinely like Borders - they are knowledgeable and eclectic and frequently less claustrophobic than the small local bookstores my conscience tells me I should be patronizing.

In short, I am not prepared to cast the first stone. Are you?

The Mallification scenario which generally appears in outraged articles or on protest flyers goes something like this:

A small local establishment (let's say, for the sake of argument, that it's a coffee house) does a steady business among the neighborhood regulars and other people who have been clued in. Gradually the word spreads. The coffee house begins to do great box office - in fact, it may well end up with more business than it can handle, adding layers of management and accountancy in order to attempt to deal with its growth. These will eventually choke the soul out of it.

But let's say that doesn't happen. Let's say the establishment has a certain atmosphere about it which keeps some members of the community from joining in the fun: maybe it's a little too noisy for some, or too bohemian, or too dark or too artsy or whatever. Anyway, it grows but never beyond a certain level of popularity, a nice comfortable level.

What happens then is that the Mallers come in. Some bright advance scout realizes that if the neighborhood can support one coffee house so well, it can support two, especially if the second one is clean and well-lit and not expecially friendly to beat poets and people wearing lots of eyeliner.

This second establishment (just for simplicity, and because we've already chosen a coffee metaphor, let's call it Starbucks) is already soulless, because it's a branch of a corporation which long ago got so large the soul was squeezed out of it. It's clean and sanitary and has much lower fixed operating costs than the little local coffeehouse does. So some people go there because the coffee is cheaper. Gradually, eventually, the Starbucks will grab more and more of the business which had gone to the local coffee house, and eventually drive the local joint out of business entirely.

As I say, that's the standard fairy tale. It is not, however, strictly truthful.

Sometimes the small businesses sell out. The purpose of a business is to make money, and I long ago resolved that I would not think worse of anyone just because they gave in to the temptation to take the money and run.

Sometimes the local business doesn't fail. Boston, between its Starbucks and Au Bon Pains and Dunkin Donuts, has more coffee-toting establishments than the mind can encompass, yet there are many excellent local coffee houses which manage to stay in business despite this onslaught. Often the local place serves a need which the soulless chain can't or won't fulfill.

And sometimes we encourage the Malling by our own habits concerning where we will and won't do business.

I become acutely aware of the color bar when I visit the South. Although Southerners are not nearly as racist as Northerners make them out to be (I have ranted about this elsewhere), the problem today is one of voluntary, not involuntary, segregation.

I am generally blithely unaware of the color of the faces around me - I just don't pay a lot of attention, unless the person I'm looking at is cute, and then I don't care what color their skin is - but walking through Cortana Mall, I found myself wondering, "Is it just that there are more black people in this town than in Boston? Or are there more black people in this mall than there used to be?" It wasn't an uncomfortable feeling, nor did it make me want to avoid the mall - as I say, I could care less - but even I could not ignore that a balance somewhere had shifted.

There are, of course, many more black people in Baton Rouge than in the predominantly white portions of Boston where I circulate. But there is also something to the other guess. My sister, who still lives in Baton Rouge, confirmed this: When the new mall was opened, most of the white people started going there. And again, there was probably little or no aware racism involved: The white folks are always chasing the latest and greatest, the new mall is closer to where many of them live, it has better parking, et cetera. Meanwhile, the older mall is now closer to where most of the black people live (Baton Rouge being a fairly segregated city), and they seem happy to have a mall all to themselves. Voluntary segregation.

What's frightening is that I remember when Cortana Mall was being built; I remember when it opened. Before that, the older Bon Marche mall, not too far down the road, was the only mall in town. Baton Rouge is spreading in a southeasterly direction; the whites move further southeast and the edge of what some whites refer to as "the dangerous part of town" slowly chases it, like a moon going into eclipse.

When Cortana opened, Bon Marche's shoppers almost immediately became nearly ninety percent black. Today, the apartment buildings cum housing projects behind the mall - Mall City - are the source of most of the town's drugs and murders. The mall is nearly deserted. The Baton Rouge Little Theatre, unable or unwilling to move from its location tucked into the back side of the mall, facing Mall City, now posts a security guard in its portion of the parking lot on show nights. The dreadful irony is that as many black people now avoid the mall as white people.

Back in Cambridge, Central Square was a place of black people and immigrants. I say these things like I say everything else in this column - as a statement of plain fact. But then rent control was repealed and the housing market went through the roof. Suddenly the trendies began spreading southeast again, oozing outward from unaffordable Harvard until they reached Central Square. And lo, suddenly there was talk of Starbucks. This is a sound principle known as "following the money."

The irony here is that the young urban types - some black, most white, all more well-off than the usual faces seen waiting for the #1 bus at the Central Square bus stop - who are protesting the demolition of some of these old "historic" businesses in the neighborhood would never have considered patronizing those businesses in the first place. The donut shop which closed to make room for Starbucks was dark, narrow, full of intimidating, chain-smoking people from rough walks of life. I wouldn't have gone there; it scared me. Neither would these protesters. The difference is that I'm being honest and they're not.

Although I don't go to Starbucks if I can avoid it, I'm not going to stand in front of it giving out protest flyers when I did nothing to stop the juggernaut. That's hypocritical, and I'm the sort of person who'd rather be apathetic than a hypocrite.

Before we seriously begin to fix the Mallification problem, before we start to ask serious questions about why our neighborhoods are the way they are, we've got to get our own house in order.

As a population, we like malls. They are convenient and well-lit and heated and have plenty of parking. Only weirdos like me, who walk everywhere by preference anyway, do most of their shopping in small stores.

But then we complain about the blandness (there are only four women's clothing stores now, for example, but they operate under many aliases) and the loss of neighborhood character and the trash problems from fast food and the loss of human contact skills.

We somehow have managed, as a group, to avoid making the connection between the two.

We mourn the idea that we are becoming more racially divided, not less, despite years of misdirected work - but then we refuse to cross certain lines because we are caged in by our own fears or because we prefer to see faces that mirror ours as closely as possible.

There are plenty of culprits to blame for the Mallification of America and its consequences, but to point the finger at Big Business first is to ignore the obvious.

[February 2007:] Upon rereading this, I find that I am rather fond of it. Perhaps because of the obvious personal motivation. I still visit Baton Rouge every few years, and I have not yet seen any major changes there which I would regard as positive. It's very sad.

"Bunns and Noodle" is the name used for you-know-who by cartoonist Alison Bechdel. "Barns Ignoble" is my own.

Please note that Wal-Mart is mentioned nowhere in this article.

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