Mall Rats - Just Hanging Out

What are your teenagers doing in their spare time? If you are in your teens, what are you doing? Every teenager likes to “hang out” which, if truth be told, is a simple way of hoping to see and be seen. It is a very important aspect of social development and we have all learned from it in one way or another. Adults practice it regularly at country clubs, gala charity events, and football games and hanging out as a teen is where we all learned to be social animals.

The first place I went to hang out was downtown when I was about eleven. I grew up in Syracuse, New York, which is a very typical mid-size American city. We lived within the city limits but somewhat near the beginning of what became suburbia. A friend and I would get on a city bus and with a few bucks in hand could spend most of a Saturday wandering through stores, getting a hot dog, and seeing a movie at one of several great old theaters. Apparently our parents were never concerned for our safety, and we were likely a bigger nuisance to others than anyone ever was to us.

Then things started to change. Of course I started to change too but while the cracking voice and peach fuzz on my face foretold of new interests, it wasn’t my personal growth that changed the most. It was the city. I believe it is fair to say that this change was occurring all across America in most every small to medium size city. Our city’s downtown was slowly being abandoned!

Nothing tragic happened suddenly like an air raid but over time, downtown began to resemble a city that was hit by the buzz-bombs that Germany launched at London. Holes started to appear where old brick buildings once stood. Long familiar stores closed. The theaters all shut down. A few new and taller office buildings were built that required entire blocks to be leveled. The classic art deco train station and the elevated tracks that ran right through the general downtown area was closed and the trains were moved outside the city limits. An east-west interstate highway replaced the tracks, and a huge swath was cut through the downtown to build another north-south highway. The city, for the purpose of hanging out, was dying.

One trait possessed by teenagers is an ability to move on to greener pastures without a great sense of remorse for what was. I was perfectly happy to find myself hanging out at a new strip mall that was built in the closest suburb, the opposite direction as downtown. It was just as cool to me at the time and all of my friends, or those I though would make good friends were there. It wasn’t until later in life that I realized I could not allow my own daughters to roam downtown at will for fear of their safety that I began to miss those days of my own youth, freedom, and the feel of a real city. Of course my daughters were not interested in downtown anyway, they wanted to hang out at the mall. But what they missed! I am sad and angry that we, collectively and individually, have so injured our cities.

There are so many issues here; cultural, economic, historic, and social. So, before I stray from the topic, where are the public places we now provide to our young people to hang out in? Clearly, in most small to medium size American cities there are very few options and the teens seem to prefer a large suburban shopping mall.

Syracuse has the dubious distinction of being home to the Carousel Mall. The owners of this mall have hopes, with large public financing, of making it the largest mall in America. More about that elsewhere but it is interesting to note that this particular mall has instituted rules (available in printed form) that govern under what circumstances teenagers are permitted in the mall. Obviously they have had problems with gangs and various activities that are disturbing or harmful to other visitors but fundamentally, they disrupt the real purpose of the mall, selling merchandise. So with a great stroke of irony, the place where teens want to hang out is officially off limits to them for that purpose!

A shopping mall is an awkward variant on the definition of “public space”, because it is not truly public at all. A city street is a public place under all circumstances. Everyone, including teenagers, still needs to behave but anyone can walk by a place of business on a city street and look into the windows. Apparently this is not the case with a mall. But teenagers still need public places and they will always find someplace to hang out. The mall is greatly misunderstood by anyone who honestly believes that it is a great replacement for a metropolitan environment. It is simply an homogenous controlled environment designed by marketing wizards and we all must realize that they should not exist at the direct cost and peril of our true public spaces.