Be the wind that blows against the wrecking ball

On the resurrection of a dying mall

Just before the holidays, our urban sketchers group went to the Lloyd Center to draw the ice skaters. The Lloyd Center is Portland’s dying mall; you probably have one like it where you live. In the sixties, it was a breezy open-air mall with an ice skating rink in the middle. In the seventies and eighties it was a sprawling indoor megamall with anchor stores like Nordstrom and JC Penny, interspersed with places like WaldenBooks and Express and Orange Julius.

Teenagers—you might’ve been one at the time—had a mall-based social life. It was a free-range hangout space, with cheap snacks and clothes you could try on and magazines you could sit on the floor and read for free. At least eight movies, almost all of them fresh, original stories not based on any comic book, were playing at the multiplex at any given time. Parents brought their restless toddlers to the mall, just for variety. In the morning old people, wary of trip hazards and inclement weather, could go for walks. It didn’t seem so great at the time, but in hindsight it kind of was.

Nothing remarkable up to this point, right? Many of you remember this.

In the nineties, those major department stores started to shut down and the mall declined. The Lloyd Center was sold to a private equity firm. They sold it to another firm. Which sold it to another. And so on.

It is, of course, slated to be torn down.

A few years ago, our urban sketchers group decided to draw the mall to commemorate it before it was reduced to rubble. Outside the main entrance is a sculpture of a stack of coins called “Capitalism.” Quotes about money are inscribed around the edges of the coins: my favorite comes from William Blake, writing about his frustration with the art establishment in England in the early 1800s: “When Nations grow Old the Arts grow Cold, And Commerce settles on every Tree.”

The sculpture was covered in grime and the fountain it sat in had long ago stopped working. Many in our merry band of artists didn’t even bother going inside the mall. Nothing was happening in there. We drew the crumbling monument to capitalism and called it a day.

But then the mall didn’t die.

The latest conspiracy of capitalists to own it (that’s the collective noun for capitalists), do plan to tear it down and replace it with the sort of mixed-use condo/apartment/retail/faux neighborhood you see everywhere. But this takes time, and while they’re working on their plans and permits, they decided to lease the spaces in the mall for cheap—something around $1000 a month, according to local reports, with a short-term lease that doesn’t terrify a weirdo independent business owner.

So the weirdo independent businesses showed up.

I was there in mid-December. After I drew the ice skaters, I wandered around the mall. I stopped at Floating World Comics, one of the first to move in, and marveled (see what I did there) at their massive selection of zines. The place was so crowded I could hardly get around.

There was a store for magicians and a chess club and a bridge club. There was a place where you could learn to roller skate—not a full rink, just a store about the size of a Wet Seal, where you could come in and somebody would show you some moves on skates.

There was a music school where you could learn to play the piano, and a couple of art schools, and a pickleball court.

One storefront had been taken over by—I thought I might’ve hallucinated this one, so I had to look it up just now—an arcade with nothing but claw machines. And there was a pinball museum, operated by some Portlanders who repair pinball machines, and they’ll let you come inside and play all day for eight bucks.

There were several holiday markets where the youngsters were selling their hipster art: risograph prints, hand-crocheted flowers, papier-mâché flying cats.

One tiny storefront had been turned into an immersive art exhibit featuring some artist from LA who worked in denim. Another store had been transformed into a vintage clothing wonderland, adorned with enough black paint and old house woodwork that took on a surprisingly bohemian air, considering that it had probably once been a Sharper Image.

I remembered that last year, the Victoria’s Secret had been taken over by a theater company that brought in fifty folding chairs and put on a Samuel Beckett play, surrounded by all the fixtures and the pink-striped wallpaper. “We’re not trying to pretend we’re not in the Victoria’s Secret,” the director said. There were no plays on while I was there, but there was also no reason why there couldn’t be.

Remarkably, the Barnes & Noble was still in business, and it was full of people buying books and magazines and coffee, as if the 2010s and 2020s had never happened.

At either end of the mall, where the abandoned department stores still stood empty, little kids kicked a soccer ball around.

And then I realized that something else was going on.

An Ann Taylor Loft had been turned into a sort of art installation/educational space for a group advocating to protect and restore the Willamette River. The fixtures still lined the walls, looking all slick and corporate, but the river activists brought in their photos and maps and hand-painted signs with slogans like “There’s Magic Everywhere” which I guess applies to rivers as much as anything else, and it was a slightly befuddling hodge-podge of handmade river-themed wonderfulness.

At the former clothing store The Children’s Place, a shop had been set up for teens in foster care to come pick out free clothes. The teens congregated around the store, looking as sulky and bored-but-also-not-leaving as teenagers at malls always have.

A free toy store was set up at the other end of the mall for low-income kids.

There was a health care clinic, and the headquarters of a climate change/sustainability nonprofit, and—I feel like maybe I also imagined this but now I’m not sure?—some sort of buy nothing store.

And you could still get an Orange Julius.

It’s weird and punk and post-apocalyptic, because all the trappings of the mall are still there: the signs, the fixtures, the bland white walls. Nobody has money for a renovation. They don’t give a shit that their art gallery looks like an Old Navy, which is the most punk attitude to take about it. The whole place looks like a bunch of fierce hobbyist-anarchist-activist-bohemians moved into the deserted remnants of nineties-era consumerism and set up camp—because that’s exactly what happened.

Portland’s food cart scene started like this. In the 1990s, a massive downtown city block sat empty. The food carts were a way to bring in a little money while the owner waited...and waited…for the real estate market to turn around. And it flourished. The food cart pod was a wonderland of chefs, unburdened by prohibitive start-up costs, experimenting with steamed buns and curry burritos. It became a massive tourist attraction, spurred the development of food cart pods all over the city, and launched many of the great restaurants that make Portland’s food scene so interesting today.

Then the real estate market did turn around (which is a euphemism for “then the blob of free-floating investor wealth grew so enormous that it had nowhere else to go and formed a pile 35 stories tall on a vacant lot in downtown Portland”), and all the carts, as iconic and successful as they were, nonetheless had to move so someone could build a fucking Ritz Carlton on the lot (that’s what we all call it, The Fucking Ritz Carlton), and I suppose something similar will happen at the Lloyd Center as soon as the capitalists get their funding and permits lined up—

—but there is some part of me, some sparky and overly idealistic part of me, that is rooting for the capitalists to fail, and for the mall to linger in the miasma of financial uncertainty that would have lasted indefinitely under normal market conditions (“normal” being a euphemism for “operating in reality, and not under the influence of a metastasizing blob of free-floating investor wealth that will demolish and rebuild anything, in any community, whether people want it there or not, just to give the money a place to go”)¹…

and in that scenario, the weirdos would keep on selling their magician supplies and repairing pinball machines and staging plays in abandoned dressing rooms and giving away free clothes to foster kids, and all those people would meet one another and cross-pollinate and start bands and write plays and be the wind that blows against the wrecking ball, for as long as that can possibly last.

Long live the Lloyd Center! Y’all come out and see it while you can.

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Hey wow there are so many new people here!

So Substack shared my post about the tree I lost, and over a thousand people signed up for this newsletter.

Hi, thousand new people! I’m the author of fourteen books, and if you’ve read any of them, it’s probably The Tree Collectors, The Drunken Botanist, Wicked Plants, or Girl Waits with Gun.

In this space I have written about self-appointed artist residencies, five non-existent jobs I would like to do (be sure to read the comments), why I love pulling weeds, a productivity hack that involves cookies, and my ideas about walking in the woods. I do not always write about things being torn down while I make art about it. That’s a coincidence, or…I don’t know…a response to the moment we’re in right now.

I’m also an artist, and for a very small amount of money you can join me in exploring anything and everything we can make in a sketchbook. The archives are here if you want a preview.

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The bit at the end

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1. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Portland once had people like self-made businessman and philanthropist Bill Naito, who time and again saw vacant buildings and derelict neighborhoods as opportunities for homegrown ideas to flourish. He put partnerships together to make a truly astonishing number of good things happen in Portland. Seriously, go read about this guy.