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John's Blog

Give a man a fish and feed him for a day....Teach him to use the internet and he won't bother you for weeks!

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Video Voyeur


edIT - LTLP
"Post-apocalyptic remnants of consumerism" is how the originator of this video describes it, which is pretty accurate. An artsy, well edited tour of a dead mall done up in the style of a music video would be another. The link is from one of my favorite "shopping nostalgia" sites Malls of America, which has a ton of vintage pictures and memorabilia from shopping centers throughout the country. Although I've probably liked to them before, some other good places that allow you to relive sights and stories of retail establishments of the past include:
deadmalls DOT com
Groceteria: Did You Bring Bottles? (supermarket history and architecture from the 20's through the 70's)
Not Fooling Anybody (a chronicle of bad storefront conversions)
The Weis Project (a study of architectural styles used by a Pennsylvania grocery store that I grew up with)
Modern Ruins (not retail related, but a series of stunning photographs of abandoned industrial and commercial sites)
|| JM, 12:11 AM

4 Comments:

For quiet a while we had two abandoned wal-mart buildings across the street from one another while they built the third one, a super wal-mart, only a few hundred feet from where the first wal-mart had been built. Each time one of these buildings was built, trees and wild habitants were destroyed. There isn't a gun large enough to make me walk into a wal-mart.

Our local mall is in its last throes of a long hard slog. Many of the store spaces are rented out on holiday basis or to fly by night stores selling only one item, like small imported rugs. I expect any day to hear of a new mall coming in some other location where they will lunar-scape, pave, cement and create another monster that we do not need.
Blogger pissed off patricia, at 8:51 AM  
I just visited deadmalls.com and saw a sad thing. I lived in Tampa a very long time and I see that one of the malls where I used to shop has been torn down for a parking lot. The picture of the run down mall, before it was torn down is very sad to me.
Blogger pissed off patricia, at 8:54 AM  
I'm no fan of Wal-Mart either, but they aren't the only ones responsible for overdevelopment and destruction of natural resources. Some of their other "sins" are even worse, but that's a topic for another day.

I find it interesting that despite the fact that many of us have rejected "the culture of consumerism", we still have emotional attachments to these "cathedrals of commerce". I'm guessing that it reflects our need to belong to a community, and since malls became the "new downtowns" these became an artificial community for many of us. Or not....just a rambling thought.
Blogger JM, at 3:30 PM  
Don't they have a lot of evangelical churches that move into those abandoned shopping malls?
Blogger Neil Shakespeare, at 11:52 PM  

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