photo from labelscar.com

Labelscar.com is a fascinating blog about shopping malls all across the United States (via).

On the face of it, malls seem anything BUT interesting — from the outside they’re oversized, featureless buildings surrounded by acres of parking lot, and inside they are often sterile and (thanks to the plethora of national mall retail chains) generic. Nevertheless, shopping malls became the crossroads of hundreds of American communities in the 1970s and 1980s and are as deeply enmeshed in our culture today as the fabled downtown ever was in the earlier part of the 20th Century. I vivdly remember when the first enclosed mall opened in my hometown (well, in the city across the river, Lewiston, but the distinction between the two cities is blurry at best) and I was already in high school when the “big” mall opened (really in my hometown this time). My friends and I spent plenty of time at the mall, but we escaped being true mallrats by only a couple of years. Now, we are well into a second generation of Americans whose public sphere has only ever been the mall.

“Labelscar” takes its name from the mark left behind when a store leaves a particular mall space, and the removal of the store logo leaves behind unsullied paint or other marks. A lot of this website is taken up with documenting defunct malls, and, as with the photo above, the pictures of spaces ordinarily full of people and goods gone dark and empty cause a bit of cognitive dissonance.

One particular subsection of the site appealed to me quite a bit: All The Malls Of New England. One of the site’s authors claims that he has been inside every single enclosed shopping mall in all six New England states. He lists all of the malls he’s been inside, though he only has photos of a small subset. I believe that I have come up with two that he missed — the Tontine Mall in Brunswick and the Rainbow Mall in Portland. The Tontine Mall still exists as far as I know (I haven’t been to Brunswick in years), but the Rainbow Mall long ago became the home of Andover College. It has not been a mall for so long, that it’s likely that the blog author isn’t old enough to ever know it was a mall.

Neat website, good for an afternoon’s-worth of noodling around. Lots of interesting and informative comments from visitors reminsicing about their childhood malls or filling in some of the gaps in information.