Requiem for the Great American Shopping Center
Jacob Schlather

In Forest Oak Mills Mall we find ourselves in the ruins of consumerism. A 1.5 million square foot shopping mall that has three stores left inside it, a macy’s, an arcade and a gym. This sprawling two story mall was frozen in the 1980s and has been thawed out now and begun to die. This building isn’t abandoned, quite yet. But it’s certainly a ruin, reminding of us a different era in America history, that of the shopping mall. When you and your friends would make plans to meet at the fountain at the mall at 12:30 on Saturday. And sometimes your friends would get impatient and you’d have to go look for them in fye, hot topic, spencers, wherever they were. These things are dead now, the internet has killed them. Now we get our consumer goods delivered to us and the shopping malls die slowly, with air conditioning, in a vision of our recent past.

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