Many of us dread the annual ritual of trying to find distinctive gifts for relatives and friends, only to settle for the ubiquitous gift card as the holiday clock expires. A major challenge of the season is to discover a gift that you haven't seen before. We seem to be surrounded by sameness, both in the proliferation of mall chain stores and the merchandise they offer.
Over 30 years ago, this issue of sameness was addressed in a New Yorker piece by Calvin Trillin entitled "Thoughts brought on by prolonged exposure to exposed brick." In that piece he lamented the sameness he saw in the malls, with their sandblasted brick walls and fichus plants. A good number of these malls were developed by the Rouse Company, which introduced the marketplace concept that we see along the East Coast in Quincy Market in Boston and HarborPlace in Baltimore.
Whether you are in Albuquerque or Ann Arbor, the stores in most malls are the same, ranging from higher-end offerings like Williams Sonoma to lower-end offerings like Old Navy. Even Italy's famous Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, a precursor to the covered mall in the United States, now houses a McDonald's. Thirty years after Trillin's piece, in 2007, a Dave Barry column appeared in The New York Times lamenting what U. S. Route 1 has become: "A place just like every other place. Only not." We are surrounded by sameness.
Perhaps there is a sense of security and comforting predictability in knowing what stores and eateries you are going to see and the choices they offer. But over the long haul, there is a danger in such sameness. People get bored; they move on. And we see the consequences of this boredom as malls close and new ones open, built as open air malls with streetscapes that remind us of small town America in the 1950s. Often the distance between a mall and what has replaced it (or soon will) is less than a mile.
And there is certainly a danger in overbuilding, the consequences of which are already apparent. In 2007, no new malls opened in the United States, apparently the first time this has happened since the 1950s, according to an article by Matthews in 2008. To document these castoffs, there are even websites called deadmalls.com and labelscar.com (the latter featuring the store signs that are façade "scars" often visible on the exteriors of buildings when big box stores like Circuit City close).
In this cookie-cutter sameness, in the malls and their residential twins the suburbs, many social scientists think we have lost a sense of community. And Americans miss this. In his classic film "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces," the author William Whyte said people will pay "good money" for the experience of an old fashioned street. This experience, he says poignantly, they find at Disneyland. Similarly, urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg talks about America's vanishing third places, its bars, cafes, and delis. These third places have regulars; they're inclusive; and they're accessible.
As the holiday season reaches a fever pitch, let's not forget places with distinctiveness, most likely independent retailers, on the main streets of small towns. Those are likely to be the places with a sense of community and singularity; they're likely to be the places where someone will know your name.
