At its peak, the great glass-domed structure housed more than 100 stores, not including the penthouse food court, with today’s numbers dwindling into the 50s. If you’re looking to bust the malls-are-dying theories, the 5th Avenue Mall in downtown Anchorage is a bad place to start. “Oh, that was a real hit to the community,” an Uber driver explains before getting back into “my kind of libertarianism” and what a Fred Meyer is and is not. It’s fraught here, but there’s one thing everyone can agree on: It is really fucked up that the Nordstrom is gone. Nathaniel Wilder/Eater AnchorageĪnchorage is a politically divided town, so much so that the city’s Jewish Democratic mayor was forced out of office just two years ago amid a false pedophilia rumor. Patriarch Michael with his kids Dmitri, 13-year-old Michael Jr., and 14-year-old Arlene at the food court. It would be a simple process for the writer from California - look friendly, ask photographers to hang back, approach teenagers to ask them about the heavily processed meat they’re gossiping over. My question for teenagers and other youths across the West is simple: Is the mall food court still a cultural watering hole, or am I fucking old now? In an effort that was part journalism, part exposure therapy, I put on my best “hello, fellow kids” regalia and lurked the food courts of Anchorage, Alaska Tempe, Arizona and Portland, Oregon, to find out what today’s mall teens had to say about it, if they even still existed at all. The word is that the mall is dying: something about kids these days, something about online shopping, something about the food court’s legacy going the way of the three-camera sitcom and the middle class. I wasn’t allowed to be a mall kid, and I coped in a move so adjacent to Disney adults it makes my nose bleed - I’m a mall adult.
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The feeling blended with the taste, whether it came in the form of rubbery mystery meat from Sarku Japan or whatever vegetable they decided to put on top of the cardboard dough at Sbarro that week. The TV shows I obsessed over would airdrop their characters at the mall dressed in clothing far more disposable than the Styrofoam containers full of prop food they ate out of: There, they’d exchange information, silently judge one another, fall in love, and plot out the rest of their fictional lives in a way that made me want the same. I went in with a framework for what it Meant.
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“I’m a bit of a foodie myself,” he says.Īs a kid, I entered the mall food court with more than just my mom and 10 clammy dollars. “Can you talk to me about the food court for five minutes?”Ī 15-year-old named Earl nods sagely, eating garlic fries and wearing a winter jacket with the tags on.
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“I write for a magazine,” I tell two teenage boys in Anchorage, Alaska, at the fifth-floor summit of a dying mall.