Posts Tagged ‘Dead mall’
Liminal Space overload part 2
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At the Pittsburgh Mills Galleria, a fairly empty shopping mall nearby Pittsburgh in Fraser Township, your humble narrator just kept on shooting photos. Our Lady and myself were struck by the surreal neature of the experience in this ‘liminal space.’
As mentioned yesterday, one kept on noticing how ‘maintained’ everything was. Dusted, vacuumed, mopped.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
We had to cancel an outdoor activity – due to high waters on areal waterways, caused by unusual precipitant volumes recently fallen – which promulgated ‘flash flood’ warnings from the authorities. Our initial ‘out of doors’ destination was thereby scrapped, so we visited this place instead.
As often mentioned, I’ve got ‘a list,’ and much of it is already pinpointed on a Google map. Whenever I find myself somewhere unexpectedly with time to kill, I’ll check that map, and see what’s nearby.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I didn’t see any part of Pennsylvania’s anti-vampire systems nearby – no giant white steel crosses on the hillsides, for instance – and wondered if perhaps this place gets real busy at night? Maybe the invasive vampire issue they’re vouchsafing against to the south is related to Maryland, or West Virginia, as you see more of those hillside crosses in that ‘border zone’ than in the northern parts of the region.
Go figure. Meshuggeneh Goyem, huh?
Churches, too, could make great use of the cavernous interior spaces here in this mall. Supposedly, there used to be a Baptist denomination which met up in here somewhere for services, and for some reason I seem to think that it was set up in the former movie theater.
One reads a lot of background stuff before writing one of these posts, some of it gets linked to, and some of it is just absorbed for texture.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Concern began to grow that I had led Our Lady into a hellish maze.
It’s impossible to maintain a sense of ‘where’ you are in relation to the outside world in here. I kept on thinking that we’d make the next turn and see Judas being chewed up in Satan’s mouth, at the deepest levels of Gehenna. I was also worried about a series of Dungeons and Dragons monsters lurking about. Beholders… brr.
What an odd experience.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
We began to near the entrance which brought us into this place, which would provide an exit back to the parking lot where we had stored the Mobile Oppression Platform, a Toyota. Getting here definitely requires a vehicle, although I’m sure that there’s an arcane and kind of weird multi hour route you could use Pittsburgh’s bus system to execute.
All told, this is just under an hour’s drive from HQ in the South Hills region where Newtown Pentacle HQ is found in Dormont.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Regarding the Newtown Pentacle time warp – these shots, and the ones from the Tour-Ed Mine, were gathered on the 14th of August and the text in these posts entered on the 23rd of the same month. As you’re receiving this in middle October, I’ve got a problem emerging.
Not publishing Halloween oriented posts at Christmas.
I’ll figure it out.
Back tomorrow with something different – at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
Liminal Space Overload
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After descending into a coal mine (and museum) in nearby Tarentum, and then having a lovely lunch – as described in prior posts – Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself drove over to the Pittsburgh Mills Galleria, a 2005 vintage shopping mall with quite a tumultuous history.
It was all very, very odd – this visit.
I don’t like or advocate use of the term ‘dead mall,’ as a note. If you were to search on YouTube for this location, you will hear that one a lot in the videos you see. Saying that, I don’t have an alternative terminology to offer, so…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This mall has a long and convoluted history, but it was the dream and life’s work of an entrepreneur named George Damias, and his quite controversial project began in the 1980’s, opening in 2005.
Rather than summarize the Wikipedia entry for you – go get it all right from the horse’s wikimouth here.
It was so odd in there.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The only camera option for this place was to use the widest lens I had in the bag, which was a 16mm prime. The ISO sensitivity was set high, 6400 I think, and the lens’s aperture was set at f4.
There were a few other people present in the mall, but not so many, as there’s just a few smaller shops and office spaces occupied within. We saw maybe twenty or thirty others, all seemingly human.
Allegheny Health Network uses one of the large storefronts here as a school for nursing. There was also an open comic book store and also a snack shop, the kind that sells cotton candy and chocolate coated nuts.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Despite the mall being de facto ‘kaput,’ and mostly unoccupied, one thing that just kept on jumping out at me was that this place was being ‘kept’ in a fairly immaculate manner. Somebody is dusting, and mopping those floors, polishing the glass.
That’s the food court pictured, incidentally.
The air conditioning was on, but was set high by shopping mall standard, around 78-80 degrees.
Haven’t spent much time in malls since the late 1980’s, but part of the ‘draw’ for those places always involved the air conditioning. Central and residential AC didn’t become ubiquitous until the last 25 years or so, and ‘back in the day,’ your best bet for staying cool – for free – during the high summer was heading over to a mall (Kings Plaza, in the case of my old neighborhood in Brooklyn) and literally ‘chill out.’
Big deal during the summer, that mall AC was.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I had to inspect the porcelain. There were some plumbing issues going on in there, but again – it’s some random bathroom, in a largely unoccupied shopping mall, and there were paper towels and soap, filled to spec, in their dispensers. It was clean in there.
As mentioned, we did see a few other people while walking this liminal space, whose excess in certain areas lent a sense of bizarre profanity to the experience. Elderly mall walkers were observed, seemingly walking endless circuits through an empty space.
I thought about Dante.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My head is full of ideas for saving these sorts of spaces. I’ve got a scheme in mind that could do it, but that would require some out of the box thinking and a budget, and that’s not something which people out here – or anywhere – are terribly enthusiastic about embracing these days.
Simply, tying these spaces to local agricultural businesses (Pittsburgh is surrounded by rural counties, and smallish family farms) for direct to consumer sales would be a bit difficult to handle, as far as setting things up, but would be a win/win for everyone concerned. Cut the national level AG distributors like Cysco out of the economic loop, so the profit stays with the farmer and the tax money remains local.
The citizenry gains access to local grown food, Wall Street is cut out of the loop, and the Pittsburgh Mills Galleria would have a reason to turn the air conditioning down around 70 degrees again.
Back tomorrow with more.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
