Posts Tagged ‘Pittsburgh Mills Galleria’
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.
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