THE CHATTER
In praise of the uncommonly common space found at our shopping malls
In Coins, a short essay he wrote for the New Yorker in 2001, Nicholson Baker reflects on the power and the sanctity of the shopping mall water fountain and the coins we ritualistically toss it in offering. “The thing to do when you wished on a penny was to thumb-flip it very high,” he writes of the ceremony. “Every day you could check on your penny, or the penny you had decided must be your penny, to see how it was doing, whether it was accumulating wishful-filling powers.”
In the early 1970s, at age 16, Baker worked as a junior maintenance man at the Midtown Plaza in Rochester, N.Y., digging holes for parking signs and changing elevator light bulbs. One day, he was instructed to sweep up the coins from the Plaza fountain, and he “experienced a magisterial shiver” — him, a lowly teenage custodian, charged with so sacred a task!
The essay is a beautiful tribute to the practice of penny wishing. But if there is another, secondary theme in the paean, it has to do with the strange space the shopping mall itself opens up for such a custom to flourish.
Why exactly do malls have fountains? They have nothing to do with shopping. They do not encourage us to spend money — other than the pocket change we spend on a wish — and they are more expensive to build and maintain than a mere decorative flourish or other form of public of retail outposts it houses: commerce is the mission and purpose, and a mall strives to foster a willingness to spend. On the other hand, the mall is by its very design a kind of town square; only, enclosed and privately owned. In a bid to pamper shoppers and persuade them to remain there longer, malls take pains to be comfortable, reassuring and as pleasant as possible. People, duly seduced by those comforts, are drawn to the mall, and at the same time as they routinely part with their cash, they reclaim mall space as their non-commercial own. The consumerist paradise of the galleria thus becomes – almost despite its intentions – a free space to meet, gather, walk or play.
To understand the truth of this dichotomy one need only visit a mall and really look.
At the Billings Bridge Shopping Centre in Ottawa, Ont., a modest mall south of the downtown core, dozens of elderly locals from nearby apartment complexes spend the early hours of every morning wandering the empty halls, rounding the simple circuit for a daily bit of exercise as clerks and managers at the still-closed shops prepare to open for business. At the Galleria Shopping Centre at Dupont and Dufferin in Toronto, meanwhile, older men gather at clusters of little wooden park benches, enjoying the communal spirit without lending the vaguest consideration to buying anything at all.
Such community phenomena