Dave bidini

‘The first few malls called to us the way the mouth of the spaceship called to Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind’

Iwas a mall kid growing up. They were a big deal in the ’70s suburbs; all of that thundering concrete landing heavy in the middle of parks and ravines. The first few Toronto malls — named after a kind of dreamy Brittania: Cloverdale, Albion, Yorkdale — called to us the way the mouth of the spaceship called to Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. For a single, flickering moment, the mall was to new suburban families what the piazza or town square is to old Europe. On Saturdays, every kid and their parents would promenade under the yellow ceiling glow, summoned to a hive, and the nature of that hive, because the idea of being together was hard to find elsewhere.

When I was 15, I spent a summer working at Music World at the Albion Mall. I’ve written before about how that played out — I was fired for being terrible at my job — but getting up every day and going to the mall to work was like getting up and going to Buckingham Palace. On break, I cruised the T-shirt stands and smoke shops; stared in the windows of the Supercutz watching older kids get punk haircuts; and snuck into the twin cinemas to see the next Planet of the Apes trailer.

Those early malls spun off strip malls. There was one in every suburban neighbourhood: a half-block of drugstores and bowling alleys. It was at the back of Westway Plaza that I took guitar lessons for the first time in a cramped room filled with hippies and weirdos trying to learn “Black Magic Woman.” On weekends, local bands would set up in the shop, and after school started, me and my friends would hang out on our bikes and watch them set up and play. Like the bigger malls, there was life here, too. Culture had barnacled to consumerism, and if you charted the origin of new Canadian music in the ’80s and ’ 90s, the lines would lead to parking lot plaza pavement.

Eventually, strip malls blossomed — “blossom” is the wrong word — into big-box stores that loomed over the suburbs like malls on steroids. Like most forms of consumerism, developers pressed their luck, and some of these grey wastelands made places like Cloverdale Mall look like the Taj Mahal.

Big-box outlets eagerly and impatiently doubled and tripled in numbers, gorging upon whatever was left of space on the fringes of the city. As we’ve seen with the quick demise of Target, and, most recently, Future Shop, this glut could not sustain, and because they offered no promenade, people looked elsewhere, especially in the city. Suddenly, there were people here in the streets, in the parks, in the shops. The light drained from many of the former beacons of consumerism, and the citizenry fell over each other trying to get back downtown.

I went back to the Albion Mall a few years ago. I had to remember what it was like, and to measure how far away those days were from there to here. From the outside, the mall seemed the same, but inside, it was empty. I left the Albion Mall. I ain’t ever going back there again.