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Community leaders, institutions, and even entire communities can inspire us to do great work ourselves. They can serve as role models, spark new ideas in us, or provide us with a place to place our energy. There are a great deal of community members and places left unsung or only recognized by a narrow population and while we can never show all of the people that deeply affect and serve their communities, we hope to shine a light on and share the stories of some of those people and places and what they mean to their community.
June 12, 2017
Submitted by: James Riley
Everyone knows that the largest mall in America is the Mall of America. Good thing too, or else that name might seem foolish. But it is only the largest mall because it has so many un-mall-like things in it. Things like roller coasters, post offices, and aquariums. The second largest mall in the United States does not waste its square footage on such silly non-retail pastimes. In fact, if we judged mall size strictly by retail space, King of Prussia Mall would be the largest.
We do, of course, judge a mall on space, retail or otherwise. Which stores occupy space in the mall. What the mall does with the common space between stores. It is impossible to walk through any mall in America and not judge it. Malls, like families, are always rising and falling in America. Your local mall, as you have undoubtedly noticed, is no different. It has changed.
In a mall, space is both a marker of success and of failure. Dying malls and thriving malls are remarkably similar but you would never mistake one for the other. Both have shuttered stores, empty lots where there ought to be retailers. But walk through a mall and see: are the closed spaces announcing things to come, teasing with anticipation of delights to be consumed? Or are they asking, practically begging, for tenants? Look too in the stores that are there. Are they sparse with little or no merchandise or are they tastefully spaced out with an expensive lack of variety? The distinction is subtle but unmistakable. Very rarely do you see the stores of the old malls, crowded with middle-class sensibilities and merchandise. The middle class is disappearing from our malls as well.
Closer to my home there are two malls, Christiana and Concord. They are the malls of my youth and adolescence and while Christiana Mall was always bigger, they always seemed comparable. Not anymore. Christiana has grown wide and strong as Concord has withered on the vine. In outfitting myself for this trip, I went to both and I saw the Concord Mall in a slow state of decay, attracting cheap stores or none at all. The Christiana has sucked it dry.
The Christiana Mall has gone the way of most thriving malls. It is, like King of Prussia, a luxury mall, focusing on high end retailers. Outside the mall, restaurants are springing up, as are specialty stores. All retail power is being funneled to the area creating a shopping complex that covers nearly a mile. Going to the luxury mall, like its cousin the outlet, is now a full day event.
As I walked through King of Prussia I found myself walking through many different malls. This is literally true, as what is now King of Prussia used to be three separate malls that have merged into one. But it is also figurative. Thriving luxury malls are microcosms of that favorite topic of armchair city theorists: gentrification. There are huge swaths of mall which contained intimidating stores with expensive things tastefully spread out and attended by well dressed staff members with trendy haircuts. They stood ready to help anyone who might walk in. Nobody did. This was during the middle of a Wednesday in June, so take whatever meaning from that you can.
I wandered the top floor completely, noting that even the food court seemed prohibitively fancy. When I went downstairs, I started to recognize the mall a little better. It was not a clean cut between the two, a glorious upper mall built upon the sleazy undermall; after all, Tesla has a showroom on the bottom floor. But the only section in the entire mall that felt as crammed with value as the middle-class malls of old was there and it was jarring enough for me to think it was dirty. Though it was just a Lids, a Gamestop, a food court and a handful of other stores, the change in aesthetic was arresting.
The young man working in Gamestop seemed unconcerned about the imminent threat I sensed. I asked him how business was; Gamestop, after all, closed more than a hundred stores this year. That is by design, he admitted. When Gamestop bought up all other similar video game stores years ago, it did not close any of them. It waited to see which stores did better than others and now it has a policy of closing a certain number of underperforming stores a year. I do not know if it is true, nor if I would be so confident that my store, sitting directly underneath another Gamestop, was so far from the chopping block. I do know that that is what Simon Property Group, the company that owns King of Prussia and a great number of other outlets and malls, does to its property. It sheds the weak and invests in the strong, fulfilling the oft cited adage the rich get richer and the poor just get the picture. You know, but for malls.
What then is left for the dying malls? Well, I don't know. But by gum, I will tell you what should happen. We don't have a money problem, we don't really even have a space problem. We have an imagination problem. Why does the mall have to be a strict retail space. Why can't an anchor store be an art museum? There are of course the malls whose buildings have found second use as medical centers, hockey rinks, high schools, and churches, but why not more? Imagine a mall with a Cinnabon, an open public space, an escape room, micro-library sights, startup offices, a senior center, and painters' studios. What if the food courts were salons and there were afterschool programs running engineering and robotics clubs out of what used to be Radio Shacks? What about showers for the homeless or collection facilities for recycled electronics or distribution centers of food banks or community greenhouses? Why not a historical society next to Hot Topic? Why can't malls meet any other need of the community besides retail? If it works for Mall of America, why not for the rest of the malls of America?
March 6, 2017
Submitted by: Lisa Riley
I, as so many, have been completely despondent since the election. Besides knowing what a poor imitation of P.T. Barnum the president is, I work with many Donald Trump supporters, and I am having a difficult time understanding how they could fall for this very badly done con man. I find it difficult to look them in the eye or include them in a story or joke. I feel they have jeopardized my well-being, and in extension the world's well-being.
When I first heard of the Women's March on Washington, my younger son and I decided at once we would go. So, with my antibiotics for my infected sinuses, my orthopedic inserts in my shoes, and a purse full of tissues off we went to the Wilmington, Delaware, train station, the one named after Joseph Biden.
Getting on the train was the first of many emotional hits of the day. Completely packed! Every seat in every one of the 11 cars. We sat with the conductors who told us that Amtrak was able to put on 3 extra trains for the day. Each one of those were also sold out. It was a lighthearted ride with the excited conversations around us, including the conductors who were so happy with everyone's behavior and jovial attitude.
We walked from Union Station, helped across the street by a traffic cop swinging her pink hat, just following the crowd. Somehow we ended up behind the stage. At only 10am, the time the speakers were to start, I already felt like the Mighty Python soldiers, walking into a wall. We turned around, tried to get down another way and found the same thing. This was all done without pushing or shoving or tempers. People would just kind of reverse course and try a new way. It did not take long for us to figure out we were not getting to the stage, still don't know where it was, so we headed down the mall, our nation's mall.
Having been to the Smithsonian Museum many times, I was familiar with the area, but never had I seen it so beautiful: People, all kinds of people, all ages of people, just moving. There were things left from the inauguration still on the grounds: tents and some chairs and many port-a-potties. Although we were able to find one out of the way that was opened, we found out that all the port-a-potties left from the day before had been PADLOCKED. I cannot at this time think of anything that explains this new administration as well as a locked toilet. There seemed to have been someone with clippers that got about 20 of them opened. Feminine ingenuity.
We saw no food trucks and the wait for the caf� in the Smithsonian visitor center line seemed endless. But there were chocolate bars in the gift shop. With sugar and caffeine, I was set.
We kept heading to the Washington Memorial thinking that the march would have to come by us. It looked like the march had started and we joined the flow. It was not too long before the flow became a slow moving current. We timed the walk for one block to be 36 minutes.
I am making note of the inconveniences only to make the point that none of it mattered. There was no grumbling or complaining. Everyone just made the best of what was happening and all of us enjoying the moment. For the first time since November 8th, we had a purpose and a voice, and yes, even a smile.
There were all generations represented, but the majority were young. It was the young people that gave me hope. To be witness to their passion and dedication to do the right thing, that gave me hope. Even if the right thing to do is put themselves between a couple of anti-choice protesters and a very determined and very angry woman who wanted to walk through them. (Yes, that woman was me.) Those young men and women, so much more in tune with the spirit of free speech, saved me from embarrassing myself.
I think it was then that I realized we will be ok. It is going to be a long, dark battle to come. The war on ignorance and apathy is a most difficult fight. We, as a society, have become lazy in our job as citizens. We have sat back and allowed those less informed and less inquisitive to hijack what it means to be a successful American.
Size seems to have become the way the society has measured success. How big of a house, how big and fancy of a car, how much money can you get and how little do you need to give back to society or government. Although the size of the march was enormous, that was not the measure of success for me. What I saw that Saturday in DC was a younger generation teaching a clinic on citizenship. We cannot sit back and let others push this country in a direction we don't agree with and think an election every 4 years is the only recourse. We need to be active - in your face and loud. Unacceptable behavior is just not acceptable. Unacceptable policies are just that, unacceptable.
Before I went to Washington DC on January 21, 2017, I was worried and scared of what would become of this country under this administration. I am not anymore. These children of ours will teach us a new meaning of success, that community is not just your family and where you live. Community is the country and our place in the world. If they don't have a house bigger than the one they grew up in, if they don't take elaborate vacations, if they don't do the job their parents did - that is not a failure to them. Instead they seek to become the heart and mind of a democracy. Let the office holders know when they do something good, and let the world know when they have done something unjust. This young generation might just find a whole new way to measure success. I, for one, am in awe of them and hope they just let me to continue to walk beside them.