(When I was a kid, maybe nine years old, I remember sitting at home with my mom on a Saturday night, waiting to drive back up to our local mall and pick up my sister, Shannon, at closing time. She was around 15 then, outfitted with a pager my mom bought for her at that very mall. It was a simple model. You would call a number, then the pager would beep, notifying her of what number to call back. The pager was enclosed in an opaque, dark purple case and affixed to the belt loop of her Levi’s with a gold chain.

My mom and I had dropped Shannon and her friend, Laura, off at the Foley’s a few hours before. Foley’s, the now defunct department store chain, was my family’s standard mall meeting point. If we got dropped off, it was at the Foley’s. If we were to be picked up? Foley’s. Lost in the mall and couldn’t find each other? Meet at the Foley’s, specifically on the sofas right by the glass doors. This wasn’t due to any brand loyalty on our part. In fact, mama always said Foley’s was “too rich for our blood.” It was sheer convenience. Foley’s was situated on the back side of Town East Mall, meaning you could avoid the highway access road to get there.

That fateful night, we returned to Foley’s to pick up Shannon and Laura only to find them in hysterics. Some boys Laura tried picking up had stolen Shannon’s pager. They hadn’t stolen it from Shannon’s body, however. She had let Laura wear it, I suppose so that Laura could look cool in that certain way that only a pager can accomplish. But Laura’s canoodling proved dangerous and the pager was snatched away, never to be recovered. It turned out that the gold chain was no match for the clutches of a determined teenage boy.

Town East Mall was the center point of our suburban town back then. Erected in 1971, the mall was anchored by four stores. Sanger-Harris, later turned Foley’s, is currently a Macy’s. Years’ worth of my back-to-school clothes were purchased at another of the anchor stores, JC Penney.

Extremely fancy clothes like prom dresses and bridesmaids’ dresses were procured from down the way at the more upscale Dillard’s (formerly Tiche-Gottinger then Joske’s). Sears has stood stalwart since the beginning, but like hundreds of other locations across the country, it is set to close up shop in April 2021.

The thing about growing up a suburban kid is the mall becomes your be-all, end-all. It is a place that contains not just stores, but the hope and belief that something lies inside that is just what you need. That something waiting for you has the possibility to change your life. What is that thing? Doesn’t matter. That’s the mall’s magic. The perfect thing could be in there. You just have to go in and find out.

Just thinking of the baby-bottle-lighthouse affixed on our hometown shopping center’s roof jostles loose an avalanche of formative memories for me.

I feel like that descriptor requires photographic evidence for you non-Mesquitians.

My family got our first cell phone from a Cingular kiosk right outside the Foley’s. I believe having said that sentence, I now qualify for the senior breakfast special at Denny’s. I used to walk the aisles of KB Toys, craving a new board game or action figure or Barbie doll. I filled cellophane bags full of treats at The Sweet Factory. I got the clothes for my first ever grown-up job from the women’s section at JC Penney. I had some arguably too glamorous Glamour Shots taken for a friend’s birthday party outside the Sears.

Sure, my mall nostalgia may be turned up to 11 with the isolation from COVID, but I also think I’m not off the mark. Online shopping is great, don’t get me wrong. I love being able to Google something as specific as “Zack Morris divinity candle” and within days, have that same item arrive at my house. But the intrinsic value of a mall is that I shouldn’t have to Google that in the first place. I should be able to walk into a Spencer’s Gifts, and it should be there, waiting for me, beckoning me to buy it.

On the flip side, I will concede that malls are also breeding grounds for filthy teenagers making out, smoking cigarettes, doing petty crime. But that’s what gives us* the grit to become responsible adults.

* It feels disingenuous not to correct your thinking that I’ve done any of those things. To be clear: I have never made out, smoked a cigarette, or done a petty crime at a mall. This is not because I am better than anyone. It’s just that I currently am and always have been a big ol’ chicken shit scared of getting busted. But think of all the rebellious things I could have done! The mall gave me that chance. It was I who squandered it.

The original creator of malls, store designer and architect Victor David Gruen, saw the mall’s potential as a fully operational center point for the rising suburban communities. More than just stores, Gruen’s invention was to be the “third place” for many suburbanites. If home was first and work was second, then the mall could be that third place where families spent time away from the house, but not in the city.

Across many towns, that third place is now dead.

An entire genre of YouTubers has emerged around “dead malls.” A sub-genre of urban exploration, “dead mall” vloggers show the decrepit remains of long-abandoned malls, often interspersed with archival footage showing the malls in all their former glory.

This devolution was seemingly inevitable. What Gruen initially intended as an indoor oasis became overrun by commerce. Where his first mall in Edina, Minnesota included a bird sanctuary and a green space, later malls that sprung up in its wake included, rather than birds, Sbarro’s, Auntie Anne’s, and Cinnabon.

The Slamdance film Jasper Mall covers a year in the life of the titular shopping center in Jasper, Alabama. The town is home to just over 14,000 residents, many of whom use the mall as a sort of community center.

Seniors show up right as the doors are unlocked, walking shoes laced up, ready to make their loops. A foursome of septuagenarians gathers around a food court table, not to enjoy a quick bite, but to play dominoes and socialize for hours. In the introductory moments of the movie, the security guard/mall manager/jack of all trades, Mike, mentions that he lets the city’s homeless population in during cold winter months to protect them from the elements.

Malls have been on a steady decline over the past few years, a trend that has been exacerbated by COVID. But much like Gruen’s initial vision, malls across the country have begun trending back toward their community-centered roots. The emptied-out anchor space in Jasper that sat idle since 2017 is now home to a worship center, kid’s play place, and private school. One mall in Gwinnett, Georgia has utilized empty retail space to conduct mass COVID vaccinations, and it’s not the only one. Where once you tried on the latest pair of Reebok’s or sniffed CK-One from rectangular sample cards, soon you will be able receive your COVID vaccine.

The over-saturation of malls that began in the late 1970s and eventually tapered off in the late 1990s may have been the mall’s downfall. In Dallas, for instance, Valley View Mall’s traffic was significantly diminished when the Galleria was built less than a mile away. Updated and sleek, the Galleria sucked major brands away from Valley View, leaving the older mall to suck in its final dying gasps these past few years. Corridor by corridor have found themselves on the business end of a bulldozer.

Maybe I’ve just been cooped up for too long. Maybe I’m drunk on nostalgia and fuzzy feelings. But I fear that the loss of malls means the death of a major American institution that has powered suburban commerce for the past seven decades. Plus, where else am I supposed to get my Dippin’ Dots?

From the looks of things, the mall of my youth isn’t a total loss cause. In the past few years, Town East has received interest from some big retailers, with Dick’s Sporting Goods moving in as another anchor in 2018. Even with that, the old gray mall just ain’t what she used to be. She isn’t ghastly or gutted enough to find herself on a “dead mall” video, but neither is she beautiful or bountiful enough to be featured on a shopping vlogger’s channel. But still she stands, right where I remember her, doors open, ready for our return.

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This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.