It’s been awhile.
I was driving past the mall earlier this week, a day or two after a blizzard dropped a foot of snow on Portland. It’s been bitterly cold, so the snow is light and fluffy, drifting in the wind. I drove past a wasteland site with a singularly ugly building at the center. It’s a car dealership, almost complete, small signs saying “we’re hiring” and “coming this spring” dotting the entrance, mostly buried in the drifts.
Car dealership architecture is close to the worst there is, largely because the actual building for the dealership is beside the point: it’s just a backdrop for the sea of gleaming cars, a backdrop that makes you covet the cars. Without the inventory, though, the building is less than an empty shell – it feels like a scrim at the back of a theater stage after a show has packed up, dust and scraps of paper and tape markings on the floor and the shadows on the scrim from where the spotlights focused for too long during the run. It has a feeling of something that needs to be taken down and put away.
It struck me as I continued on through the mall scape that actually, most postwar retail architecture is of that same type. The buildings are mostly boxes, occasionally with charming touches – the Maine Mall has faux mansard awnings at the entrance to Macy’s, formerly Jordan Marsh when I worked at the food court – but all set back sometimes hundreds of yards from the street. What you’re meant to see is not the building itself but the cars parked in front. Ideally lots and lots of cars, to make you think “gosh, if all those people are fulfilling their retail needs here, maybe I should too.”
Funnily enough, despite the essential uselessness of the actual facades, these buildings are rarely tagged with graffiti. I’m sure the mall security staff will claim the victory here, but I actually think it says something about the graffiti artists: they want their wall art to be seen, but these buildings are too far away from people who actually look at anything, and in any event, there’s usually a few hundred cars between the wall of a mall and any potential viewers passing by. It’s sort of a shame, really, because these malls are actually perfect targets – mostly tall flat stucco surfaces, usually some pale tan or white color making an ideal foundation layer – and some organic riot of colour would do those surfaces good.
Graffiti, though, inevitably pops up in densely built areas in cities, not in the wastelands of the exurbs. I was in Lisbon with the ex-girlfriend (who is really the girlfriend again, but no need for that now) and the downtown – beautiful 18th century churches and warehouses and palaces – was pretty much tagged everywhere. And not particularly good graffiti, and with none of the politeness of Northeast Corridor graffiti folk who painstakingly fill in blocks of colour and would never deface another person’s tag. Some blocks looked like a pack of four year olds hyped up on espresso found a case of black spray paint and just sprayed randomly until they ran out.
On the ride to the airport in the fog, you could see pockets of retail pop out as you came out of the city centre, but much closer to the housing estates and developments than you’d see in North America. And with that small added density, sure enough, the graffiti artists took full advantage of the wide, tall, unmarked corrugated sides of the big box stores – names that I didn’t recognize but clearly just the local version of Best Buy and Home Depot and the other usual suspects. Instead of boring endless paneling, though, there was stabs of poorly done white and black and red tags. Not much, but better than the alternative.
When you take off from a certain runway in Portland, the plane usually banks to the south and gives you – from the left side of the plane – a perfectly framed aerial perspective on the mall and its environs. It’s like the area has been bombed out, with cartoon-perfect craters formed in the aftermath with a big box store in the middle of each crater surrounded by parking. On a certain level, the only graffiti that would make sense for that exurban desert would be on the rooftops, or on the more remote pieces of parking lot that are only used to store snow in the winter. You’d have a reliable audience – forty or fifty planes a day if the winds are right – and the view isn’t blocked by cars.
This is just a short one – I need to get back in practice. I’ve had a lot to write about but not necessarily in this format. But I’m ready to start again.
Happy New Year, by the way…