DECEMBER 15, WEDNESDAY

THE MALL

Yesterday I saw the big and little box strip store on Hendersonville Road for the first time. Earlier I visited the Asheville Mall for the first time in years. I take that back, once a year Kathe would decide it was time that I wore something new and we would make a 15 minute trip to Belks in the Mall for new trousers and maybe a shirt. I put up with it knowing I wouldn’t have to come back for a year.

We also more often visited Barnes and Noble to read the magazines from their wide selection and to have a cup of coffee. Sometimes they had cut rate sales on books. Barnes and Noble is connected to the mall but has an outer entrance so we didn’t consider ourselves as having gone to the mall. Malls were for teenagers who had nothing better to do on Saturday evenings. Come to think of it, Barnes and Noble is another big box store, only more attractive, as are all the stores in the Mall. But in the last few years I have stopped buying printed books. I have shifted to eBooks, I have shifted to Amazon Kindle.

When we first came to Ashville in 1965 downtown Asheville was the place to shop. Belks, Dillards, Iveys, Pennys, Sears, all the big department stores were downtown. But in 1973, the Asheville Mall opened, just over the mountain from downtown and for the next twenty years the Mall expanded as the downtown stores moved to the Mall or shuttered. In the 80’s most of downtown Asheville was shabby and unsafe. But around 1990 a gradual shift happened, downtown Asheville rejected a bond issue which would have condemned and flattened the downtown and turned it into a mall and instead began a slow climb with new stores and movie theaters and a civic center and library and museum and new hotels to elegance and finally is the beautiful, lively downtown, crowded with restaurants and craft stores and galleries, mixture of a few high end chain stores such as Anthropologie and many local stores which proudly ask you to buy local.

And the Mall? When I visited it a few days ago to see what is there I found half the food court restaurants shuttered and one in five stores closed. The huge Sears store was sold and is projected to become condominiums.

Belks, formerly a high quality department store looks more like an outlet store, still with the same bright lights, especially in the cosmetic section, but with almost no sales people in sight. They must have gotten my email address through the last pair of pants and every day I get word of another half price sale.

They have the desperate air of a store about to go under, as does the whole Mall. The quality stores, Banana Republic, The Gap and other well known brands, either went out of business or went on line and bargain stores that I have never heard of have taken their place. Candy and coke machines and rocking chairs fill the halls, giving an illusion of activity.

The Mall always seemed a bland and sterile, but at its prime it was jammed with people at Christmas and it was impossible to get a place to park. It bustled with people Christmas shopping and seemed alive. When I was here few days ago there were a few people wandering listlessly around but they appeared to me to be eager to get in and get out. The pandemic hovers over us and maybe that explains part of what is happening. But over everything is Amazon and internet shopping. As I write this I listen for the Prime truck. Change is sweeping over everything and dislocating everything. But how ironic that the Mall which almost destroyed downtown Asheville is itself being destroyed by the same disrupting kinds of changes in commerce that made it so successful only twenty years ago