Story and photos by Pete Shaw
“They put a parking lot on the piece of land
Where the supermarket used to stand
Before that they put up a bowling alley
On the site that used to be the local palais
That’s where the big bands used to come and play
My sister went there on a Saturday.”
–Ray Davies
As my better 99% and I approached the Lloyd Mall on Saturday August 8th, we were shocked by the huge number of cars in the parking lot on the north side of the mall. We parked in an auxiliary lot, one which I had never even given thought to using before, particularly over the past ten or so years when I could have parked the entire fleet of rental cars from the Portland airport and still had ample space for more.
“Is everyone here for the magic show?”
“I don’t think so. It’s a small place.”
As we parked the car, I remembered this was the final day for the mall. After 66 years, it was time. For what remains uncertain. In typical fashion for this city and this country, there is, if you’ll excuse the reference, a concept of an idea. In more prosaic terms, destroy first, ask questions later. Regardless, but also because, thousands of people had shown up to bid farewell to what has long been an iconic Portland institution.
I have never been much of a person for malls. When I was growing up in New Jersey, my mom would sometimes go to one of the three malls within reasonable driving distance to get something she needed at a department store, or some school clothing for my brother and I, leaving us to wander, often to a book or music store. If we didn’t burn the place down, or at least didn’t burn the wrong things down, we were rewarded with lunch at Friendly’s. I remember exciting times around Christmas, the long lines of kids at the Woodbridge Mall eagerly awaiting our chance to tell Santa all the things we wanted when we woke up on December 25. The stores were jammed with parents looking for some of those dreams, although certainly not all of them if only for reasons of sanity. Despite my pleas to the bearded man in the red suit, a drum kit never appeared under our Christmas tree.
When I was in middle school in the early 1980s, malls were the place where the cool kids hung out. I occasionally did as well, although I always felt unmoored. The mall–nay, The Mall–was the place to gaze at and/or buy the latest in clothing, play video games, and start one’s way toward dating. I dressed then as I dress now, like something the cat just dragged in. I occasionally enjoyed playing pinball. And much as today, no self-respecting woman, save for my better 99% who has a very large and loose screw when it comes to me, would get within 30 feet of me. Nonetheless, malls were the in scene, at least in white, middle class suburbia.
Those days are long gone, an artifact of another time. The mall as a place of commerce has long been in decline. I imagine the efficiency malls once provided with many stores in close proximity has fallen to the rise of internet shopping as well as a general shift in the type of venue where people want to spend their time and money. Prior to the pandemic, I only visited the Lloyd Mall either to pick up some birthday or Winter holiday gift at See’s Candies, or to pick up a pair of sunglasses. The latter featured a salesperson trying to upsell me on a much more expensive pair that apparently were the newest in sunglass fashion. Dressed as usual, and drenched in sweat from a bike ride on a hot summer day, I stopped him midway through his pitch. “Look, man. I know you have a job to do. But do I really look like someone who is going to appear on the cover of Vogue anytime soon?” He laughed and rang me up.
On occasion it was also a place to see movies that were either not at the independent theaters in town or were not playing at a convenient time. My better 99% and I caught Bad Santa there. It remains a touchstone of my film viewing life because despite there being only about five other people in the room, we all could not stop laughing even without the rippling laughter that comes with a large crowd and keeps the good times rolling longer than they otherwise might.
Pioneer Square is often touted as Portland’s living room, but by my reckoning, that was a title that until this past Saturday was better suited for the Lloyd Mall. If the crowds were far more spare than they might have been 20 years ago, they were nonetheless diverse. It is perhaps the bane of every generation to lament the generations which follow it, but I think each generation does many things much better than the ones it follows, and younger folks today seem far more accepting of people who are not like them, and I often found this reflected in the Lloyd Mall. I saw far more BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks than just about anywhere in the city outside of some rallies and protests, and the same was true for other people who did not fit well or at all into the white, straight, nominally Christian paradigm. And there was a wider array of royalty of the Freak Kingdom, all waving their flags, and seemingly getting on well with each other. I am sure this is not entirely true, but I would bet a couple of root beers that it is far more true than it was in 1983.
When COVID-19 struck and inclement weather, be it cold, hard rain, or heat dome, I began visiting the Lloyd Mall more often. For one, especially on a cold and wet Saturday morning in January, it would be sparsely populated and quiet. My better 99%, who is also my world-favorite conversationalist, and I would do laps around all three floors. I was usually loaded on caffeine, my mouth emitting an amazing stream of gibberish that she somehow not only understood, but responded to, when probably all it deserved was a rote, “Sure, man.”
But also, I knew the already diminishing number of stores would accelerate. While I do not rejoice in such things, I do find this type of decay interesting and worth documenting. Indeed the number of closed stores did increase, and at one point in 2022–the anchor stores already all gone, unless you count the Barnes & Noble which stuck around into this year–I think I counted over thirty empty storefronts, about 25% of those available. It was to some extent like walking around a graveyard in a ghost town.
However, something entirely amazing but also nearly predictable happened. In the vacant stores, people began doing their own things. Art displays popped up. The former Marshall’s space held a rollerskating party. In the nearby storefront that once housed cosmetics and similar wares, people performed plays. It seemed like every time we did our laps, something new appeared, not on some timed rollout like Fall fashions or toys marketed for the Winter holidays. These pop-ups were, in their way, subversions of the original commercial purpose of the mall, a joyous rebuke of the “Capitalism” sculpture at the Southwest entrance.
And as per my and my better 99%’s purpose, there also was a magic theater. I grew up across the street from a magician. It was not his primary occupation, but when one of his sons, Friend Glenn, had a birthday party, his father would perform for us kids. I was always mesmerized. Jessica, however, had never seen a magic show, and this seemed as good a time as any for a first time. I spent the hour looking for the various tricks and devices the magicians used to draw attention from where the real action was. It was a far different scene than my Friend’s kitchen which did not have a stage or lights, but it was just as interesting. The crowd, composed of children and adults, clearly enjoyed the skill of the illusionists.
After the show we did a few laps around the mall, some extra last steps for the road. The ice skating rink was jammed. So many mornings over the past few years we had seen small classes as well as some folks skating on their own, but nothing close to this. From the third floor, I thought of Orson Welles atop the ferris wheel in The Third Man, referring to the teeming crowd below as tiny dots. About a year and a half ago, a woman at least a decade older than me was skating, doing turns and lines and all manner of things that I could only imagine my body allowing. After she left the ice I approached her and told her how awesome it was watching her do these things. She was a bit tired, and she modestly told me anyone could do it. “Not me. My body would break. But it was so nice to watch. Thank you.” We left her beaming. Was she down there now, taking her final skate? I suspected not. There was little room for anything more than nostalgia and wistfulness down there.
People waited in a long line for one last bag of Joe Brown’s caramel corn, many of them not alive when the store began operating at the mall on opening day in 1960. I will die never having tried the stuff, and at least on that reality I will rest in peace. But who knows, maybe some of those people in line recalled waiting with a loved one, or just a liked one, and the feeling engendered was as good as the popcorn, and both had aged well. So why not try tapping that vein one more time?
Some made music and broke into song. Bubbles were blown. The Department of Public Dance got down.
As with nature and politics, graffiti abhors a vacuum. The walls and posts of the mall were adorned with messages–outpourings of gratitude, Love, and sentiment for what had been and what would be lost. Outside a store peddling lightsabers–and for $300, you too could have your very own SoroSuub X-34 landspeeder–passersby were given true life advice: let the Wookie win. I remembered my father taking me to see Return of the Jedi at the Brunswick Square Mall, long after everyone else in the galaxy knew that Darth Vader was Luke’s father, and him laughing when in the beginning of the film Vader counsels a wayward officer to get moving on completing the new Death Star lest he find out firsthand that the emperor is not so forgiving as he is.
Another scrawl held a reminder of an experience no doubt had by many: “Gone all the days of meeting someone to see a movie at Lloyd, and going to the wrong theater.” Those days actually ended in 2015 when the Lloyd Mall theater went out of business, and if it was probably not a memory as sweet as caramel popcorn, it seems for at least one person to have proven as sticky.
E & D each traced the outline of one of their hands. In between, one of them wrote, “We had one of our first dates here. Now we’ve been married a year. Love you, Lloyd. Thanks for all the memories.” May that memory and all such ones always be a blessing.
For some, it was enough to bear witness that “Strawberry pickle was here.”
Some of those messages had a more political edge. “Demolish ICE in PDX, not the Lloyd Center.” On the door of the small Portland Police Bureau office on the third floor, someone wrote, “ACAB 1312.” Another wall had taped to it various messages wondering why the mall was going to be demolished, and just what was going to replace it. “My real concern about this is that this is a 30-plus acre site and it just might be vacant for years. And what is that interim condition? If it is really going to be demolished all at once, how is that going to leave a void? We’re losing community assets, and being left with what?”
I am not a nostalgic person, and most of my sentiment is reserved for people, not places. About 12 years ago, my father sold the house into which I had been born, and which had served as the setting of Home for so many years. I sorted through a bunch of his stuff, as well as that of my mother, deciding what would be left behind and what would move on. A portion of a life and a time, some of which I was privileged enough to share in, winnowed down to what I deemed Important.
Jessica asked me if, after I left that house for the final time, I was sad. I wasn’t. No doubt, there is something weird about it all. It was, after all, a physical anchor. But Home, the psychic anchor within, was what mattered and what remains wherever I go.
So I was not much upset about the idea of the Lloyd Mall closing. I would miss the art, and I certainly would miss seeing all the folks in the living room. Certainly, the thought of walking in some other mall, like the ones in Beaverton and Clackamas, sounds dreadful. A couple of months ago I had to check something out in the Washington Square Mall. An entirely different scene there, perhaps bustling with the same spending energy as the Lloyd Mall had 30 or 40 years ago. No art spaces. No chance for some random skating party, or a not-at-all random skating gathering in a storefront offering lessons. I quickly realized there was no hope that sparks would fly, that something would surprise me, and that knowledge quickly set my nervous system’s vibrations to negative.
But that spirit that imbued the Lloyd Mall, that made the phrase “let’s go to the mall” not sound awful these past few years, will continue. Nonetheless, or rather in my own I-have-a-heart-of-stone way, I understood this outpouring of Love and sentiment. Good times were had here. So were sad ones and important ones and meaningless ones that for one reason or another had staying power. Those all count for something, and they all have their own portability.
We were approaching the exit doors on the second level, the ones we had entered through a few hours earlier. The ones we had used so many times over the past six years.
“The trap doors!”
“Huh?”
“Did you notice how twice when someone was called on stage, the magician mentioned they were standing on a trap door, one on the left side and one on the right side.”
“And?”
“When the magicians’ assistants mysteriously appeared from or somehow disappeared through whatever contraption, they were in the middle of the stage. The mention of the other trap doors was the diversion. Or at least that sounds good.”
We exited into the late afternoon sunlight, the parking lot still packed. People were arriving for “The Final Skate” or perhaps just one last look for a stray memory, a glimpse of what was or what might have been. Jessica commented, as she had so many times that afternoon, how cool it was seeing so many people from so many different walks of life.
“Only here. At least for now,” I replied.
I reached out to hold her hand as I had so many times when entering, walking around, and leaving this place. I smiled as I heard Lou Reed intoning in my mind, “There’s a bit of magic in everything. And then some loss to even things out.”
