Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

 I'm a member of the Mall Generation (a better name than GenX). I remember Sunday rides with my dad to the Woodhaven Mall - a little one-story mall with a Wilco (Woolworth's other brand), a supermarket, and a Gaudio's Garden center as anchors. The central area had a fountain and the Paperback Booksmith (where Daddy usually bought me a book) was on one side, next to a women's clothing store. There was a donut shop where I'd get a grape drink and a chocolate iced donut before Daddy and I played pinball. There was also a 4-screen movie theater where Mom and I saw most of the live action Disney movies of the era. Sometimes we'd go to the larger Neshaminy Mall (where I made my first clothing request - I asked Mom for a Zoom shirt when I saw them in Pomeroy's) or the Oxford Valley Mall with its large circular ramp between floors (I'd be allowed to run down it once per visit).

We moved before I became a teenager, so my main malls were different. Plymouth Meeting was closest, but low occupancy until the first IKEA in the country opened up on the property in 1985. Michelle worked in the shoe store summers during college and one year she also worked at The Bombay Company. I waitressed that summer and around 11 am most days I'd come visit her and we'd sit in the back (no one shopped at The Bombay Company during the day), knit, and discuss last night's Eastenders. Willow Grove was new, three-level and shiny with a large food court, and had more trendy stores. Montgomeryville was a bit of a drive, but larger and busier than Plymouth meeting - and also near my high school so I was likely to run into friends. 

College didn't stop my mall days - freshman year we'd take the occasional bus trip to the Monroeville Mall and after I brought my car I made regular trips there and occasional trips to the larger but hard to get to (I have no sense of direction) Century III Mall. After college, Quakerbridge Mall and a "prestige" mall also along Route 1 had theaters with enough screens for me to go to the movies twice a week and bookstores for me to browse while waiting. I still remember the teens trying to get into Species having a hissy fit because my friend Van (then 30) and I (26) weren't carded when we bought tickets for Nine Months (for years we had a standing appointment to see Hugh Grant movies - usually in mall-attached movie theaters). What ended them was a 1999 job with a mall leasing company. They decided to have temp lawyers review all their leases as part of their Y2K update and seeing the expectations per square foot (and about once a week spending an hour or so after work in King of Prussia mall waiting for the traffic to decrease - that was always my least favorite mall, dating back to it's outdoor era, because I found it disorienting) just killed my desire to enter a mall more than a few times a year, if that.

Alexandra Lange is another mall kid, and in the introduction to Meet Me by the Fountain reminisces about her malls, comparing them to her first post-COVID mall trip, to the new and massive American Dream in East Rutherford, NJ. From there, she analyzes mall trends by decade.

Malls started in the 1950s, with suburbanization, and they catered to middle-class white women who'd left cities but still wanted convenient shopping. Initially they weren't enclosed, strips or blocks of shops with courtyards and paths in between. Developers envisioned a private version of the public square, and malls contained services like hairdressers, dry cleaners, and dentists that we don't think of as "mall" businesses. The 1960s brought enclosed malls, protecting shoppers from the heat of Phoenix, the cold of Minneapolis, and the dreariness of March in Philadelphia. Malls got larger and developed somewhat standard layouts based on letters and with anchors at the end of every strip. The 1970s brought the urban mall, starting with Boston's Faneuil Hall which restored a historic building, and expanding into new malls like Harbor Place in Baltimore and The Gallery (now The Fashion District) in Philadelphia. All three opened to fanfare and impressive sales, but their promise faded, with Faneuil Hall now for the tourists, Harbor Place an almost empty construction zone when I visited in 2018, and The Fashion District being threatened by a new arena for the 76ers.

The 1980s were the zenith of mall culture, and of mall profitability. Owners realized teens had disposable income and wanted a safe place to go. WaldenBooks received most of my money, but there were Duran Duran posters to buy at Spencers, cassettes to buy at Sam Goody or We Three Records, clothes from whatever store was "in' among my friends, and then something from the food court, usually a bacon and cheese baked potato. Maybe a few video games if the mall had an arcade (only Montgomeryville did among "my" malls).  Times were changing as I aged out of my teens, though, and by the 1990s malls began to restrict teens, saying they could only enter with adults or during certain hours (most of which were during the school day). The 1990s was also the start of the mall's decline. Maybe turning away paying teens was a bad idea, but the main villain was over expansion and economic whims. Malls grew faster than the population and ended up competing with each other for shrinking dollars as the economic distribution became dumbbell shaped. By the 2000s, anchors were closing and big boxes and outlet malls arranged like the 1950s "town centers" took over. Plymouth Meeting Mall is now quieter than it was pre-IKEA (that store moved to a big box strip a few miles away) and most of the business in that complex goes to stores with outdoor entrances only. Megamalls, like the Mall of America and American Dream seem to be surviving by adding experiences (both include amusement parks), and the mall is thriving in parts of the world where it's still a novel experience. 

Lange's book isn't all Hot Topic and Macy's, teenagers and senior mall walkers. Malls are both public and private, and she discusses how that affects the ability to protest or simply disseminate minority opinions. Malls were also built for people like me - middle/upper middle class and so white I practically luminesce. What happens when malls become the place where non-white working class people shop? I constantly read that The Fashion District underperforms, but even before its makeover, it was profitable - but the customers no longer looked like me and chains were leaving. Is that why it's being called a "dead zone" that should be replaced by a "privately funded" (if you believe that, I have a mall to sell you) sports arena that the most optimistic estimates say will be used 40% of the year? I have my suspicions. Other malls are being reimagined as college campuses or being razed for mixed use development. If The Fashion District is truly failing, we should try that rather than give in to the whims of a sports team owner.

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

 I prefer baking to cooking (probably a side effect of being single - I have no one to share ideas, admire my work, or help clean up) which is probably why I'm not much of a kitchen gadget person. Still, as a 21st Century person with a microwave and KitchenAid mixer (Mom bought me one the first Christmas I had my own house so I wouldn't "borrow" Big Yellow, which Daddy bought her for Christmas 1979), I'm far ahead of early humans who had a pot, a knife, and a spoon. Food writer Bee Wilson tracks the evolution of cooking and utensils from pre-history to the bread maker and Oxo Good Grips. 

She starts with a wooden spoon - everyone has one (and in the hands of Lisa Scottoline's South Philly matrons, it's a threatening symbol of power). It's simple, useful, heat resistant, and hard to improve. Even the stick end is useful for stirring oatmeal. So simple that we don't think about how central is is to cooking. She then moves to pots (for much of history, cooked meals were soup/stew/pottage - throw ingredients into the pot with some fluid and cook until it's time to eat) and knives. This is where specialization begins. No pot is perfect for every use (if it's a good conductor, it won't heat quickly; sautéing in a stock pot or making spaghetti sauce in a frying pan is difficult-to-impossible), and while there are some multi-purpose knives, the ideal blade size and shape depends on the job. As she expands into the idea of cooking, the use of ice and eventually refrigeration, and the kitchen itself she explains how gadgets may come and go, but the basics stay. They may be refined (as the late appearing fork moved from a skewer to the two prongs still used to stabilize meat for carving and eventually to the 3 or 4 pronged utensil we use every day) or combined (the spork and it's relatives, which she lists in a footnote), but at their core they're identifiable through the centuries.

Ice and Stone

 Grunge was just coming in when I discovered Sharon McCone in 1990, so it's a bit odd to think of Ted being into grunge when Sharon met him. Marcia Mueller's detective was 28 at her 1977 creation, 20 years older than I was. Now, her age is unstated but I estimate she's just shy of 60. Mueller's retcon skills exceed those of Sara Paretsky, though. She mentions old friends and alludes to early experiences, but since her world has changed regularly, both personally and professionally, the fuzzy timeline causes fewer problems than with Chicago's solo PI.

Sharon has also become more apolitically active, in part due to her discovery of her Native American heritage. Ice and Stone has Sharon investigating the murders of two Native women, tow of thousands who have disappeared or been murdered in the last several years. Here, the main suspects are the local landowners, a man and his two sons, or perhaps the two goons they employ. ice and Stone is tightly plotted and q quick read (only 256 pages, with several pages just giving the date), with an unexpected motive for the murders.  There's also slight pharmaceutical plot error (-zone is the nomenclature for antipsychotics, but she needed to explain how rare earth elements would factor in), but it's obscure enough and not quite vital to the plot (i.e. not five minutes of searching like the patent/trade secret confusion made me give up Jill Churchill) that I'll let it go

Water Like a Stone

Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid are police detectives so they shouldn't have to stumble across dead bodies. Deborah Crombie's mysteries border the cozy sub-genre so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when their Christmas, the first spent with Duncan's family in Cheshire, includes a murder investigation. As the couple arrive with enthusiastic 5-year-old Toby, moody teenage Kit, and two dogs, Duncan's sister Juliet calls - she's found an infant's body behind the plaster of the barn she's rehabbing. Duncan and Gemma are off duty, but the DI on the case is an old friend (of sorts) so he allows them to observe. When Kit finds the body of a longboat dwelling former social worker, a woman who'd let him and his father visit the boat, there's no way the London police can stay out of the case.

As for Juliet, finding the body isn't her only worry. She'd recently opened her building business after quitting her job as office manager to her husband's investment firm, akin to the tension created by his mistaken belief that she'd been having an affair with his business partner, Piers Dalton. Their teenage daughter Lally has secrets of her own, involving Piers's son Leo and a classmate who'd drowned a few months earlier. Kit finds himself between his magnetic new cousin and his basic nature as a good kid scarred by his mother's death. His attempt to protect her puts himself in danger and unmasks the murderer.

Crombie's books are the anti-Law & Order; the detectives personal lives play a central role. Christmas was the perfect time for Gemma, Toby, and Kit to meet Duncan's casually affectionate and welcoming parents. Cheerful, energetic Toby happily accepts them as grandparent, and Gemma almost immediately feels at home with her almost-in-laws, so different from her working class parents. Kit has a slightly harder time, as one would expect considering the fraught relationship with his maternal grandparents who are fighting Duncan, who has not legally been declared Kit's father, for custody. Despite the recurring nightmare of finding his mother's body and the turmoil caused by Lally, Kit warms to his new family. Even if the mystery wasn't a good one, Water Like a Stone would be worth reading as a straight novel. 

Spare

I'm not usually a memoir reader, but I was also raised by someone who hate-watches anything to do with the British royal family. So I read Spare in part because my mom wants to talk about it, but partially because of my own suspicions about the royal family and the British media. On that narrow criteria, Spare met my expectations.

Spare exceeded my expectations by being a thoughtful look back by a man who's been dealing with trauma since adolescence but, perhaps because of his privileged position, wasn't given the tools to deal with it. A few years ago during one of the regular debates about The Catcher in the Rye which pop up on social media, I wondered if the book is taught less often because modern teens can't imagine a world in which a boy who punches out the windows of the family car the night his younger brother died doesn't get counseling. No one seemed to think that two young teens whose mother died publicly needed anything more than a return to their routine - no extra tenderness, no grief counseling. I'm not exactly faulting Charles for being unemotional because of the environment he was raised in, but you'd think that by 1997 someone would point out that the boys needed to at least have some sort of professional grief counseling. But no, the Stiff Upper Lip ruled the day. The first section of the book, covering his adolescence, is full of "I think this happened" and disconnected events, showing a teenager adrift. He's unable to grieve for his mother (and has locked up memories in defense) and sent to Eton despite it not being a good fit in order for the public to think he's close to his brother, which he never has been. This is where the image of him as "thick" and a screw-up starts. He's honest about drinking and smoking marijuana with his friends, but I get the impression that most of their set did that (so, likely including his brother). But he was the one who the media called "naughty."

The second section covers his transition to adulthood. He entered the army in part because there weren't many other options (the tragedy of being close in the line of succession - I get the feeling Charles would have been much better suited to teaching A-level English and running the drama club). Learning to fly helicopters gives him a purpose, and he enjoys being just another officer...until the media sells him out and he's sent home. He also mentions that he killed people because it was his job and that he's conflicted about that. 

His military career is interspersed with and followed by visits to Africa, where he became interested in conservation and met nature filmmakers who became surrogate parents, and tales of his ordinary life. His girlfriends understandably can't deal with the constant media attention and even though he's grown up with it, he can't either. Everything he does is photographed and the paparazzi go out of their way to bait him. Beyond that, once his military career was over he had little to do - even as a full time working royal, his engagements were restricted to those that didn't conflict with others. Imagine a company based entirely on appearances where all members fight with sharp elbows for the best positions and make sure the competition is iced out of anything that might raise their ratings. That's the royal family. Not the best place for a young man dealing with the fallout of active military service on top of long-untreated trauma. It's no surprise he started having panic attacks and withdrew into reruns of Friendsˆ.

Then, while scrolling through a friend's social media feed, he saw her pictures with her friend Meghan and instantly fell for her. He asked their mutual friend to connect them, started chatting, and fell madly in love as he got to know her. The media (and his older brother) portray this as a "whirlwind romance" but they dated for about a year and a half, which seems normal to me. Meghan also encouraged him to give therapy another try after a prior brief and unsuccessful attempt, and at first the family seemed to like her. The media, however likes to add racism to their hazing of new royals and in retrospect, it was a warning sign that the monarchy didn't defend her. After they got married, the couple's media coverage got worse, and Harry points out that the royal rota not only have connections to courtiers (and possibly family members) who give them juicy stories (true or not) to cover for other royals' indiscretions - or just to knock more popular firm members down a few notches. Here's where William and Kate come across particularly poorly. He comes across as a self-centered bully, and she's cold and snooty. I can understand that Meghan's touchy-feely California attitude might not be a good fit, but I also didn't want to believe the trope of Woman Always Compete With Each Other. The story of the bridesmaids' dresses and Kate's apparent snubbing of the couple makes it look like there was at least a one-sided competition along with a 35-year sibling rivalry coming to a head. We know what happened next - Harry and Meghan escaped, first to Canada and then to California as their negotiated plans were rejected and/or leaked and their security (needed in part because of the hatred stoked by the media), and the book ends with the birth of their daughter. 

So, how true is the book? Memoirs are by definition one sided, but with the Levenson Inquiry we know that the British tabloid press, which is more mainstream than the US tabloids are, uses underhanded methods to write stories which either skirt or outright ignore the truth. And prior books have said that the courtiers run the firm, not the royal family themselves. Memories may vary about details, but the bulk of the story feels true. After 35 years, he's giving his side in response to twisted media reporting and his intention appears to be to get the media to tone it down and maybe give his niece and nephew - the next generation's spares - a bit more breathing room when the photographers stop being satisfied with the frequent but highly controlled photo calls.

Jane Austen at Home

 Lucy Worsley admits to being a Janite, so her biography of Austen is written from a fan's perspective. Worsley is also from the "warts and all" school of historians, so she's not afraid to delve into the family feuds and societal divisions that made up Jane's family. Quiet, observant, acid-penned Jane then crafted her narrow worlds into six near perfect novels.

The Austens were near-gentry; her clergyman father associated with those above him socially but her mother had to be hands on in the garden and dairy. Children were not seen as sentimentally as a generation or two later and all eight siblings were sent out for a few years and her disabled brother (he most likely had epilepsy) never returned.

Jane also grew up in a world of extended families with great differences in wealth and status. Her mother's brother married up, but never shared his wealth (as the Gardiners appear to, or were expected to by Mrs. Bennett) thanks to a parsimonious wife scandalously accused of shoplifting. One of Jane's brothers, Edward, was adopted by childless relations and settled in as a lord of the manor. Two brothers made their fortune (like Admiral Croft, Captain Wentworth, and William Price) in the Royal Navy, and James Austen succeeded his father s rector of Stevenson. Then there was Henry, who both rose and fell as a private banker who eventually went bankrupt. Married to his cousin Eliza, the scandalous widow of a French nobleman and the illegitimate daughter of Mr. Austen's sister Philadelphia, he was Jane's literary agent and supporter but also a bit of schemer and a partial model for Henry Crawford. As unmarried women, Jane's and Cassandra's fates rose and fell with those of their brothers, depending on Edward's grace and favor lodge (in unofficial exchange for child care) after their father had died.

What about her writing? Worsley disagrees with the theory the Jane only wrote when she had a "home" in Stevenson and Chwton. While she wrote the first drafts of three novels before her father gave up Stevenson and three after being published in 1811, it's likely that she was revising and rewriting the manuscripts that would become Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice while moving among rental lodgings in Bath and Southampton. We don't realize that because of class and era. Jane was a Georgian, product of an era where woman's work was necessary. Her first biographers were her brother Edward's wealthy and Victorain descendants who felt that seeing Dear Aunt Jane as a professional would be insulting.

Worsley also explores Jane's romantic life. She had one known thwarted romance and turned down one proposal. Jane Austen at Home mentions another potential suitor, an associate of Henry Austen's who never got up the nerve to ask, and a few unnamed men with whom she danced and flirted. In the end, Jane chose a career and a life among women, living with her mother and sister and with sisters by choice like Martha Lloyd (who lived with the Austen women as sort of a regency Golden Girls) and the Biggs sisters (one widowed, one thrown out by her brother, Jane's almost-fiance). Creativity or childbirths -one of the few women able to make that choice. To be honest, it probably wasn't entirely hers because she was dowry less in an era with a war-created shortage of eligible men. But unlike Marianne Dashwood and (at least in my opinion) Emma Woodhouse, she never had to settle.

Death and the Chapman

When Kate Sedley completed her series with The Christmas Wassail, I decided it was time to return to the start of the series. Roger changed quite a bit over the 12 or 13 year timeline of his books. In December 1483, Roger Chapman is married with four children with Bristol as his home base and a reputation for aiding Richard III. That's a far cry from 19-year-old Roger Carverson who recently left Glastonbury Abbey knowing that monastic life wasn't for him. That Roger is bright and curious but somewhat naive. Naive, but tall and handsome and it's his attractiveness that brings him to the attention of Alderman Weaver's housekeeper/cousin and to Lady Mallory's servant Bess. Relatives of both Alderman Weaver and Lady Mallory disappeared from the same street in London and both want Roger to find out what happened, which he does. 28 years after my first reading, I'd forgotten this main mystery in favor of the subplot which brings Roger in contact with the Duke of Gloucester and his spymaster, Timothy Plummer. While chasing a false lead in the disappearances, Roger finds out where Anne Neville had been hidden in an attempt to prevent her marriage to Richard. I have hundreds of books (read and unread) on my shelves, but I'm going to make time to revisit Roger's travels.

In the Shadow of Vesuvius

 In the Shadow of Vesuvius brings Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily, along with her childhood friends Ivy Brandon and Jeremy, Duke of Bainbridge, to an archaeological dig in 1901 Pompeii. As so often happens, they come across a much more recently deceased body and find that most of the archeological expedition (including a brother and sister team - she's the archaeologist and he's an artist who draws the uncovered artifacts - the head archaeologist, and the man financing it) are hiding secrets. Another more personal secret turns up as well, in the form of Emily's husband Colin's previously unknown daughter. Fighting jealousy and the feelings of inadequacy Colin's late lover induced in her years ago, Emily eventually uncovers the truth, and saves herself with the aid of a knife carried by the young woman poet whose life in Pompeii shortly before Vesuvius destroyed the city.

In a Dark House

 Sometimes, a mystery novel has too much plot. That's my opinion of Deborah Crombie's In a Dark House but I still found it entertaining. The book starts with a young firefighter chatting with her colleague before they're called out on an arson fire. You can feel their friendship and romantic potential, so it's not a surprise when he dies during the fire. He's not the only casualty - there's a woman's body on the ground floor - and Duncan Kincaid leads the police investigation. Meanwhile, Duncan's cousin, a Cambridge based vicar who's covering for one of her colleagues, asks Gemma James to come along on a welfare check of one of her parishoners. Fanny Liu is a former nurse now disabled by Guillaume-Beret and her flatmate, who also helps her with daily activities has disappeared. There's also a missing child case and a murder connected to the battered women's shelter adjacent to the fire site, and all plots end up being at least loosely connected. It's not the best mystery I've read, but Crombie's characters are engaging and feel like real people and each individual solution is well supported. In a Dark House is a bit too convoluted to be a good mystery but it works as a novel.