There are some streets in Manhattan where, while staring at a glass-fronted Blank Street Coffee or a PlantShed or a stray Strand Book Store location, I lose track of where I am. Lower East Side? Chelsea? Lincoln Square? This summer, a friend and I walked through SoHo, talking about a movie we had just seen, when a throng of outdoor diners broke my concentration: That initially charming dinner crowd gathered on the sidewalk were twirling their forks at Fumo, a chain I recognized from its Harlem location. And its Upper West Side location, not to mention its Chelsea location, and probably several other locations I am forgetting.
As far as Italian food goes, Fumo is almost uniformly delicious. That uniformity is the problem. Fumo’s Instagram-ready beauty is recognizable to anyone who has lived in New York, or inside social media, in the last five years: plenty of windows, plenty of (sometimes fake) plants, plenty of white and green paint on the facade. Of course, the restaurant is also popular on TikTok, where users praise its $12 pasta deal, fried mozzarella and blindingly white interiors.
We’ve moved beyond what the magazine n+1 identified as the unadorned qualities of post-2008 cityscapes. That insubstantial, flat and gray “fast-casual modernism” is complemented by a social-media-approved cookie-cutter skin that has been thrust upon our major and midsize cities in a dismal consensus. It’s no surprise that New York is getting its very own versions of two neo-yuppie Los Angeles mainstays: the meme-ified health-food store Erewhon and the Los Feliz cafe Maru (which I love, of course). America’s two largest cities have most quickly been reshaped by the internet, succumbing to an epidemic of increasingly blank streets for the moneyed classes, the bicoastal and the terminally online people who covet luxury. It’s possible now to walk down Columbus Avenue and mistake it for Abbot Kinney in Venice Beach.
As a solution, I present a hated staple of American urban infrastructure: the strip mall.
A strip mall is a hard thing to love. In Los Angeles, where I’m from, few features of the landscape better encapsulate the city’s willfully illegible nature, its hostility to pedestrian culture and urbanism. They are holes punched into the canvas of L.A. life, nondescript emissaries from the land of suburban ennui — and I love them. I’ve come to think of them as relics of a version of the American city that once had room for the quirky, outcast and dull.
You must understand a strip mall in terms of Los Angeles’s relative lack of public space: The city contains less than a quarter of the recreational areas of New York despite being nearly double the size. Strip malls are the city’s informal public spaces, the ones that residents have had to make for themselves. Their tenants vary: In South L.A., where I grew up, the strip malls along Crenshaw Boulevard host CVS and grocery chains, but also a Japanese restaurant called Tak’s, reflecting the neighborhood’s unique prewar melding of Japanese and African American cultures. In Koreatown, strip malls tell the story of the area’s demographic drift through KBBQ joints that sit alongside legal-aid clinics for Latino immigrants. In Torrance, some of the best sushi I’ve ever had was at a restaurant that sat next to a math tutor.
I learned to see these eyesores as pocket spaces, archives of the city’s history, worlds within the world. They are one of the basic building blocks of Los Angeles, which more often functions as a constellation of fiefs and enclaves than a metropolis. Strip malls also litter other urban environments, from Orange County to Houston to Raleigh, ugly and ubiquitous in their own way. Yet theirs is a stubborn ugliness, blocking shinier, newer development while containing businesses and communities that define a city’s unique character.
As a kid, I spent most of my time in strip malls in Mid-City and Koreatown and West Hollywood. My friends and I lived in disparate corners of the city and did not yet have cars; our ability to hang out was contingent on finding a strip mall we could easily access by bus, one that was close to other strip malls or, on special occasions, an actual mall. (I wore my nice white Chucks for those outings.) Occasionally we’d try to skate in strip-mall parking lots while one friend, Michael, shot little movies on a digital camera. More often, we’d grab bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and use them as excuses to loiter outside a 7-Eleven while we gossiped, joked, tried out smoking and waited for something to happen.
You could call my celebration of these low-slung mundanities misguided nostalgia, but in retrospect, my friends and I were participating in a long tradition of urban life. Strip malls are signs of how locals have settled into the city and adapted its hostile landscape. Angelenos are a refugee people, a fractious tribe of Black Southerners, Central and South Americans, white Midwesterners and Asians of all backgrounds who arrived with little and pleaded for little other than survival. They have fitted themselves into the crevices that private enterprise and city planning has left available to them.
I suspect that many cities play host to such traditions. It seems as if we live in a period when our major cities are being re-engineered, supposedly, to appeal to as many people as possible. But when cities are remade for “everyone,” they rarely work for everyone. In practice, entire neighborhoods are being reconstituted as comfortable spaces for those of means to go about their lives with as little friction as possible. The strip mall resists that exclusionary ease: gnomic and perverse, ugly and inefficient in a way that our nascent urban monoculture abhors. They make the city into a series of publics.
The post The Case for Strip Malls, the Antidote to Shiny, Soulless City Luxury appeared first on New York Times.
