My name is Kermit The Frog
and I’m sitting on a log
Miss Piggy too
She ain’t wearing no shoes
We went to the mall
On a Saturday
We ain’t have
Nowhere to play
I’ve chosen to open this week’s newsletter with an untitled blues song created by my late father, Sam Jeffers, one Saturday in the early 1990s. This was composed in the ten minutes it took for us to walk from the back parking lot on the upper level of the Four Seasons Town Centre. At the time, it was one of two, soon to be three successful, still open and occupied enclosed shopping malls in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina.
(The Piedmont Triad is the official name of our region, not to be confused with the Research Triangle, which Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill make the sides and Cary, Hillsborough and so many other municipalities fill out the middle and sometimes spill out of the sides).
I decided to dig out this blues song because I’ve noticed people have been making a lot of noise about something called the retail apocalypse. And I happened to read this article put out on the Congress for New Urbanism’s site that had some nice charts from LandUseUSA spelling out exactly which stores are closing and which stores aren’t closing.
Those charts make it look like things aren’t going so bad.
But then you look at the list and later see in an article in your hometown newspaper (which is also on life support) and see your own childhood mall’s Forever 21 is on the chopping block, just years after it was touted as the savior of the space.
(Ok, this is a theoretical statement, but I know many of you are facing this exact same thing).
Still, even if your store is saved, you think about the dead malls, in the Triad’s case, Carolina Circle and Oak Hollow Mall and Cotton Mill Square and Fourm VI which were so exciting and bright and also touted as saviors, but now are either just Walmarts, Targets, churches, office buildings, schools, libraries and maybe Sears (or not).
You also wonder about the strip malls that have the big box stores and wonder what it really takes to make Kmart turn into Target as we are watching happen in Oxon Hill, our just outside of DC community where we live.
Today’s Les’s and I’s first anniversary and we met for our first date at Midlands Beer Garden, which is very much not a mall in DC.
Or is it? It is on one end of a strip shopping center, that also includes a post office, a used book store and a storytelling collective. The mall was placed in the middle of what was otherwise a block of traditional rowhomes in the northern part of the Park View neighborhood, where I lived both times when I was a D.C. proper resident.
And we often go to Tyson’s Corner Center, one of the largest malls on the East Coast and which sits across from Tyson’s Galleria, which is one of the most high-end enclosed malls in the United States.
We marvel at how practical Greenbelt Mall and Mall of Prince Georges are. There’s Target and Planet Fitness and (in the case of Greenbelt) Joann Fabric and Crafts, and Books-a-Million, along with so many other stores that are owned by people of color, serving all income levels and uses.
And we often commute via The Fashion Centre at Pentagon City and L’Enfant Plaza, the former that combines all that luxury of the Tyson’s malls into a practical use of being a major Metro junction and L’Enfant which provides the touring company I tour at part time, my current hairdresser and sustenance for several federal employees and other tourist attractions that happen to all come together along this enclosed, mostly underground, promenade.
Finally, over last weekend after our joint Untokening presentation, we went to the Streets of Southpoint, the mall in which my resident Durham years I regularly spent at least $150-$200 of my paycheck (at the time). it was interesting to see how the retail trends of the last 11 years had sprinkled themselves throughout the mall, known as one of the last enclosed malls to be built in the United States and one of the first to incorporate both an enclosed version and a “town center” style main street, that effectively serves as the mall’s third floor.
When I moved to Durham in 2008, the mall was only two years old and practically sparkling. It still sparkles, even with a dead Sears hanging off the side. Mall experts say that when an anchor store closes, that end of the mall often struggles. Thankfully, the mall has four remaining anchors, but with the loss of Sears, it lost some of its middle-income range.
I’ve come to the same conclusion as the CNU article that retail isn’t dead, it’s just shifting and changing. I do hope though, that our main streets and malls continue to provide the same support that they have in years past, but with an expanded vision of seeing everyone who comes through their doors as potential partners and continuing to help people make memories and movements. So we don’t have to be too mad about the mall, especially this holiday season.
Welcome to The Black Urbanist Weekly #5. It’s October 11, 2019. Thanks again for opening, clicking, reading and sharing.
Also, look out for an improved job board over the next few weeks and please scroll down and click on the store links. The holidays are coming and the only time you step foot in a mall this year could be this newsletter. Or, it’s the new year and one of my lectures and workshops or a complementary life coaching session with Les could be exactly what you need to jumpstart your self-care and your community care.
Other things on my mind this week…
I was so inspired by so much black excellence.
Like all this black man excellence of several Alabama cities, namely Montgomery, finally electing a black mayor, the success of Charleston, SC’s department of transportation director (and other black alums of his university), this dude not letting gentrification take all of his skills and business savvy and community making as a barber, building up Seattle’s black community, and finally, the head of the North Carolina Industry Expansion Solutions and Manufacturing Extension Partnership (who also happens to be my uncle and one of the reasons I’m a huge audio and music nerd).
And I know folks who aren’t Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) often want to benefit from our culture or emulate some of our greatest cultural creators, but please don’t keep pretending to be BIPOC or putting us out front as if this is who you really are, especially when it comes business and government contracting. This illuminates so many of the issues that companies looking to do business with jurisdictions and other organizations that seek to award contracts based on disadvantaged and marginalized peoples quotas. I hope that we can continue to flip the script, look at the excellence we already have and continue to promote our companies with those disadvantaged designations, especially those disadvantaged by race, gender identity and sexual orientation.
And that’s why I’m going to end this section today on how we can really increase leadership and power among black women, and how we can in fact raise the standards, so we don’t have to harbor the frustrations this article brings up of being a black woman in journalism. In fact, I just finished Elaine Welterroth’s wonderful memoir, More than Enough. She’s almost a year younger than me, and I don’t have Ebony, Glamour, Teen Vogue and now Project Runway on my resume, but the millennial hustle as black woman is all there. And I think we can all, especially those of us in the media, learn from the lessons she presents.
Because at the end of the day, in ways we may not always co-sign, black women will do it anyway. And we are more than enough.
Before you go…
—Check out the job board. Just minutes before I hit publish on this edition, I got a new submission to the board. Renovations coming soon.
—Buy a bag or t-shirt from The Black Urbanist store or greeting cards from Les’s Lighthouse. The holidays are coming and these will make great gifts!
— Let me come to your town, office, church, school or whatever space you cook up and tell my life story, motivate your students, help you with your marketing and branding or all three! Book me for a lecture, workshop or both. Also Les is available for motivational speeches and for one-on-one life and health coaching. Book her.
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