The other night Kim and I went to the venerable Broward Mall. The comedian Chris Rock has a great line about malls in the town he grew up in. He said:
"There are usually two malls. There's the "good mall" and then there's the "other mall".
The 'other mall' is usually the older mall that has started to go downhill, and now there's all sort of shops that shouldn't really be in a nice mall...."
And that's what is starting to happen to the Broward Mall. When we moved back to Ft Lauderdale from St Louis, the Broward Mall had just opened. Mind you, this was back in (gulp) 1979. (Man, if I knew then what I know now--oh my!) At the time, the Broward Mall was said to be the biggest mall in all of Florida. It was state of the art.
Mind you, I suppose you really shouldn't ask for a shelf life of over 25 years for your neighborhood mall--I mean, I don't want to appear to be greedy with the memories of my youth here. But, we sat and had a really crappy dinner and I looked around at the food court. Its about 1/2 the size it used to be, and one of the retailers was having some mid-week special that brought out a lot of young mothers and their screaming kids (that always makes for the best dinner environment). Kim & I commented on all the fast food joints that USED to be there and how much bigger the food area used to be.
Then we had some time to kill and we walked around....and I started noticing all the sort of sort of new retail stores that attract....ya know....the lower income buyers.
Your dollar stores, the...well, I think ya know what I mean. And it hit me that the Broward Mall---a place that I spent so much time in during the waining years of my youth--had turned into "the other mall".
When did I get old? Did I have fun while it lasted?
Later,
Jeff
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