Glendale Galleria as a site of adolescent socialization and identity formation

Glendale Mall

Sometimes a Mall

To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a mall is just a mall. Except that this is almost never true. For Americans who grew up in any city large enough to have its own shopping mall (or who grew up next to a city that was large enough to have its own shopping mall), the mall was a place where many of them learned to be grown-ups. Or at least how grown-ups would be if they had a more-than-usual amount of disposable income and no job to get to. And a lot of hormones to work off.

This paper examines the Glendale as a site in which the commerce that is enacted is far less important that the growing-up that occurs there. The fact that teenagers use malls as a sounding board for their adult lives is never an explicit aspect of the identity of the Glendale Galleria, but an ethnographic investigation of the mall exposes such a function as lying only a very little bit under the surface. This paper analyses Glendale Galleria as a themed space, although one that is "themed" in ways that are ambiguous, multivalent, and contradictory -- and no doubt for the most part unintentional.

The Galleria was opened in 1976, a generation after the first malls began springing up around the country and a generation before malls began to change to more open-air designs and a more destination-like philosophy in which shopping was combined with various forms of services and entertainments as well as convenience like on-site daycare, although some of these could easily be described as feeble. The mall lists under its "services and amenities" such things as a lost and found, a notary public, and the sale of lottery tickets. These offerings might well be those of a poorer bodega in the kind of neighborhood that few of the inhabitants of this mall would ever go.

Also on its website, it advertises itself as offering "a complete entertainment experience." It has remained vibrant, or nearly so, in the years since the nation celebrated its bicentennial, outlasting many of the malls built in that era. It is the place to go in Glendale to buy clothes for most people, people who could go to Los Angeles but who (in most cases and entirely wisely) simply do not want to get on the freeway, especially if they have just spent the entire working week in their cars. Parents will drive teenagers as far as this mall, but then they are on their own.

Any mall, at least one that has lasted as long as has the one in Glendale, reflects the city in which it resides, although in a somewhat ambiguous way. One of the selling points of malls, as it were, is that one knows what to expect from them. Shopping malls exemplify both the good and the ills of a mass-market society: You are unlikely to get any surprises when you go there, and you are unlikely to get any surprises when you go there. The expected is safe and reassuring, and this a large element of the theme of the Galleria: You will feel safe here. Nothing will threaten your life or challenge your intellect or view of the world. And this is not unlike the city itself, a fact that is tacitly acknowledged by the adults, and scornfully so by the teenagers.

Bean & Moni (2003) describe this aspect of mall theme and culture in the following passage, although their dismissal of the importance of malls in shaping teen identity suggests that they themselves did not grow up in malls and so have no experience of how much identity can be created and sustained in the reflection of a store-front window.

Urban teens navigate through shopping malls, train stations, airports, freeways, and the Internet. These fluid spaces are disorienting, disrupting a fixed sense of place, and this spills over into teens' interior worlds. Instead of clear anchors in family, community, and institutions like schools to forge a coherent identity, these fluid spaces engender feelings of disconnection and alienation & #8230;.

Identity in a mall culture is constructed through consumption of goods, with selfhood vested in things. Because this is ephemeral, feelings of panic and anxiety flow (p. 640).

Well yes, but no also. The mall is certainly a place in which the consumption and display goods is a large part of the identity-making process of visitors, and especially of teens, to that marketplace. But this fails to explain the reason why so many teenagers simply hang out at malls, spending hours without buying anything.

Selling, and Buying, Self-Identity

It is true that during these periods of wandering from shoe shop to anchor store to Starbucks that teenagers do stop to look at the goods that are being sold, and much of their conversation can revolve around who would wear such-and-such a dress (and what such a dress would say about their moral character and status), but these interactions between teens and objects should be read not only in terms of consumerist culture, or even primarily in terms of consumerist culture. Teenagers hanging out in malls are using the world around them to locate themselves culturally and socially. This is a universal function of young adulthood: Only the props vary. And simply because the "props" of adolescence in the Galleria are cheaply made does not mean that they have no value in the eyes of those who linger.

When Langhorne (2001) laments the disconnectedness of the mall and similar spaces, he does so (again, as in the above passage) as a way of downplaying and even dismissing the ways in which young people are able to make meaning of their lives in places that would seem to offer any real possibility of real and authentic identity creation.

Global markets, global manufacturers and purveyors of knowledge, and global consumers, already either horizontal in shape or lacking any physical shape at all, have arrived as new participants, stirring like a rising mist on a summer's morning round the soaring trunks of the trees in an old wood. They move inexorably across global space and time without respect to physical geography, political frontiers, or night and day. (Langhorne, 2001, p. 39)

Where the New is Not Exactly New

The mall itself is always under construction, with new stores replacing older ones so seamlessly that within a few weeks it is hard to remember which store was there before. And hard to believe that it made much difference. The mall offers up commercial pablum.

It is what happens in its corridors that matters the most, for in the spaces on the outer sides of the storefronts teenagers talk to each other and assess one another, casting glances at the young parents who walk beside them with fractious children and promise -- promise -- themselves that they will never turn into adults like that. The mall offers the promise of a future to teenagers, a future that is mostly theirs to shape, as one would take on an identity like trying on new clothes.

Other visitors to the mall include white teenagers and adults, a number of whom are of Armenian descent. (Armenian-Americans make up over a quarter of the city's population, American FactFinder, United States Census Bureau), a little more dark-skinned than many other whites, looking as if they might be latino/a if not for the fact that they never speak in Spanish. This is a quirk of immigration patterns, and one of the (few) things sets the city apart from its neighbors. All of the visitors are relatively well-dressed, matching the cars parked in the lots around the mall. The visitors (regardless of race or age) present themselves as neither Jaguars nor beaters.

Rather, they reflect the kind of just-barely-upper-suburbia that is the city itself. It is no longer as shiny as it was when it was built, in the years after Glendale's boom as its own city (Gold, 1988, p. 100). The mall, like the city, is a part of the background of the region: Not Los Angeles, not Burbank, but certainly not Watts. A place that is safe enough, but not a lot more. This is a central part of its identity as a place, not a planned "theme" per se, but very much a part of the way in which visitors identify the place.

The stores in a mall are not generally considered to be part of the "theme" of a shopping center. Such a theme is generally considered to be something more overt, something more intentional. The idea of the "themed space" has grown in popularity dramatically over the last decade, a time when the infrastructure and the culture of the Glendale Galleria were already established. Moreover, a mall cannot easily be intentionally "themed" in the way that other shopping areas can (Paradis, n.d., p. 57).

A number of small towns across the country have recreated downtown shopping experiences to represent a real (or hoped-for past) that allow individuals to pretend that they are visiting history and entertaining and educating themselves rather than simply spending money on things that they probably do not need. Towns like Virginia City, for example, sell their Old Westness (with staged gunfights in the street occurring at scheduled times) more than anything else, although handily you can pick up memos of that Old West in every store.

Essential to this ability to frame capitalism in a context outside of the post-war abundance of the mall is an integration of the outside into the most overt forms of themed environments. A place like Virginia City only works because we can see the environmental backdrop that was actually there when it was actually the Old West.

When I walk past the tiny houses on our street, I wonder about the stories inside them. I wonder hard, because houses must have walls and rooftops for a reason. My only query is the windows. Why do they have windows? Is it to let a glimpse of the world in? Or for us to see out? Our own place is small perhaps, but when your old man is eaten by his own shadow, you realise that maybe in every house, something so savage and sad and brilliant is standing up, without the world even seeing it. (p. 24)

The mall creates a world that exists in a separate plan from the rest of the world, not because it is set aside from its community but because it is set within a community that is set aside from the natural world that existed once and never again.