Refracted Neurons

 I am beside myself with glee.  I really thought this weekend would be fun, but not that special sort of fun that makes me giggle like a child.   There is an abandoned mall inside this hotel.  This is not a drill.  Let’s back up for a minute.  I’m in Yakima at the Hilton Tapestry hotel, a place known for having Mason roots.  There is a tour you can take, but it’s only on weekdays, and I have already spent a night in a Shriner clown room*, so I’m good.   This hotel is labyrinthine.  The outside is a confusion of empty storefronts showcasing local art and no admittance doorways.  The garage is keycard access only.  The porte cochere is more of circular drive, with one part of the circle blocked by potted plants and a grouping of roped off chairs.  There is a patio with arched columns, gated with ornamental fencing, where an air conditioning unit is housed.  Walking around the hotel gives a disorienting feeling of always head...

We were driving by the mall the other day when I saw it. There's a hole in the mall where the men can see it all.   "What are they doing now?" I turned around in my seat. "They're, you know, tearing it down," my husband seems unsurprised. "But there's a hole in the side of the building!  I have to go back there."  I couldn't get very close to the construction for obvious reasons, but I did get a couple of shots over the fence of a crane tearing the ever-loving capitalism out of the store. Inside they extended the wall, and now there's a small passageway through the center guarded at either end by construction workers. The empty center of the mall, ready for demolition. Even more shops seem to be empty than last time I was here.  The RAM and Bergmans were empty save employees hauling equipment out of the shops. This used to be Bergman's Since there wasn't much new I could see, I drove around the...

Now I know people love stories of dead or dying malls, I mean, I do too.  Empty institutional architecture puts the honey on my peanut butter toast.  But there's a difference between stores fleeing a mall because there are no patrons and stores fleeing a mall because someone’s gonna drop an ice rink on it. And that, my friend, is the story of Northgate Mall. The white space is exactly that; empty. I went there last week to eat belt sushi and made a disquieting discovery: The center of the mall has been walled off.  The food court end of the mall was surprisingly busy for a Friday mid-day, but the other end was pretty dead.  Oddly, there was at least one mall-walker and I could not figure out for the life of me how she was going to walk the mall.  Jump over the barrier and power walk through the vacant center?  Or maybe she was gonna do what I did, and pop in different entrances whack-a-mole style until she found something other than a wall. ...