A Loogie in the Eye of the Capitalist Dream

Sad malls. Is there any public place so defeated-feeling as a sad mall? It’s like a death on Christmas day. It’s supposed to be merry, and the supposed-to-ness of it only highlights the grim element. But then again, because it’s just a mall and not a death, I must admit I take a perverse glee in their existence: in their own way, they are transgressive. They are a loogie in the eye of the capitalist dream.

Sad Mall #1: The Galleria, Dufferin and Dupont. Galleria! A word that, for me anyway, evokes Zappa’s seminal “Valley Girl”. But this ratty-ass mall could not be farther from Silicone Valley’s gleaming, iconic shopping paradise. Observe: the “anchor stores” (I made up that terminology, but it’s pretty good) are a Zellers and a Price Choppers, and a bad Price Choppers at that, like the kind where not only have they not heard of wasabi, but they don’t know what you mean when you ask for capers. And when I think of Zellers, I smell plastic and the sizing on cheap clothes. There is an excellent “common area” that was probably supposed to be a food court, or at least get filled with chairs and tables, but it’s still a vast, echoey, empty space that is also very dim, with sparsely located, dingily-coloured pot lights. The vendors come from places that probably only saw their first malls in the last five years, and they sell things like cheap, ugly synthetic clothes (maroon hoodies with Canadian flags on the front) and junky-looking home appliances. The one nice thing about the crummy mall is that I took Awesome Dog to the pharmacy there a few times and no one kicked us out. In fact, the pharmacist gave A.D. a Social Tea cookie.

Sad Mall #2: Greenwin Square, Sherbourne and Bloor. This mall’s size works against it, but still. It contains a couple of dry cleaners, a McDonalds, a PharmaPlus, and a host of totally insignificant stores. Oh, and a Goodwill! The trim is a really raunchy teal colour, and the halls have green and blue neon tubing along the ceiling. There is a markedly strong smell of cleaner or air deodorizer that I guess is meant to evoke baby powder, but at some points it gets so overwhelming that, when combined with restauranty whiffs from Mickey D’s, it’s like being suffocated in a woman’s deodorized armpit.

Sad Mall #3: Gerrard Square! I haven’t been there in so long, but that place is legendary. Not quite in Little India, but with a slightly third-world feel anyway. Don’t have much to say about it because the details have faded from memory, but I wanted to have more than two malls on my list and The Atrium on Bay is up for debate.

Honourable Mention totally goes to the Dufferin Mall, but in the last decade it has really pulled itself out of the gutter. The cool thing is, it still has personality. The Food Court in the winter is overrun with Old World patriarchs getting together to shoot the shit away from the house. Lots of them fall asleep in the chairs throughout the mall. There’s a store with funky fat-girl clothes and a place selling churros, those South American donut things. The food court has a place called “Roasty Jack’s,” the logo of which is, mysteriously, a running shoe, and the motto of which is “Endless roastability!” Catchy.