http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/610023
TheStar.com | Insight | What should we make of empty big-box stores?
URBAN RECLAMATION: What should we make of empty big-box stores?
While we routinely mourn the disappearance of the small storefront, we rarely ask what happens to the texture of a city when a big-box store closes shop.
For starters, a new language to describe the concrete ephemerality would help.
Bigness, it seems, ‘has yet to find its own poetic dimension’
Mar 29, 2009 04:30 AM
Ryan Bigge(SPECAL TO THE STAR)
Except for the fact that they’re rapidly disappearing, the hundreds of aging New York shops captured in the new book Store Front share little in common. Having spent eight years snapping up the modest beauty and idiosyncratic style of drugstores, bakeries, barbershops, butchers, luncheonettes, beauty salons, fish markets, florists, candy stores, diners, delis and corner groceries in the five boroughs of New York, photographers James T. and Karla L. Murray argue in the book’s introduction that “These storefronts have the city’s history etched in their façades.”
Like people, storefronts absorb and deflect the abrasions of time very differently. Some, such as the Frank Bee 5¢ to $1.00 Store in the Bronx and Barney Greengrass (The Sturgeon King) in Manhattan, retain pristine signage, their stores serving as both museums and functional retail locations. Others, such as Ideal Dinettes in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighbourhood, are resigned to the elegant decay of rust and corrosion, a slow, graceful withering away.
And some are such community fixtures that they no longer require perfect signage, like the I Y L E S store in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant (add a “B” at the beginning and two “C”s in the middle) or the AIR stylists in Bensonhurst. (The “H” is dislocated, rather than missing, and drifts slowly down toward the awning.)
The Murrays note in their intro that about a third of the shops documented in their book are now gone. And while their interviews with proprietors raise the usual issues relating to survival, gentrification, chain-store incursion and the importance of community, Store Front works best as an aesthetic defence of small stores.
(For a sample, visit their Flickr photo stream.)
Not every establishment is pretty, but each is unique, and the neighbourhood texture they provide is invaluable. Our own Queen and Spadina, for example, is no longer the same intersection without the Stem Open Kitchen, and Queen and Bathurst is still struggling to overcome the abscess created by last year’s fire.
Often we realize what is gone only in retrospect, but the future of retailing, at least in the form of big-box stores, is so incontrovertibly hideous that the loss of an I Y L E S store is felt immediately.
Futuristic films such as Idiocracy and Wall-E posit Costcos with 16,702 aisles and a global conglomerate called Buy n Large, respectively, and neither store appears to be particularly attractive. As Joel Stein noted in Time magazine back in September 2006, “The problem is, Idiocracy is so aesthetically displeasing – its vision of the future so purposely, gaudily, corporately ugly – that even showing a second (of the trailer) made people refuse to see it.”
Fussing about appearances might sound nitpicky, but as artist Julia Christensen’s recent book, Big Box Reuse, demonstrates, the most significant problem with Buy n Larges is, paradoxically, their impermanence and architectural inflexibility. Not impermanence as in rapidly crumbling walls or leaky roof, but rather, like a young, moulting grasshopper jettisoning a too-small exoskeleton, Wal-Mart has a habit of abandoning stores. (Their website lists almost 150 empty stores for lease.) This is not due to falling profits, but rather the opposite: the need to expand and grow, just like a grasshopper. As Christensen writes, “It is actually cheaper for the company to build an entirely new store from scratch than it would be to interrupt business at the old building in order to renovate.”
Large buildings traditionally required a significant investment in labour and material and implied, by their very existence, a hedge against the passage of time. Department stores could be considered the original category killers, but they certainly looked glamorous doing so. Even 20th-century malls have a certain flair to them. As architect Veronica Madonna writes in Concrete Toronto, “Like the Great Pyramids perched in the desert, the (former) Simpson’s building of the Yorkdale Shopping Centre sits like a great monolithic structure in an asphalt landscape.”
Building big used to mean building in a meaningful fashion. But big-box stores offer size without heft. “The buildings exude an ephemeral quality,” Christensen notes, “imparted by the frequency with which corporations vacate the structures, and yet the dead weight of an empty big-box building does not simply go away.”
But rather than simply complain, Big Box Reuse tries to figure out what can be done with a leftover concrete cube. Through 10 case studies, she demonstrates how Wal-Marts and Kmarts have been converted into libraries, health centres, Minnesota’s Spam Museum, even a chapel.
This last reuse has a certain poetic justice, given the reverent worship of the late Sam Walton, described by Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed as “the Cult of Sam.”
For Christensen, reanimating a concrete corpse requires both physical renovations and psychological shifts, an application of imagination to transform what is into what could be. Preventing new big boxes from being built, however, necessitates a different kind of mental recalibration. Abetted by the convenience of the car and ample free parking, mega-retailing is not an easy habit to cease. As if to underscore this, Philip Preville’s October 2008 Toronto Life article defending the (now-defeated) Leslieville SmartCentre was titled “Resistance is Futile.” Or, to quote the (fictitious) mayor of Seattle in the 1992 film Singles, “People love their cars.”
If big boxes are here to stay, then introducing, or reintroducing, aesthetics into the debate seems reasonable. Of course, there’s always a danger of sounding like a persnickety Karl Lagerfeld when daring to suggest that something is amiss about enormous boxes on the hillside filled with ticky-tacky.
But being a snob can produce results. Wal-Mart met unusually strong resistance when it tried to open a location in Vancouver a few years ago. After their proposed store was rejected by Vancouver city hall for not being environmentally suitable, Wal-Mart hired architect Peter Busby, who specializes in sustainable buildings, to make a big green box. After spending almost two years on the project, Busby, in 2005, unfurled a blueprint for a store with skylights, small windmills, an innovative geothermal heating and cooling system, rainwater recovery, and a parking lot of permeable asphalt.
Alas, it was never built. Vancouver city council said no to the store a second time, citing traffic congestion and increased emissions. But it was this kind of leverage and input over the design and impact of large retail that appeared to be lacking in the Leslieville debate – resistance, we were told, was apparently futile. And the Wal-Mart-in-Vancouver story has a happy ending, provided you’re Julia Christensen: the Cult of Sam eventually decided to buy and renovate an old Costco instead.
Along with better boxes, a new language to describe and debate the concrete ephemerality of the current behemoths would be a useful step forward. As Andrew Blauvelt, curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, writes in the preface to the suburban-art collection Worlds Away, “bigness has yet to find its own poetic dimension.”
In Concrete Reveries, philosopher Mark Kingwell suggests we might have to start by learning to appreciate the texture of the evil grey material: “It has swirls and patterns, little islands and continents stained on the extended map of its face. Concrete is beautiful, never more so than in the rain.”
Meanwhile, in its rethinking of Brutalism (an architectural attempt to reign in the excesses of modernism), Concrete Toronto reminds us that even a mall can be more than a place to buy stuff. For Veronica Madonna, the Sears building has hints of “social utopian ideology,” and “its exaggerated parapet, tilted slightly forward and reaching up to the sky, suggests endless possibilities.”
Along with thinking about the outside of the box, we need to consider what occurs within. Chicago-based photographer Brian Ulrich takes surreptitious photographs of the activity within the big boxes. In the introduction to Worlds Away, Blauvelt comments on the suburban ennui that Ulrich’s portraits capture and asks: “Is it shocking to see this beautifully composed portrait of someone pushing a cart through Costco?”
New Jersey-based artist Stefanie Nagorka, also in Worlds Away, builds paving-stone sculptures in the aisles of Home Depot, thus putting art in the middle of commerce, and turning the items for sale into art.
Although the Home Depot once planned for the Queen and Portland condo development is no more, it could have been an interesting experiment in medium box retailing. Indeed, for LTL Architects, a New York firm that enjoys speculations and what-ifs, it represented the future of retail-residential co-habitation. Their New Suburbanism proposal, included in Worlds Away, stacks apartments and housing on the roofs of big-box stores: “The residential neighbourhood above and the commercial zone below are physically separate and perceptually distinct, although each influences the other.”
The computer sketches and maquettes generated by LTL are whimsical, strange and counter-intuitive – perhaps even impossible. But at least they aren’t ugly.
