The former Red Bird Mall now resembles historic ruins. For decades hardly anyone wanted to shop there, preferring to venture across Dallas or in recent years nearby Cedar Hill for its trendy outdoor walking mall. Many cities across the U.S. are burdened with mid-century malls. Old and gray and huge as the sea, they remain sprawled across a good hundred acres—taking up way too much space and offering no tax revenue.
The death of a mall is a pitiful sight especially for Baby Boomers like me with memories that keep us forever 16. The biggest thing to have come to my neck of the Dallas suburbs was this very mall. Opening in 1975, it seemed destined for eternal business with anchors like Sanger Harris, JC Penney and of course Sears. The mall shops were crazy eclectic but competed to fulfill our every want and need. More shoes and dress shops than a busy gal could visit in one day, a couple of record stores (for the latest album rock) and eateries galore made the mall an inexpensive teen date: a place to roam and people watch. Christmas time was especially crowded. As a teen I always liked going to the mall. It made me feel alive.
My first real job was at that mall where I scooped ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. We wore pink baseball caps and smocks. I learned to operate a cash register, figure tax, and count correct change back to customers. After school on the days I went to work, the price of a single scoop had increased a penny or two, sometimes a nickel. If I recall correctly, a scoop at some point was 20 cents then more and more, corrections noted in pencil near the register. The owners, a married couple, wanted to train me in management. Turned out the young assistant manager was stealing from the register and summarily fired. But I had greater dreams to fulfill and passed on pursuing management. Besides, the job paid $2 an hour when the minimum wage was more than that. When I inquired about the discrepancy, the owners explained if a company is small, employees don’t have to be paid the federal minimum wage. After some months, I quit to finally earn minimum wage at a barbecue joint.
But working at the mall really appealed to me. Many occasions I’d approach every single store, on both floors, and ask for an employment application. Through high school and early college, I usually could land a job at the mall. My sales clerk experience included the children’s clothing department at Sears and a clothing store called Woman’s World that specialized in the latest fashions for larger ladies. I enjoyed my breaks at Sears because I could go to the candy and nut counter for a bag of warm cashews and an Icee. At the ice cream shop, employees got a free scoop for coming to work. I usually passed but when succumbing to temptation chose Daiquiri Ice on a sugar cone. I was trying to be sophisticated. Besides, I liked the cool turquoise color.
All’s fair in mall and war
Because of the mall’s location, in south Dallas, a lot of whites referred to Red Bird Mall as Black Bird Mall. What an awful thing to say, just because a lot of shoppers were black. But see, the majority whites at the time were not yet willing to be inclusive or think of the community and our country as multicultural and multiracial—as I had come to realize in college. The racial epithet of sorts was around 1989. Yes, there was crime at the mall, perhaps more than other malls in Dallas, still at the time unverified as fact by the general public. It seems an urban legend started the moment Red Bird Mall opened: a horrible story about a little boy attacked in the mall’s restroom. Hearing the story as an adolescent, I believed it and was on guard if ever having to use the mall restrooms, eerily placed down long corridors. After I grew up, going alone to the mall seemed unsafe. I could tell things had changed. The young crowds seemed rough, loud—and most importantly to business—weren’t there to shop. But neither was I most of the time in junior high and high school. I did shop for and buy a prom dress at the mall my junior year: a lacy baby blue evening gown and a very fond memory.
In an effort to rejuvenate the mall, it was renamed Southwest Center and its interior walls redecorated in a style reminiscent of the Old Southwest, more New Mexico and old Mexico than modern Dallas, Texas. It just didn’t fit for those of us born and raised in this area. As the poor economy of the late ’80s and early ’90s continued to threaten businesses from independent shops to national retail chains, my old shopping ground got a new nickname: Dead Bird Mall. It was a hilarious yet honest depiction given all the mall vacancies.
Eulogy for a dead mall
A year ago the Dallas mayor proclaimed intentions to yet again reincarnate Red Bird Mall, first off to rename it as such because originally it referred to a nice upper middle-class Oak Cliff area of Dallas. The city is working with businesses like Starbucks to once again populate the vast concrete territory still harboring some semblance of a mall. But perhaps malls should be a thing of the past. As wonderfully convenient, though costly, as shopping malls were—everything under one roof—times have changed. People shop online first to purchase so many things. Then there’s Wal-Mart and Target.
So what’s gonna bring ’em out to the modernized Red Bird Mall? Perhaps a lot of small single buildings connected by outdoor walkways, fountains, floral landscaping with shade trees, benches, ponds and nature—a beautiful place for meditation, reading online and waiting while others shop. Rule one should be in considering a new shopping development to revitalize Red Bird Mall: Why do people want to go there?
In retrospect, maybe we should list all the reasons people stopped going there: safety, loud unruly crowds, loitering, theft, assault, guns, drugs, evening hours, humongous terrain, accessibility, health issues, and impractical shops. Consumers of the 21st century may have no need for the old mall experience that millions of us hold dear in our memories. Our generation knows better than most: The past tends to be romanticized … because we don’t want to reminisce about the way things really were.