Now that my camera has been fixed, I hope to take a spin out to the site of the old Wonderland Mall in Livonia today, which the newspapers here have reported on its inevitable demolition.
This calls into mind the theories of the "donut hole", the dying central core of an area, and the Wal-Martization of society I've subscribed to for years.
In urban sprawl, for instance, as an inner city ages, the people start moving further out into suburbia. As those suburbs age, more farmland is taken up by newer housing. In each instance, the new outer ring is trying to out-shine & out-do everything the inner ring(s) used to provide. By the time the rings are four to five layers thick, no one even wants to see what happened inside the "donut hole" that used to be the thriving city. Think of drug-laden neighborhoods and rotting infrastructure among the top culprits.
Wonderland Mall is a case in point, built in the 1950s as state-of-the-art. But its leadership could not, or did not know how to, compete with newer malls being built near the area. When a new mall would be built, Wonderland did not know how to win those shoppers back. Food courts & carnival rides, for example, could only go so far. The result was a ghost mall that pointed to the sad commentary of what it was, and what it could never be again.
What's replacing it? Danger, danger Will Robinson! A Wal-Mart.
The common man has lost ground to the corporate giant again, and I ask those who worked hard to get that big box there: where was their energy to convince Wonderland's owners to save the mall, instead of the corner being yet another site of this non-union, mom-and-pop-store-destroying behomoth?
Wal-Mart is destroying our society; it's eliminating the variety we knew shopping malls to provide. There remain traditionalists who hope this cycle reverses itself (although with money doing the talking, it's unlikely).
Getting back to malls, Great Lakes Crossing in Auburn Hills is now the premiere shopping mall in the Detroit area. Not long ago, it was the Somerset Collection just north of the city. It has tried to re-make itself, unlike Wonderland, but the results have been mixed. How much longer before the mixed results turn flat, the donut hole gets wider, and the endless sprawl of WalMarts continue?
Boy, does tradition need a voice, now more than ever.
