We were rethinking the Sixties that week, or Morris Dickstein was.
We were taking another look at the Fifties that week, or Hilton Kramer was.
I agreed passionately. I disagreed passionately. I called room service on one phone and listened attentively on the other to people who seemed convinced that the “texture” of their lives had been agreeably or adversely affected by conversion to the politics of joy, by regression to lapidary bleakness, by the Sixties, by the Fifties, by the recent change in administrations and by the sale of The Thorn Birds to paper for one-million-nine.
I lost track of information.
I was blitzed by opinion.
I began to see opinions arcing in the air, intersecting flight patterns. The Eastern shutde was cleared for landing and so was lapidary bleakness. John Leonard and joy were on converging vectors. I began to see the country itself as a projection on air, a kind of hologram, an invisible grid of image and opinion and electronic impulse. There were opinions in the air and there were planes in the air and there were even people in the air: one afternoon in New York my husband saw a man jump from a window and fall to the sidewalk outside the Yale Club. I mentioned this to a Daily News photographer who was taking my picture. “You have to catch a jumper in the act to make the paper,” he advised me. He had caught two in the act but only the first had made the paper. The second was a better picture but coincided with the crash of a DC-io at Orly. “They’re all over town,” the photographer said. “Jumpers. A lot of them aren’t even jumpers. They’re window washers. Who fall.”
What does that say about us as a nation, I was asked the next day when I mentioned the jumpers and window washers on the air. Where are we headed. On the 27th floor of the Ritz in Chicago my daughter and I sat frozen at the breakfast table until the window washers glided safely out of sight. At a call-in station in Los Angeles I was told by the guard that there would be a delay because they had a jumper on the line. “I say let him jump,” the guard said to me. I imagined a sky dense with jumpers and fallers and DC-ios. I held my daughter’s hand at takeoff and landing and watched for antennae on the drive into town. The big antennae with the pulsing red lights had been for a month our landmarks. The big antennae with the pulsing red lights had in fact been for a month our destinations. “Out I-10 to the antenna” was the kind of direction we had come to understand, for we were on the road, on the grid, on the air and also in it. Where were we heading. I don’t know where you’re heading, I said in the studio attached to the last of these antennae, my eyes fixed on still another of the neon Fleetwood mac signs that flickered that spring in radio stations from coast to coast, but I’m heading home.
1977
On The Mall
they float on the landscape like pyramids to the boom years, all those Plazas and Malls and Esplanades. All those Squares and Fairs. All those Towns and Dales, all those Villages, all those Forests and Parks and Lands. Stonestown. Hillsdale. Valley Fair, Mayfair, Northgate, Southgate, Eastgate, Westgate. Gulfgate. They are toy garden cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes, profound equalizers, the perfect fusion of the profit motive and the egalitarian ideal, and to hear their names is to recall words and phrases no longer quite current. Baby Boom. Consumer Explosion. Leisure Revolution. Do-It-Yourself Revolution. Backyard Revolution. Suburbia. “The Shopping Center,” the Urban Land Institute could pronounce in 1957, “is today’s extraordinary retail business evolvement….The automobile accounts for suburbia, and suburbia accounts for the shopping center.”
It was a peculiar and visionary time, those years after World War II to which all the Malls and Towns and Dales stand as climate-controlled monuments. Even the word “automobile,” as in “the automobile accounts for suburbia and suburbia accounts for the shopping center,” no longer carries the particular freight it once did: as a child in the late Forties in California I recall reading and believing that the “freedom of movement” afforded by the automobile was “America’s fifth freedom.” The trend was up. The solution was in sight. The frontier had been reinvented, and its shape was the subdivision, that new free land on which all settlers could recast their lives tabula rasa. For one perishable moment there the American idea seemed about to achieve itself, via EH. A. housing and the acquisition of major appliances, and a certain enigmatic glamour attached to the architects of this newfound land. They made something of nothing. They gambled and sometimes lost. They staked the past to seize the future. I have difficulty now imagining a childhood in which a man named Jere Strizek, the developer of Town and Country Village outside Sacramento (143,000 square feet gross floor area, 68 stores, 1000 parking spaces, the Urban Land Institute’s “prototype for centers using heavy timber and tile construction for informality”), could materialize as a role model, but I had such a childhood, just after World War II, in Sacramento. I never met or even saw Jere Strizek, but at the age of 12 I imagined him a kind of frontiersman, a romantic and revolutionary spirit, and in the indigenous grain he was.
I suppose James B. Douglas and David D. Bohannon were too.
I first heard of James B. Douglas and David D. Bohannon not when I was 12 but a dozen years later, when I was living in New York, working for Vogue, and taking, by correspondence, a University of California Extension course in shopping-center theory. This did not seem to me eccentric at the time. I remember sitting on the cool floor in Irving Penn’s studio and reading, in The Community Builders Handbook, advice from James B. Douglas on shopping-center financing. I recall staying late in my pale-blue office on the twentieth floor of the Graybar Building to memorize David D Bohannon’s parking ratios. My “real” life was to sit in this office and describe life as it was lived in Djakarta and Caneel Bay and in the great chateaux of the Loire Valley, but my dream life was to put together a Class-A regional shopping center with three full-line department stores as major tenants.
That I was perhaps the only person I knew in New York, let alone on the Condé Nast floors of the Graybar Building, to have memorized the distinctions among “A,” “B,” and “C” shopping centers did not occur to me (the defining distinction, as long as I have your attention, is that an “A,” or “regional,” center has as its major tenant a full-line department store which carries major appliances; a “B,” or “community,” center has as its major tenant a junior department store which does not carry major appliances; and a “C,” or “neighborhood,” center has as its major tenant only a supermarket): my interest in shopping centers was in no way casual. I did want to build them. I wanted to build them because I had fallen into the habit of writing fiction, and I had it in my head that a couple of good centers might support this habit less taxingly than a pale-blue office at Vogue. I had even devised an original scheme by which I planned to gain enough capital and credibility to enter the shopping-center game: I would lease warehouses in, say, Queens, and offer Manhattan delicatessens the opportunity to sell competitively by buying cooperatively, from my trucks. I see a few wrinkles in this scheme now (the words “concrete overcoat” come to mind), but I did not then. In fact I planned to run it out of the pale-blue office.