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Annalee Newitz 🍜

What happens when a mall dies? In my latest newsletter, I visit two of San Francisco's moribund shopping spaces -- the former Twitter building, and the former Westfield mall. What I find is very liminal. buttondown.com/thehypothesis/a

This is a 1955 picture of the building that housed Twitter, then known as Furniture Mart. The text around the image reads: The saga of Twitter and X occupies a lot of ideological real estate in the media right now. And yet this shitposty, aggressive transformation of one brand into another was merely a blip in the long life of this former mall. Decades before a social media oligarch occupied it, the building was an ever-growing sales warehouse and showroom for wholesale furniture and housewares companies. Opened in 1937 at the height of the Depression, the Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart’s many floors and wings boasted lavish displays of sofas, chandeliers, kitchen appliances, and more. The building’s elaborate Art Deco facade was infused with appropriated Mayan imagery. It was a showstopper. During the post-World War II era, the Mart truly blossomed. Bolstered by 1950s and 60s middle class prosperity, its owners took over several adjacent buildings, filling them to the brim with tangible objects for physical spaces. Home to over 300 wholesalers for 60 years, by 2008 it housed only 30. The Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart was sold in 2011 to the Shorenstein Company, a development firm that retrofitted it for a new economy devoted to social objects and virtual spaces.
These are two pictures of empty mall spaces. One is an empty rotunda, whose shopfronts are covered in butcher paper. The floor is fake brown marble. The other is a forgotten hallway, most of its doors and windows covered in paper. Only one sign remains etched on the glass: "Brow Savant." The text reads: As I ascended toward the blank spaces where Nordstrom once ruled, I found a glorious unbranded emptiness that future archaeologists will no doubt describe as “ceremonial chambers” or “special use spaces.” The mall seemed to degenerate into absurdism as I continued to ride the escalators up. Twinkling strands of gilded holiday decorations fell from the distant, illuminated ceiling, past five dark levels of unfilled retail space.
Dec 11, 2024, 08:29 PM·Public
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