The Death of Midtown

June 19, 2008, 12:30 pm; posted by
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I work a thousand feet or so from what claims to be “the nation’s first fully enclosed downtown mall,” Midtown Plaza in Rochester, NY. I don’t know quite how that can be true, since it opened in 1962 and I once worked a few thousand feet from a downtown mall that dated to 1850, but you choose your battles. The picture on the right dates from its late ’60’s heyday.

I go there often on lunch. At first I used it only for its pizza, or as a portal to the Skyway system that connects many of our downtown buildings, including my bank and the library, but once our ex-governor announced its demolition so a suburban telecom corporation could relocate downtown, it gave my wanderings greater focus. Now my visits are to a condemned prisoner, a wizened dowager facing a strict sentence of death. The mall closes on August 1.

I am fully in favor of economic development, and I am not particularly sentimental about the building. It’s far too easy to wax eloquent about the glories of Midtown’s past while overlooking its decaying infrastructure and outdated designs; this mall’s prognosis was clear long before Fr. Spitzer pronounced last rites. But I wonder, as I ride the barren escalator past the remnants of the Christmas monorail, whether the change will really be beneficial, and if so, to whom. Preferring as I do the sometime-stagnant past to the always-uncertain future, I was destined to be a conservative.

During one recent visit, a drunken homeless man interrupted my lunch order to clumsily proposition an employee, whose resigned eye roll perfectly completed Midtown’s modern urban vignette — lunching professionals from the surrounding office towers and staggering castoffs who made the deserted mall their daylight home, thrown together at her counter for amusement and frustration. Together, though, we could never keep the mall alive, and so every time I enter, another store has closed its doors. The darkness spreads. The emptying halls take on a foreboding desolation; the once-bright retail windows offer only a disturbing emptiness.

We are not made to be comfortable with death of any type, even, perhaps, the death of the garish and commercial. Worst of all is the slow, wasting type that visibly saps the life from the bones — it takes an act of the will to stay and witness. Let it compel us, at the risk of cliche, to make the most of the time we have.


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