Quote:
Originally Posted by Chef
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Artists, musicians and other marginal types have always lived in the detritus of the discarded ideas of previous eras. There is no reason why a dead mall in an aging blue collar suburb in 2025 would be any different than the Lower East Side in the '70s.
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Some artists have already tried romanticizing the suburbs in prose and/or film. Eric Bogosian, William Upski Wimsatt, Kevin Smith, Todd Solondz, to make a few. But I don't think there's really enough interest by a large enough subset of creative types to turn malls into artist communities en masse. That's not too say that none will emerge, but there are many, many ways in which urban warehouse districts are completely incomparable to a dying mall. The biggest way is connections to other parts of the region. Warehouse districts have at least usable public transit, even if it's not as good as other, more populous neighborhoods, it's far better than transit would be for a dying mall. The same for biking. The driving infrastructure may be better for a mall, but an artist crashing in a warehouse district could live just fine without a car if they needed or wanted to, but that would be a lot more isolating in a suburban mall.