never dead on the horizon

 

I am a bit hesitant to share anything from the trash pamphlet that is the SF Gate, but this article caught my eye last month. A mall that was always very near and dear to my heart is closing down this month, and is to be razed for some stupid biotech campus.

Quite frankly, the last thing that we need is another biotech campus.

Plus, I thought all of those people were working from home now, so why are we building new things for them?!

Tanforan shopping mall has been around for about 51 years. Formerly, it was a racetrack  that was made famous by Seabiscuit --yes, that Seabiscuit (and was even used as a Japanese interment site during WWII).

I am not morally opposed to change. I am not one of those anti-change curmudgeons.

I just hate the reasons why things change. 

At the end of  2019, I posted on my LiveJournal about how deeply saddened I was about the closure of one of the best stores in the Bay Area--the Palo Alto Fry's. When I tell people, "you don't understand," I really mean that--that it was something so special that you had to experience it. Like all good Fry's locations, it was theme. It was a former canning factory that was Wild West themed. It closed even before the pandemic, right before the pandemic hit.

All Fry's Electronics are gone now. This is largely due to mismanagement, but who knows if they would have survived the pandemic had they even been managed correctly.

All I know is about both of Fry's and Tanforan, is that I am sad. 

I am sad about people losing their jobs just to make millionaires more money. I am sad that places that were such an important part of their communities are now gone.

I am not a spoiled brat who only wants their way, I am not adverse to change.

I just hate the reasons why things change. 

Change is always scary, even if it's the exciting kind of scary. Change is always met with some degree of fear of the unknown. I don't mind change on our own terms--change the serves a meaningful purpose. Changing up your hair cut or your social media icon, changing your job, things like that. I wouldn't call greed a meaningful purpose. Feeling powerless is a yucky feeling.

I don't mind change. I think variety is good. I think spicing things up is always good.

For what felt like most of my childhood, Tanforan was closed. It wasn't actually closed that long, it just felt like it was closed for that long. It was only actually closed for about 3 years and reopened in 2005. It closed right as my grandfather was dying, so he never got to see it reopen. When it was remodeled, it was remodeled by a company that designs cruise ships. And it felt just like that. It was glossy and shiny and spacious and new. Previously it had sort of been considered a dump of a mall. It wasn't the cultural icon of Serramonte. It wasn't the Bastian of Snobbery that was Hillsdale. It was a little sketch, but it had an anime store before those were really a thing.

But this make over was really something amazing.

I spent a lot of time there when I was in community college. It was a safe place to hang out after school. It was a fun place for my friends and I to go to, whether we were going to the bookstore to be Those Assholes who hung out at Barnes and Noble and read manga they never bought (although we would eventually buy some),  who bothered their friends who worked at FYE pretending to be Karen customers, who went to the movies there, who, you know, just got to be safe there.

I went to the Barnes and Noble for the first time in years in December. I bought some Christmas presents, I bought myself a watercolour sketchbook. It felt so NICE to go into a physical store again, which is a lot to say for someone who actually actively detests having to go into physical stores. I was there again in January to pick up a physical copy of the first books of the Tristan Strong trilogy. I wanted to have something to read whilst I waited in line for my rapid Covid test. (I was negative--hooray!--, and on the way home, got stopped because of a mountain lion hold up, true story.) I call having to go out in public since 2020 being "in the wild," so the humour of me running into "the wild" wasn't in anyway lost on me.

I won't see Tanforan  before it closes. I have no reason to go to the mall, and no real desire to spend money I don't have on the things that I don't need. Because of the Covid-limited bus schedules, and how generally unsafe it is to be Out There, I won't have a chance to. And that's okay. My last memory of the place buying an amazing book on the way to my Covid-test and a trip home that was hijacked by a mountain lion is a pretty good way to see the place out. I am no less sad that it's riding off into the sunset, but that's how I have said goodbye, it's not a bad way to have done it.