Folks, it's Choose Your Own Point of This Article!

Yay! Bad history is being paved over and erase to create a new mall! We must forget!
Boo! Bad history is being paved over to create a new mall. We must not forget.
Malls are bad places where bad things happen and I don't like them
Mall are OK places where bad things sometimes happen and I maybe don't like them?
I am willfully ambiguous about my opinions about malls

Nathalie,

If you have the time you should read The View From Flyover Country by Sarah Kendzior

https://www.elliottbaybook.com/search/site/the%20view%20from%20flyover%20country

https://twitter.com/sarahkendzior

@1 @3 -- whooosh!

@4

They're like that.

Sigh, I will miss Northgate Mall, even though I haven't really shopped there since college - not because I shop online but because I mostly stopped shopping for clothes, and the bookstores got murdered by Amazon. It was a good place to hang out with friends sometimes in the winter, especially around Christmas. All the colors and shapes and textures and people mixed together. Things you can't get online!

@4 @5

There's nothing wrong with enjoying the meandering self-expression of someone so new to town that they're still pulling sticky notes out of guidebooks for their source material.

But maybe you shouldn't take that to the point where you start to feel Smug about it, you know?

“I don’t spend time at malls anymore,” says the author.

And she doesn’t seem to spend time researching the first mall in America, either.

I went to Northgate before it was a “Mall.”

When it was covered, and became a mall, it was a great change from having to drive from store to store, park, and walk in the rain to and from the car to transport goods and people around.

When the Northgate Mall opened my brothers and I loved to look through the window in the donut shop and watch them fry donuts. It always got us a free donut and Mom always bought a bag of donuts.

Northgate has always been a boon to North Seattle. It brought new conveniences to shoppers.

It has evolved many times since the author was born and set her views. And it also has served the Northend very well.

The new changes will continue the success of the first “Mall.” Bring them on.

Is purse snatching still a thing? It used to be a thing. "Purse snatcher" used to be a vocation.

There were criminals and purse snatching was basically their whole deal. The'd spend their whole day snatching purses, then go home and probably knock back a few and maybe watch Barney Miller or whatever, and then get up the next day and snatch more purses. They'd get caught and sometimes they'd find evidence of dozens of purse snatchings.

Is it that nobody has a purse at all? Or they have a messenger bag but it's too hard to snatch? Or they only take phones? Or there's just not all that much crime now, not like it used to be? Do teens and twentysomethings reading that Ted Bundy caught a purse snatcher have a clear idea of what it was that Bundy caught?

The bureau of justice statistics says "Rates of personal theft (purse snatching and pocket picking) decreased 48% from 2.3 personal thefts in 1993 to 1.2 per 1,000 persons in 2000." Also a 39% decrease in purse snatchings and pickpocetings form 2000 to 2009. So there. I guess I'm not imagining things. In this case.

Can we all take a moment to remember the Mocha Tree, Farrell's ice cream parlor and that very strange (was it Viking themed?) restaurant that Macy's had?! I will be a Northgate enthusiast until I die, perhaps at Northgate itself.

I thought it was an interesting article. I have been around Seattle, on and off, since the mid 70's, but I have a big gap in the early 80's when I was in high school back in Iowa - and in any event, Northgate was always up in squaresville (I've never much cared for North Seattle). I enjoyed a few meals in the Legend Room (the dining room at the Bon, Marie23 dear), saw a few movies at the Northgate Theatre, but that's about it.

I found the white supremacist bombing story to be fascinating. Newer arrivals have no clue as to the sort of city Seattle used to be, where organizations like the George Jackson Brigade and The Order conducted bombings on a regular basis, and people like Bundy were walking amongst us. I can hardly believe it myself, even though one of the first memories I have of Seattle was the bombing of the Laurelhurst Substation on Dec 31st, 1975.

I loved this piece, Natalie. One thing I love about malls in the age of mall decline is how contrary they are to the narrative people like to tell themselves about the recent past. There's this weird nostalgia about back when things were somehow more authentic--but then there's these hulking unromantic superstructures to rebuff these narratives and I adore that.

I used to live in the north end and visited the mall frequently. A security guy I chatted with told me the mall was haunted because there was a hospital housed there once. Does anyone know if there ever was?

Yes, tabletop_joe dear, there was The Northgate hospital. It was on the north end of the mall by the movie theatre. I remember it being there, but I don't know when it went out. The only thing I've ever heard about it is from people telling me they were born there. It must have been a baby extraction facility back in the 50's and 60's.

The "original" Northgate, at least in its pictures, was sort of nice looking, but it's been altered beyond recognition.

@16 Thanks for confirming!

If you go down the NE hallway there you can see some nice large photos of Northgate in its early days. It's better than viewing them on your little device screen.

Remember when GWAR and other bands played at the movie theater after they stopped playing movies? There are a million Northgate Mall stories.

Northgate: South Center: Tacoma Mall. There's no better place for SHOPPIN' AROUND!

Still have that damned commercial stuck in my head.

Also, "Shoppin around" meant cruising people.

Northgate for life, Farris's, QFC in the mall, smoking weed in the quite room at the old theater, the roasted nut shop, woolworths icees, the old red robin arcade and never ending love to the toy stores i shoplifted endlessly from back in the day

Wow! You have to go all the way back to Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgeway to justify a very questionable redevelopment that likely will bring more woe than boon to the Northgate area.

Turning Seattle into Manhattan won't solve it's problems, but it will make developers richer than Crassus. Maybe we can grow our own Donald Trump, eh?

So much for The Stranger's liberal/progressive veneer.

"purses don't have money in them anymore"

It's weird how much we've torn our hair out trying to fight crime for the last century, and it turns our the only thing the really works is to redefine the variables.

NYT, June 1990: "CONSUMER'S WORLD: Coping; With Car Stereo Theft. In cities around the country, ''No Radio'' window signs in cars have become a common sight."

NPR, March 2009: "Car Stereo Theft: A Dying Crime. Criminologists and industry experts say the biggest reason stereo theft has declined is that car manufacturers started installing good stereos.... People don't steal factory radios."

The loss of brick and mortar stores is tragic, and there are intangibles that are irreplaceable. But retail outlets lose like 15% of their stock -- or more -- to theft. That's baked into the price you pay. With online retailing, the losses in shipping, to theft or mishap are only 1 to 2%.

If 15% of consumer goods are stolen, it supports a whole underground economy to move all those goods. Just like there used to be car stereo installers and stores everywhere, to replace the one stolen from your car, or the crappy one that came with the car. Car stereo installer used to be a job title. Without all that shoplifting, the fences and flea markets and car stereo installers go out of business. If you took somebody's old school radio now, where you even find someone to take it off your hands?

Now we have a lot of new crimes with online credit cards and identity theft. But we did blunder into a world where a lot of the daily grind of street robbery we used to live with is just gone, without a trace.

Don't listen to the haters, Natty G- you're great.