In July 2006, I attended the SOBO Summerfest in Boulder, Colorado. This was a pretty forgettable affair – some uninteresting jam bands and some merchants giving away sports bottles and power bars-- but certainly nothing to write home about. What caught my attention, though, were the staging grounds themselves. The revelers gathered in a strip mall parking lot, backing up against a row of shops: used sporting goods, knickknacks, a diner, classroom space for knitters, mountaineering equipment repair, and the now empty Social Security Administration office. It is a commonplace that America is losing public space – town squares are abandoned in favor of strip malls on the edge of town. The first strip mall is thought to have appeared in Kansas City early in the last century, and we’ve continually moved further out along the road ever since. This de-centering has left an indelible mark on virtually all American cities; even Boulder, which in many ways is a beacon for the success of central town planning. So placing the Summerfest in a parking lot was an obvious choice, logistically. SOBO refers to South Boulder, not really a neighborhood proper, but simply that part of Boulder south of the rest of town (duh). The out-sized strip mall here (actually several interlocking strips) is the hub of activity in South Boulder, and I’m writing in a coffee shop in the strip mall right now. The structure does actually have a name, the Table Mesa Shopping Center (not the Table Mesa Strip Mall, a more accurate, but rather less grandiose title), though no one actually refers to it as such. I’ve heard it referred to as ‘the shops’, ‘the hood’, ‘the café’, ‘the strip mall’, and only very occasionally as SOBO (always said with a snicker of derision). These monikers reveal a certain familiarity – a speaker would only ever refer to ‘the shops’ if the listener was certain to know what was being referred to, otherwise it would be hopelessly vague. Furthermore, it is precisely this familiarity that goes against the expectation of pessimistic critics, historians, and preservationists.
Conventional wisdom has long said that as a community moves away from its center, its cohesive identity will evaporate. However, the millennial predictions of the city’s disappearance have not come to pass – or, rather, the outcome is just a little more complicated than predicted. For instance, sitting here as I am, looking through the coffee shop window, I see many familiar faces: Pyramid-Head Guy[1] just walked past, the women from the cooking school next door are taking their break, the banjo hippie has made an appearance, and I’m always hopeful that Camo-Man[2] will show up again after a long absence. So, that sense of community once engendered by the town square has not really been lost, it has just moved to the outskirts of town. Despite the rather dismal state of this strip mall, I find that I’ve become quite attached to it. It is my cultural and communal center, even in spite of its shortcomings. Things are not the same as they were before, however, in that pre-strip mall state of urban bliss. Indeed, in important ways our relationship to the city has changed, though this change is complicated. But there are several threads here, so let me slow down and try to pry them apart.
The centerpiece of ancient Greek architecture was the agora – this was, in fact, hardly a piece of architecture at all, it was a plaza. It was largely an empty space, but one in which the most important social events occurred. Surrounding the agora, however, was the stoa. The stoa should seem to us strikingly familiar; it did not differ substantially from a strip mall. It consisted of a long, low roof, supported by columns, backing against a wall. Most were one story, though several were two-leveled (like much of the Table Mesa strip mall). In terms of its actual structure, the strip mall differs from the stoa most substantially in that the wall which originally backed the Greek stoa now has shops behind it (the stoa held vendors selling wares, but not shops, proper). So it is not without a certain amount of irony that the strip mall, perhaps most denigrated of modern structures, should be essentially the same as a Greek structure, whose culture is still often heralded as the architectural high-water mark. The historian R.E. Wycherly called the stoa a work of peculiar genius, but I think that is really overstating the case. Quite the contrary, the stoa seems to me to be an obvious development: a wall and a roof. Clearly, similar structures have appeared in many cultures at many times, and are probably close to automatic. 
It is likely one of the oldest architectural designs; there may be genius in the first moment of architectural awareness, but that it should take the form of a stoa is no big surprise. Visiting the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, I was struck that artisans selling their wares outside the monument at Wounded Knee had aligned their handmade awnings in perfect strip formation, parallel to the highway. The stoa/strip mall may be the architectural vernacular supreme. So what’s the difference? The difference is that relationship between the stoa and the agora that existed for the Greeks. This does not properly exist any more. The agora was shared public space – Socrates engaged in dialogues here. Now we have parking lots (though I think philosophy still proceeds here[3]). Is this a bad development? Not necessarily. As heir-apparent to the Greek civilizations, widespread appearance of the strip malls is nicely nostalgic but the transformation of the agora into a parking lot is peculiarly American. The strip mall, in dispensing with the agora, becomes an architecture peculiarly suited to the road. It is an architecture of movement. Think of the word itself: strip implies an elongated strand, itself already directional. It also implies the removal of something, in this case a center. The strip, once denuded of its agora, is reduced to only direction, an arrow pointed onward. Movement; travel, but without a destination. So, the SOBO Summerfest had to make use of a parking lot. But the parking lot is only a momentary agora. Most of the time it’s a temporary resting place for cars. And this is telling, too. Not-quite-dead space, a repository for our stuff before we are back on the road again.
Parking lots, and not just those in front of strip malls, are the frequent centers of public events now: concerts, farmer’s markets, pottery shows, dog shows, roller hockey. And this is very clever, in a certain way. Public space has broadened its use. But really, it’s just a response to a lack. We need public space, and we’ll invent it if its not readily provided. The parking lot provides this opportunity, but in a somewhat sadder way. The parking lot is public, but it's also tenuous – sadder, wiser. We might buy our organic vegetables here in the morning, but we also come here to fight and smoke cigarettes at night. This after-the–flood attitude has been amply shown in movies from Heavy Metal Parking Lot to Say Anything, where the kids without dates hang out aimlessly behind the gas station. The strip mall as such, though, is well overdue for a more serious study. A glossy photographic coffee-table volume just depicting strip malls would be welcome, indeed. So, even if goaded by a lack of options, we still come to the strip mall for various revelations – I, myself, once performed with a band at a strip mall (as Jonathan Richman put it, “Couldn’t stay inside talkin’, had to get outside rockin’”). We come here to celebrate, but we know we soon will have to move on (to another strip mall?). So, it is with that sense of existential whimsy, but wistfulness that I walk past these shops. The strip mall is in constant change – here the book store has closed down, and the homebrewer’s supply has relocated. But now we have an Indian grocery and a dollar store – so I can cheaply buy out-of-date Chocolate Lucky Charms. It's human nature to grow attached to certain features of our environment, but at the strip mall our attachments are continually unsettled. With the Greek stoa/agora, this must have been much less the case. On the strip all bets are off. I am always hoping that Camo- Man will reappear – clad only in camouflage trousers, constantly playing hacky sack, blasting Tom Waits from his camouflage truck. For a season he literally lived here, and could be seen every time I passed, bringing a weird constancy to the strip. But, of course, he eventually moved on, presumably to another strip mall, kicking hacky sacks off another roof.
This article originally ran in AmericanNerdMag.com on July 3, 2006.
[2] Camo-Man, obviously, wears camo pants and, not obviously, nothing else. I once saw him leap from the strip mall roof, terrifying soccer moms strolling past with their soy chais. He may summer in the mountains. More on Camo-Man later
[3] Transdimensional harmonics anyone?
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