When I first moved here (Orange County, CA) from Ohio, I did just that. I think I've been to all the major shopping areas here at least once. One of the places I went to was a mall just off the 405 in Huntington Beach. This was maybe a year or less after I moved out here--quite a while ago. I'd already explored the places closer to home, and had a definite picture in my mind of what a socal shopping mall looked like. This place was totally different. For one, the parking lot was essentially deserted--a stark contrast from other shopping centers I'd been to, with their packed garages and people parking-sharking for a spot up close. I parked near a Montgomery Wards (something they didn't have in Ohio, at least not in the places I grew up) that had either just gone out of business, or was just about to. I forget if I had managed to make it into the Wards, but I do know that I made it into the mall itself, which was sort of dark and creepy--more like the older Ohio malls than the ones I'd seen out here--and which was almost completely closed off. I was pretty weirded out by this, so I left and went to another mall up the highway which was much busier and not nearly as ghostly.
I didn't return there--there was no reason to as all the stores were closed and you couldn't even walk through most of the mall. I did hear that they were going to tear the place down (no surprise) and build a modern open-air shopping area in its place. But this was years ago, and my old car was already starting to show its age--I didn't drive places unless I had to.
I have a new car now, and I'm in the process of reviving my interest in road trips. I have a saying that "The second time makes it real." I have a tendency to have vivid dreams, and sometimes I can't remember what things I've really done and what things I've only dreamed of. I find if I go someplace or do something twice, then I know it's real. Thus, yesterday I did two things I'd only done once before. One was to go back to that mall, and the other was to drive up to Torrance, near where I used to go when I worked at my previous job, and drive back along the PCH, which is also something I'd only done once (most other times I took the 405 back).
The new shopping center in Huntington Beach is called "Bella Terra" and it's...weird. It is indeed an outdoor shopping area, but it's not like the other ones (such as the Irvine Spectrum Center, near where I work) which are basically normal malls without the roofs. That is, the stores are on the outside and you walk on the inside between them. This place is the opposite--an island of stores, with broad sidewalks around them, and one area which is more like a typical outdoor mall, complete with water feature and a place for kids to play. I parked at the Barnes and Noble (I love love love bookstores and always go in the ones I find), and walked around. Everything was different from when I was there. I saw a couple of buildings with distinctive patterns on the outside walls, that I think I remembered from the mall days, but that was about it.
Until I got around to the far side from the B&N. There I was confronted with a parking lot, as expected, but beyond that a cruddy, ruinous-looking wall. It was exactly the sort of thing you'd see in my dream world--a modern shopping center nestled right up against abandoned buildings. Only, in my dream world those buildings would be crumbling red-brick factories, and not the distinctly retail-y looking structure I was staring at. From the look of the thing, it seemed like it had once directly abutted the mall--you could see the scars from the demolition, and even the boarded-up doors that would have at one time allowed mallgoers to enter this building. I continued walking and when I could see a different side of this structure, I realized this was none other than the same Montgomery Wards that I had parked by years ago. Except for not being attached to a mall anymore, it looked more or less exactly as it had when I'd seen it the first time. Seeing it now, I could clearly visualize the rest of the old mall--I had found my anchor, in more ways than one, and I knew exactly where I was. I returned to my car and drove around the old Wards store--it was amazingly intact--even the old automotive center was still standing. Except for the old mall side, it looked like they could re-open it tomorrow. I have no idea why this building hasn't been fixed up like the other ones, or torn down to put something else in, but it was cool to be there while it was still up.
After stopping for lunch, at the same shopping mall (and the same Wendy's) that I had eaten at those years previously, I continued up the 405--a route I had not taken in a long time. I got off near an oil refinery that I had driven past many times when I went up that way for work. The weather's been humid lately, and there was a lot of steam blowing out of that refinery--gave it a very cool, creepy, steampunky look that I like.
Anyhow, I wound up at yet another mall that I had only been to once before. This one is called the Del Amo Fashion Center, and was apparently at one time the largest in the country. The one time I'd been there (the same time I'd driven back along the PCH) I recall I hadn't been too impressed by its size--it had seemed to be way smaller than South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, which is huge. This time, I parked where I had before, near the Sears. I went inside, and saw that things hadn't changed much. The ceiling was still startlingly low for a mall ceiling, and there was still the weird basement Burlington Coat Factory. I continued on until I reached the two-story section I remembered. There was a Penneys and a Macy's and...another Macy's. Most of the malls I go to have at least one of these, often more than one. Anyhow, that seemed to be it--the two-story section dead ended at the Macy's. Then, I checked a directory and realized that you had to walk through the Macy's, and beyond it was another section of mall, even bigger than the section I had been in. This section went on and on, though twisting and turning several times, and like the section I'd been in, it felt more like the malls in Ohio that I'd been in as a kid in the 80s, or as a teenager in the early 90s, than the ones I was used to seeing out here. At the very end of this section, past a corral full of really freaky ridable robot animals playing tinny children's music, was a set of doors leading into...an outdoor shopping court that felt like it belonged to a totally different mall than this one--it could have been down in Orange County, attached to South Coast Plaza or to the Spectrum Center. It was very modern and very trendy-looking and very different from the rest of the place.
On the way back to my car (which felt like I'd parked it in a different city) I discovered that this section still had some vestiges of the old mall. I found a couple of side passages that led to parking areas. One of them led to a very dark, almost industrial-looking garage that I swear I'd seen in a dream before. This whole mall was straight out of one my dreams--complete with the multiple sections that didn't quite fit together, and the store you have to walk through to get from one side to the other. Back inside, I decided to go out an exit I'd spotted on the way in (the whole place is full of these--some of them reachable only by escalator and elevator) and I found myself walking on a sidewalk, along side a parking lot, in what I would have taken as a run-down strip mall if I hadn't known that there was a regular-type mall on the other side of those doors. Ahead of me, and across the parking lot was another set of more modern-looking stores and...another B&N. There was also a Starbucks here, where I got a much needed glass of iced tea after stopping at the B&N. After this, it was back to the car. The whole place was so dreamlike it wasn't even funny--the stripmall exterior was just the icing on the cake. The malls in my dreams are massive edifices with soaring multi-level sections, outdoor areas, and cramped, run-down, hallway-like appendages stretching into the extreme outer limits of their parcels, and even beyond. They are more diverse than many cities. Until yesterday, I don't think I'd encountered one in the real world even remotely like them. Now I had.
From here, it was a road trip down Hawthorne to the Pacific Coast Highway. This runs from as far north as I've been along the coast, down almost to where I live. Along the way, it goes through very diverse areas. At the start of my journey, it led through what I deemed to be typical southern California commercial area--there were strip malls full of chain stores, and some big-box retailers. As I had remembered, however, as I progressed I found myself in crummier and crummier neighborhoods. The chain stores were replaced by no-name local outfits, and the overall character was more run-down. It continued like this for quite a while until I saw the chimneys of factories looming ever closer. I drove up a ramp and over a massive industrial landscape, like Blade Runner without the rain and darkness. Nothing but pipes and smokestacks and tanks and flame-belching flares as far on either side of the road as I could see. Multiple parallel railroad tracks, each heavily laden with cars, ran under the road, like a superhighway for trains. In the distance, I saw mountains of stacked cargo containers, like a giant's LEGO bricks. Then, the road descended down into a more human scaled industrial area, and then, more ghetto.
As I had remembered from my previous trip, the next big change took place at a traffic circle. It was there that the part of the PCH that I thought of as looking "Los Angeles-y" became the part that I thought of as more "Orange County-y" Things started looking nicer after that, and I found myself driving through a distinctly oceanic community, with both nautical and beach themes. There were boat-dealers and marinas, and surf-board shops, and at one point I passed what looked like a giant water tower, converted into a residence. I'd love to get the view from there someday. From that point on, I was driving through familiar territory--placed I'd been to many times, and which I knew were real. The rest of the trip was merely a trip home.
It was, in short, the most fun (in my strange way) weekend I've had in a very long time. I hope to be able to do stuff like that more often, now that I've got a car I trust again.
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