Crikey, 11 November 2014
You can see it through the intervening car yards, from nearly a mile away,
rising above the swell of the freeway, the landscaped verges and the strip malls
on the other side. White-crested, the higher parapets of it appear first, then
the huge four-storey boxy buildings that make up its mass, and finally the vast
car park that surrounds it, an expanse of grey asphalt. At the car park
entrance, a huge circular sign — "White Flint Mall" — and below it, a series
of seven empty frames in a three-by-three grid, only two filled with logos: Lord
and Taylor, and PF Chang’s Chinese. On the parapet there’s some sort of abstract
design, an indented circle with a bar through it, and it takes you a moment to
realise that this is not modern art, but the place where a similar sign once
was. The place has eight entrances done in white cement, fancy brickwork and
steel, but there is no activity around any of them. The windows are empty, save
for two vast display ones, Lord and Taylor, a women's clothing store.
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