80s News Today

The wind off the Chesapeake has a way of biting through a denim jacket like a piranha on meth, and on February 24, 1987, it was howling. But inside that sprawling slab of brick and glass in Glen Burnie, the air smelled like buttered popcorn, Orange Julius, and the kind of high-octane optimism you can only find in a suburban shopping mecca. Marley Station Mall was finally open. It sat there on Ritchie Highway like a landed mothership, all gleaming neon and promises. For the folks in Anne Arundel County, it wasn't just a place to buy a pair of Toughskins at Sears or a blender at Hecht’s. It was a temple of the New Age. You walked through those sliding glass doors and the world turned from February gray to a kingdom of chrome and potted ferns. Inside, it was brighter than day. Skylights poured white light across marble-look tile. Escalators moved like patient rivers, carrying laughing teenagers up to the second level where the arcades waited with their Pac-Man beeps and the first whi...

The Beverly Center mall opened its doors on February 4, 1982, and Los Angeles, that great chrome-plated dream factory, paused for a moment—only a moment—to witness the arrival of something new, something monumentally, unapologetically itself. Here was the future, or at least a version of it that cost $100 million and rose eight stories high on the old site of kiddie rides and cotton candy, where once the Ferris wheel spun lazy circles above Beverly Park and now the parking structure itself became the plinth for retail nirvana. Picture it: the intersection of La Cienega and Beverly Boulevard, that throbbing artery where the traffic never quite stops and the billboards scream in primary colors. Developers A. Alfred Taubman, Sheldon Gordon, and E. Phillip Lyon had taken the triangular plot—8.8 acres of former pony rides and mini-roller-coasters—and piled upon it a brown monolith, a great angular box wrapped in glass escalators that climbed like transparent veins toward the Hollywood Hill...

It is a little-known fact, buried somewhere between the invention of the cassette tape and the controversial decision to put pineapple on pizza, that on the sixteenth of November in the year 1984, the human race was quietly issued a cinematic memo informing it that, in the event of a comet passing perilously close to Earth and turning ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent of the population into either dust or zombies, the last remnants of civilization would be two Valley Girl sisters and a trucker. The film in question was Night of the Comet , written and directed by Thom Eberhardt. It is nothing less than one of the quintessential 80s films, one that future generations and offworld guests will be shown, should they express a curiosity to truly understand what life was like in the 1980s. It shares cinematic DNA with The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension - which opened earlier the same year - but presents a far more cinéma vérité approach in its depiction of the...

Sweet, sultry, sweat-soaked Memphis, city of the blues and the barbecue, where the Mississippi rolls lazy like a hungover alligator and the air hangs thick with the scent of fried everything. And here we are, on this balmy autumn morning of October 7, 1981, when the whole damn town—White, Black, rich, poor, the debutantes and the factory hands—pours out of their shotgun shacks and split-level ranches like ants from a hill that's been dynamited by the hand of Progress himself. Progress with a capital P, mind you, the kind that wears a hard hat and a grin wider than the Grand Canyon, courtesy of those Memphis land barons James Bridger and Stanley Trezevant Jr., who back in 1972 started snapping up acreage on Cherry Road and American Way like it was the last rack of ribs at Rendezvous. Picture it, folks: the sun's barely crested the treetops out by Nonconnah Creek, and already the parking lots—five thousand five hundred and sixty-four spaces, each one a concrete promise of liberat...

Before the Nickelodeon Hotel, the cable channel embarked on its first voyage out of the cathode ray tube into real life: the Nick at Nite TV Land Mall Tour . The date is etched in the calendar like a tattoo on a sailor's forearm: October 6, 1989.  Picture this: The sky over Long Island is that particular autumnal gray, the kind that makes the sodium-vapor lamps in the parking lot flicker on early, casting everything in a glow that's half diner at midnight, half perpetual twilight zone. Green Acres Shopping Center, this behemoth of a mall—two levels of linoleum dreams, anchored by Macy's on one end and Gertz on the other, with escalators humming like the arteries of some great retail beast—has been prepped for invasion. And what an invasion! Nick at Nite, that sly after-dark alter ego of the kiddie channel Nickelodeon, the one that's been beaming reruns into living rooms since 1985 like a bootlegger slinging moonshine in a racetrack parking lot, has rolled up with the fu...

The box rose on September 19, 1985. Not just any box, you understand, but a big box, a really BIG box, a sprawling, horizontal, concrete bunker, rising up out of the Prince William County soil with the sort of implacable, irresistible, goldarned force of a tidal bore! Out on Route One, they were coming, they were roaring up from Fredericksburg, and spilling off I-95 from the Capital Beltway, a whole NEW wave of Virginia colonists, not to conquer the wilderness this time, oh no, but to CONQUER THE SALES!! Potomac Mills Mall had opened. The sales, you see, were the point. Potomac Mills was designed as an outlet mall, not a high-end number like White Flint Mall or Mazza Gallerie. This is how you ended up with Teri Garr at the ribbon cutting instead of Elizabeth Taylor. And infamous Virginia Governor Chuck Robb, just one year removed from his New York hotel room massage.  Consumers drove to The Box to worship at the altar of the discount gods of retail - and what a pantheon of g...

The sun shot down on Denton, Texas, that September 9, 1980, like a cosmic spotlight, illuminating a new shrine to the American Dream— Golden Triangle Mall , the first enclosed shopping emporium in Denton County, a glittering, air-conditioned mecca at the crossroads of Loop 288 and I-35E. Folks had watched it rise, a leviathan of brick and glass, out there on the edge of town, where the asphalt began to fray and the prairie still whispered its ancient secrets. They'd seen the cranes, like skeletal birds, picking at the sky, seen the trucks rumble in and out, disgorging their loads of destiny. And in the town, a subtle shift had begun, a low hum beneath the surface of everyday life. Old Man Hemlock, who’d sat on his porch for eighty years watching the world turn, swore he felt it, a cold spot in the pit of his stomach that had nothing to do with the heat. "It's a hungry place," he'd rasped to anyone who'd listen, his eyes cloudy with unspoken premonitions. ...

Wham! Blam! Shazam! Ladies and gentlemen, the future, in all its retail glory, descended upon Owings Mills, Maryland, on August 26, 1986. Forget your quaint little Main Streets, your dusty emporiums with their creaking floorboards and polite, whispered transactions. This, my friends, was the Owings Mills Fashion Mall , a gleaming, chrome-and-glass titan of commerce, a veritable cathedral of consumption, and its Grand Opening was nothing short of a Happening of the highest order. 820,000 square feet of air-conditioned paradise, 155 stores and eateries beckoning like sirens to the upwardly-mobile masses, 26 minutes from downtown Baltimore. There they were, the shoppers of the eighties, those status-anxious strivers in their pastel Lacoste polo shirts and pleated khakis, the women in shoulder-padded blazers and leg-warmers, fur coats draped over their shoulders even in the summer swelter—because why not? This wasn't just a mall; it was the Fashion Mall , tres chic , a shrine to the A...

Austin, Texas - August 19, 1981 ZAP! POW! WHAM! The future crash-landed in Austin, Texas, on August 19, 1981, and it came with a thousand glittering storefronts, a million square feet of air-conditioned dreams, and the kind of consumerist fervor that could make a cowpoke forget his spurs. Barton Creek Square Mall , that gleaming, sprawling monument to the American urge to shop, opened its doors, and oh, what a spectacle it was—a neon cathedral for the suburban soul, a palace of plenty carved out of a limestone hill overlooking the sleepy, funky town that still thought it was just a college burg with a yen for breakfast tacos. Picture it: the sun blazing down on that 104-acre slab of land, once just a dusty hilltop, now transformed by Melvin Simon & Associates into a consumerist Valhalla. The earthmovers had growled, the cranes had hoisted, and the concrete had poured like a river of ambition since late 1977, when the first plans were announced. Now Austin—scruffy, guitar-strumming ...

The neon sun beat down on the freshly-minted pastel stucco, oh boy, did it ever! August the ninth, nineteen eighty-five, a date etched in the annals of…well, something down there in sunny San Diego! Not just any date, no sirree, but the glorious, the stupendous, the absolutely  happening unveiling of Horton Plaza ! The scene: San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter, where history’s ghosts—and Alonzo Horton’s 19th-century dreams of a bustling port city—mingle with the scent of fresh paint and popcorn.  Jon Jerde - that mad architectural alchemist - and developer Ernest W. Hahn called it a "festival marketplace," a name as bland as beige wallpaper in a La Jolla condo. But what it was, my friends, was a vertical kaleidoscope of sherbet-colored towers and zig-zagging escalators, a postmodern palazzo plopped right down in the dusty heart of downtown. Like a fever dream dreamt by Michael Graves after one too many bong hits and a viewing of 1980's Flash Gordon . It wasn't a mall; it wa...

It’s a scorcher, a real knee-buckler of a summer day in the Heart of America, August the sixth, nineteen hundred and eighty, and what’s this? What’s this leviathan of limestone and pre-cast concrete rising up out of the very prairie itself, like some glorious, air-conditioned hallucination? It’s Bannister Mall , baby! And Kansas City, that unassuming metropolis of meatpacking and jazz, is about to get a taste of retail razzle-dazzle the likes of which it ain’t never seen. The asphalt shimmered like a mirage as the Buicks, the Oldsmobiles, the goshdarn Cadillacs, they all came a-rumblin’ in, disgorging families in their finest polyester finery. Pant suits for the ladies, those wide lapels for the fellas, and the kids in their checkerboard shorts and tube socks, eyes wide as saucers, all heading towards that monolithic monument to Mammon. You could feel the anticipation in the air, thick as humidity but charged with a different kind of current, an electric hum of consumer desire. They’d ...

A Neon Eclipse in Suburbia Massapequa, Long Island, August 5, 1984 —ZAP! POW! The lights go out, and the Sunrise Mall , that glittering cathedral of commerce, that pulsating heart of suburban Long Island, is plunged into a sudden, sweaty darkness. Six thousand souls—shoppers, clerks, loiterers, dreamers—caught in the lurch, their Sunday afternoon reverie shattered like a dropped snow globe. The air-conditioning wheezes to a halt, the escalators freeze, the movie theater's screens go black, the neon signs flicker and die. A collective gasp rises from the crowd, a murmur that crescendos into a cacophony of confusion, as if the gods of consumerism themselves had yanked the plug on this fluorescent Eden. It’s 2:30 P.M., and the Long Island Lighting Company, those wizards of wattage, those maestros of the power grid, have botched it big time. Out there in the wilds of Massapequa, a crew of hardhats, digging with the zeal of Indiana Jones unearthing the Temple of Doom, slices through th...

The largest mall in South Carolina opened 45 years ago today, on July 30, 1980. But it seems like only yesterday... It’s a scorcher, a real Carolina crème brûlée of a day, July 30th, 1980, down here in Greenville, South Carolina, where the air hangs thicker than a debutante’s pearls and the cicadas are zinging a high-pitched drone of anticipation. Because today, my oh my, today is not just any old day. No sir. Today, the concrete leviathan, the air-conditioned agora, the shimmering, chrome-and-Formica Taj Mahal of retail – Haywood Mall – is opening its gargantuan maw for the very first time! And the people, ah, the people ! They’re streaming in like ants to a picnic, a vast, undulating river of polyester and perm, of pre-Air-Jordan sneakers and the first blush of designer jeans. They’re coming from Spartanburg and Anderson and even way up in the misty Blue Ridge foothills, all converging on this glorious monument to… well, to stuff . To things. To the glorious, unapologetic pursuit of...