Activity #1

Jennifer Rios
Activity #1

During my childhood years, the Manhattan Mall was a shopping center that I would spend most of my time in with my family. For a child who has always resided in the borough of Queens, this particular mall was my mother’s way of getting me out of the usual routines of Queens and rewarding me if I had been behaving well and keeping my grades up in school. Despite what my mother’s reasons for taking me to the Manhattan Mall were, I was mainly concerned with getting out of my borough and into a mall I considered a “real mall.” During this time, Queens Center Mall consisted of four floors with a variety of stores that I could count on my fingers, making it in the mind of a seven year old “fake.” Since shopping was always difficult at Queen Center Mall, the mall in Manhattan was the place to go to. Despite my fondness of this particular mall, after reconstruction was done to the Queens Center Mall, I began to travel less to the Manhattan Mall and became one of the many local shoppers at the Queens shopping center.

Since I have not been to the Manhattan Mall in several years, I decided to break away from the “realm of ordinary routines” (93) of my local shopping center and be a flaneur in the Manhattan Mall. When I got there, I began to walk aimlessly around this shopping center but I did not feel as if this was the mall I had spent so much time in as a child and began to feel as if I had never stepped in this building before. The stores in the Manhattan Mall have been updated to what fits the trends of the present time, making it feel like a whole new place and experience. As a child, I remember that it was always very common to run into other children who were spending family time with their parents. This time around, I noticed that there were barely any children around the mall. Instead of seeing children with their families, I noticed that adolescents had become the dominant group in the mall.

A majority of these adolescents looked as if they were from the Latino and African American descent, which was also a surprise to me. Looking back to my childhood years, not many of the children that I would play with in the stores, while my mother picked out new clothes for me, were Latino or African American. I realized that the children that I would run into were mostly Caucasian. As I walked and analyzed people further, I wondered and tried to come up with reasons for this shift in the population. I came to the conclusion that the media has had a large part in making adolescents the targeted audience, due to the fact that many teenagers have a desire to be a part of the latest trend and are a little more careless when spending money. By spending some time at this mall I was able to have “A reflective detachment on daily life [and] a means to push [myself] away from the ordinary” (99), which helped me realize the shift in stores and population in the Manhattan Mall.