Streeter: To some of us, the decline of Towson Town Center is personal

For a couple of months in the summer of 1990, I worked at the information booth on the first floor of what was then Towsontowne Centre. My job mostly entailed telling disappointed callers that whatever store they were looking for would not be open until the 1991 grand opening of the mall’s highly anticipated fancy new addition.

It felt like answering phones during the construction of Rome — the chrysalis-like transformation from mere mall to fancy-pants premier shopping destination: Towson Town Center.

More than three decades later, the pants are no longer fancy. In fact, there are far fewer places to buy pants of any kind, or upscale cookware or service for your Apple products. And while the gradual disappearance of the American mall is a well-trod subject, every vacant storefront and faded wall imprinted with a barely perceptible sign of what used to be there hurts.

As Towson Town Center becomes an emptied-out shell of its former glory, it’s like losing a glorious part of ourselves.

“I have seen the mall go through its three stages: its infancy, heyday and decline,” said Nicole Meka of Perry Hall, who used to work at the swim boutique Everything But Water there, and met her husband at the nearby TGI Fridays, where he was a bartender. “It makes me sad.”

Its diminishment feels like observing the fall of an empire. After all, this used to be a place we dressed up to visit.

“It was just so glamorous, if that’s the right word,” Meka said. “It was the special-occasion mall.”

Unique Robinson of Baltimore said that Towson was on the mall-hopping rotation for her and her friends in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She’d flip through CDs at Sam Goody, get the latest fashions at RAVE and Journeys, and got her second ear piercing at Icing. Just reading the names of the places that no longer exist makes me sad.

“We used to take Kodak pictures by the fountain at the center of the food court. That’s how spectacular it seemed,” she said.

Robinson doesn’t see Towson’s downturn as pronounced as that of Security Square Mall in Woodlawn, for instance, but what she misses the most about the old days “was the energy of it all. It wasn’t so much about the stores, per se, but the mall culture that’s completely been erased.”

The importance of mall culture between the 1980s and early 2000s cannot be overstated, not only as a third place but as a happening, a hullabaloo, an event beyond itself. It was part of being social, and Towson Town Center was that on a grand scale.

Whether it’s from the COVID hangover that some retail never recovered from, crime, the onslaught of online shopping or just a new generation of kids who hang out differently, that culture has shifted dramatically.

“Teenagers don’t have places to go like that,” said Annette Anderson of Baltimore. “Technology is something you experience in isolation. We wanted to be out in community. You grow your tribe.”

It doesn’t help that the mall has a rule that children under the age of 17 have to be accompanied by an adult after 4 p.m. This would not have flown with my late father, who would drop my sister and me off at The Gap and go enjoy not being with us for two hours.

“Can you even imagine what we would have done if we had to hang out with our parents?” Meka asked. No, I cannot. And that’s part of why this is all so depressing.

Even when I didn’t live in Baltimore anymore, I made the hour drive down to the mall from York, Pennsylvania, so my best friend and I could try on couture we’d seen in Elle. I once even bought a $60 black Chanel eyeliner because the lady at the Clinique counter upsold me. And I knew it! But I felt fancy.

When in Rome, you know.

It makes me sad that my son won’t have the same experiences there.

“We have lost a space for coming of age for our young people,” Anderson said. “That, to me, is the primary heartbreak.”

Lauren Masseron, who grew up in the then-new row homes next door to Towson Town Center, told me in an email that she “holds so many happy memories in that mall, and on that property.” She even dipped her toe into the luxury goods market, purchasing her first pair of $300 Gucci sunglasses there. But those lovely family memories have been downgraded.

“I promised my daughter I would purchase a Louis Vuitton purse for her in that mall when she graduated from college, but by then the store was gone,” Masseron wrote.

Shopping at stores you couldn’t find elsewhere was part of the magic of the place, like getting past a velvet rope. “They had Nordstrom, stores we didn’t have anywhere else, so we got dressed up in our heels, because we knew we were going to see and be seen,” Anderson said.

The Nordstrom is still there, but so many of the other places that gave the mall its luster are not. The pixie dust has dissipated. My own recent ritual was to go to the Apple Store and then stop at Auntie Anne’s for a pretzel for my kid. With that Apple closing, I have less reason to be there.

“I’m a Williams-Sonoma girl,” Anderson said. “When they closed, I had to reorient my life!”

But it seems that Towson Town Center still holds some magic. Meka recently went to the Nordstrom Rack to get shoes with her 4-year-old son, Jack. “He was hiding underneath the racks, and I was trying not to get nostalgic for shopping with my mom,” she said.

Afterward, they stopped to eat at the store’s Marketplace Café. Again, the nostalgia came rushing in, reminding Meka of how her late aunt would visit from Cincinnati and take her to lunch.

Meka tried to explain to Jack what this moment meant to her, but he’s too young to “get it,” she said. “And that’s OK. Maybe the mall gets to live another generation.”