The Arcades Project: Worcester
The arcade is a street of lascivious commerce only; it is wholly adapted to arousing desires. (Arcades Project, p. 828)
The arcades are a center of trade in luxury goods. In their fittings art is brought in to the service of commerce. Contemporaries never tire of admiring them. They long remain a center of attraction for foreigners. An Illustrated Guide to Paris said: “These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-walled passages cut through whole blocks of houses, whose owners have combined in this speculation. On either side of the passages, which draw their light from above, run the most elegant shops, so that an arcade of this kind is a city, indeed, a world in miniature.” (Reflections, p. 146)
In the spirit of this project to interpret Worcester through Paris, I explored Worcester’s Midtown Mall as a shopping arcade through a reading of Walter Benjamin’s “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”, the introduction to his Arcades Project. Quotes are from the version of the essay collected in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (Schocken Books, 1978). While Benjamin presents the Parisian shopping arcades as a forward-looking vision of petite-bourgeouis urban, consumerist capitalism that originated in Paris before spreading globally, Worcester’s single arcade reflects the disinvestment and abandonment of the downtown by, essentially, the capitalist economy. At the same time the industrial manufacturing base of the city’s economy failed, the rise of private automobiles, freeways, and suburbanization all competed to terminate downtown Worcester as a shopping destination. Denholm’s, the city’s flagship, century-old department store, closed in 1974 and is still vacant, its windows done up with seasonally-changing displays to mask the absence of a tenant, and provide a semblance of public attraction to passerby.
Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking. It bears its end in itself and unfolds it […] with ruse. In the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled. (Reflections, p. 162)
The typical trappings of a downtown business district expected of a large city are absent in Worcester. While the city has retained municipal, county, and federal offices and courts, and has two theaters that regularly host performances, there is little retail and few restaurants remaining in the area. One attempt at shopping in the heart of the city is the Midtown Mall, located in what was originally a Woolworths. With the Midtown Mall, the openness of the Woolworths department store was re-designed into an arcade-style passageway winding shoppers past small retail shopping establishments and dining options. Attempts to attract shoppers have largely faded. When I visited in late October, many businesses had a look of dusty abandonment, and those were the ones still open. Many storefronts were vacant or were holding what appeared to be unsellable trinkets. If it wasn’t so tragic it would be kitsch. According to the local newspaper, as of 2013 the city was considering using eminent domain to take ownership of the building for redevelopment, but like many plans in Worcester, this one has yet to move forward.
An inventory of retail storefronts and other tenants from October 22, 2015 follows:
On the street-level was a Latino party store, the closed Midtown Dinette, an African and Indian fabric store, Sabanas’s Latin Foods restaurant, a computer and laptop repair, a “we buy gold” jeweler, a tailor, an African hair salon, a CD and DVD-music and film store, a US Post Office open only 9am to 12pm, and a women’s clothing store specializing in gowns. On the lower level was CJ & Carlson Printing, with a sign in the window: “Its nice to be important, but its more important to be nice”. Also on the lower level was the apparently closed Max Talent, another hair salon, an abandoned upright piano, and many security cameras. At least five storefront churches were in the complex. On the upper level, behind many private property signs was Christ Center of Praise gospel assembly. On the lower level was the Final Call World Outreach Ministry, The Army of the Lord International Ministries, the New Life Evangelical Community Church, and the Iglesia Misiqonera Herencia Escogido Inc. The abundance of storefront churches in the mall and in the city as a whole speaks to the large and diverse immigrant community in Worcester, of Latin American and African residents’ desire for communion.
Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking. It bears its end in itself and unfolds it […] with ruse. In the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled. (Reflections, p. 162)
For now, for the interested urbanist or dare I say flaneur, the Midtown Mall is a study in the failure of downtown retail in rustbelt America, a chipped, dirty facade placed over a what was a historic department store. The space is emblematic of Worcester as the Paris of the Eighties: derelict but still alive, populated with a handful of ambitious small business owners and churches serving marginalized, immigrant populations, largely overlooked and stuck in limbo in the center of the city. As Benjamin wrote, arcades were monuments turned to ruins before they crumbled, an apt description of the Midtown Mall.
