In Season 3 of Stranger Things, when teen friends El and Max were skipping through the mall during El’s very first visit, the camera panned around at a bright, bustling scene with people everywhere. El hadn’t gotten out much, and her time at the Starcourt Mall was filled with excitement and delight, from trying on tons of outfits while 80’s music played, to eating an ice cream cone with her friend. 

Packed full of teens and families, malls were obviously one of the most popular places to be. I remember thinking that the television mall looked amazing, and I wondered where I could go to have that experience. 

Fast forward to 2021 and the weekend scene at the FSK Mall in Frederick is nothing like the mall scenes in Stranger Things. The fountain at the center of the mall is usually lonely, with just a scattering of people here and there passing by on their way to stores. Instead of crowds of people, there’s plenty of room for social distancing–because no one is there!

I don’t think it’s just the pandemic. Without a popular food court (there is only a Dairy Queen and an Auntie Anne’s Pretzels), there’s less reason to hang out at the mall.  And, we have so many choices outside of the mall–Starbucks, Panera, and  Chipotle.

Many stores are vacant, and fewer attract teens. It’s the last place I would think to go to meet my friends from school. 

I started wondering how and why I missed out? Why do I need a time machine to go to a good mall?

My cousin Sydney Spradlin is a sophomore and occasionally we visit the mall together. She said, “The Stranger Things mall was lit, honestly. When I saw that mall and compared it with our sad little FSK, I was shook. Compared to malls like Westfield in Annapolis or Arundel Mills, there is a big difference. In Stranger Things, malls looked like a lot more fun though. And they were better lit and had cool neon signs.”

In the 80s, malls were full of brightly lit stores that gave teens tons of options in one place to find their style. Now, they are not as convenient as online shopping or even big box stores like Target, Old Navy and Kohls, with so many products in a single store.

More than just a place to shop, malls were also a place to have fun, hang out or meet friends. My dad, Scott Kilgore in the 1980s and had an experience more like the tv show. He would visit the mall with family or friends two or three times a week.

Kilgore lived near Westfield Wheaton Mall in Kensington, Maryland.  He said, “When I was really little, before it was an enclosed mall, it was a shopping center. They had a petting zoo and they had a huge Galapagos tortoise. You could sit on it and it’d take you for a ride. I remember riding it! In the summertime, Kenmont Pool was right across the parking lot from the mall . You’d go to the mall and have fun, then walk over to the pool and go swimming. We did that every couple of weeks.”

He was often at the mall. “It was a two-level mall, and we’d walk up and down the whole mall and could spend an hour easily by getting a snack, window shopping and saying ‘hi’ to friends…it was always crowded and you’d always see people you knew,” said Kilgore. “Outside of the mall was Rivertown, which was an amusement park in a building. There was also a University Arcade that was a block away. We would go to those places, too, and play arcade games.”

It’s obvious that times have changed since those days. My cousin Niki Konkel was a teenager in the early 2000s. She recalled malls as a social hub, but she also realizes how that eventually changed.

Konkel said, “When I was a kid, I thought malls were one of the coolest places you could go on a weekend. Whether it was just to browse, meet friends to walk around together, or even tag along with my parents while they ran an errand. This point of view has really evolved because I don’t often think of going to the mall. It’s so easy to buy things online, try them on and send them back, so going to the mall can be quite a hassle.”