John Morogiello has seen his plays staged off-Broadway in New York, in Los Angeles, in Louisville, even in Vienna. But he rarely got to debut his own work in his home state of Maryland, until he opened a theater space in an ailing shopping mall.

Now, Morogiello’s all-comedy theater company, Best Medicine Rep, stages several productions and readings a year — his own plays and many others’ — at Lakeforest Mall in Gaithersburg, Maryland, 16 miles northwest of Washington, D.C. Best Medicine’s storefront is on Lakeforest’s second floor, next to the Sears. “Performance in Progress: Please be quiet,” reads a sign on a stand — meant to warn the driver of the kiddie train, which carries children and parents past the theater, not to blow the whistle.

One Saturday afternoon, beyond a flame-retardant curtain that absorbs some of the mall noise, 45 people fill the seats around a small stage. A blue-eyed actor with impish comic timing is playing the French philosopher Voltaire, in an historical play that one audience member later calls a “Voltairean sex farce.”

Afterward, Morogiello sits on a lobby couch and explains how a theater company that specializes in comedies about historical figures ended up in a space that used to be a KB Toys, then a luggage store. “We’d seen the mall gradually lose renters over the past few years,” Morogiello says. “And I love this place. I’d bring my kids here when they were little all the time. When I heard the mall sold at auction, I called them and said, ‘We can fill a space, and do full productions.’”

Morogiello loves this mall the way people loved malls in the 1980s, the way not nearly as many people do today. I know how he feels. Mall nostalgia hit me as soon as I walked into Lakeforest, built in 1978 by mall developer Alfred Taubman of Michigan. The Taubman Company built malls around the United States in the ’70s, including four in metro Detroit, where I grew up. Lakeforest reminds me of Lakeside Mall, where I once waited with my dad in a slow, snaking line to see “The Empire Strikes Back,” then killed time because the showing we’d planned to see was sold out.

Taubman’s ’70s malls look retro-futurist, the way 20th-century culture imagined the 21st Century would look: hexagon-shaped skylights in irregular white ceilings, concourses laid out in zig-zag diagonals to create dramatic sightlines. The geometry of Taubman malls’ center courts is etched into my kid-brain memory: a hexagonal glass elevator with lights on its edges, overlooking a fountain where kids could toss pennies for luck, and an angular indoor plaza carpeted in very-’70s sunny orange and red. When I was little, I called the plaza “the running place,” and my sister and I would run up and down its big amphitheater steps — better excitement than the shopping itself.

Forty-plus years later, Lakeside’s doppelganger, Lakeforest, no longer looks like the future, but like an aging vision still hanging on. It’s still got the glass elevator, but it filled in its running place years ago with a flat floor and wide, white tiles. Empty storefronts dot the second floor like missing teeth. The 2010s have been tough on Lakeforest, which was 25 percent vacant when U.S. Bank bought it at a 2017 foreclosure auction for $19 million, one-fifth the price it had commanded in 2012. This year, the mall is up for sale again, and two of the four anchors, JCPenney and Lord & Taylor, have announced that they’re closing later this summer.

But there’s life of a different kind here: In the center court, kids in sparkly blue costumes dance in a Lunar New Year celebration, sponsored by a Chinese-American cultural association. On the second floor, the same association has opened a gallery in a storefront, filled with paintings, prints, and informational displays about Chinese medicine. Lakeforest’s management is making the best of vacancy, to create a bit of the community that shopping alone once brought.

Malls have always had a life-and-death cycle, as new generations of ever-more-upscale malls and super-value centers rise up to overtake the titans of past decades. Today’s crisis feels even more existential, as wealthy consumers move from the suburbs to downtowns, and more and more shoppers one-click to deploy Amazon Prime shipping from their couches. There’s an entire internet genre of abandoned-mall ruin porn: photographers, writers, and videographers contemplating deserted concourses, drooping drop-ceilings, and ravaged escalators as memento mori of suburban-sprawl capitalism.

But what about classic malls from the 1960s and 1970s that are aging, but still alive? They’ve become places of decline, but also metamorphosis. They’re being reinvented, not as simple shopping centers, but as places to enjoy experiences — LegoLands, trampoline parks, escape rooms, and even cultural life. That can create surprising communities that mallgoers of decades past didn’t even know they were seeking.

Inside a soft, bouncy version of a Roman arena, a dozen teenage boys leap off a floor made of trampolines, ricochet off black netting, and hurl dodgeballs at each other. Some kids get one, two, three feet of air between them and the floor as they jump and pull up their knees to avoid a whizzing ball.

“For sports play, it’s really intense. We take that really seriously,” says Jonathan Alicea, 15, from Lynn, Mass. He and his friends are regulars at the dodgeball court inside the Sky Zone Trampoline Park at Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers, Mass., 20 miles north of Boston. Here, they meet kids from all over Greater Boston’s North Shore. They’ve just finished playing against teens from Gloucester, an oceanside fishing town.

“You either make friends or rivals,” says Mary Daaboul, 20, a Sky Zone party host and “core monitor,” who acts as a sort of aerial lifeguard.

Sky Zone, which leases a huge space that once housed a Sports Authority, has helped re-enliven Liberty Tree Mall. Built in 1972, the mall is named after the colonial-era landmark where Bostonians gathered to protest Great Britain’s tyrannical Stamp Act. When the mall opened, a 23-foot-tall aluminum Liberty Tree with glass leaves, built for the New England Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, presided over the central court.

The tree is long gone, and the mall’s sunny central skylights now illuminate some couches and stuffed chairs, where on a recent Sunday one guy was trying to solve a crossword with a pen topped by a yellow smiley face. Vacant storefronts stand at two of the center court’s four corners. The mall’s tenants, from a 20-screen movie theater to a food court to a small arcade next to an e-cigarette shop, are concentrated on the main drag, between Sky Zone and Buffalo Wild Wings. Animal Rides, a free-standing stall, rents furry electric scooters in the shape of a lion, moose, zebra, tiger, fox, or blue dog. The scooter path is the forlorn, 300-foot-long, near-empty concourse between the central court and a Kohl’s.

Dead malls are the legacy of a great American mall-building binge: between 1970 and 2015, the number of U.S. malls quadrupled, growing more than twice as fast as the population.

What’s happened to malls like Liberty Tree? Competition from Amazon and newer malls is just part of their problem, says Steven Dennis, a Texas-based retail consultant. In the last five to seven years, the retail industry has seen what Dennis calls the “collapse of the middle.” Discount chains, such as WalMart and TJ Maxx, are prospering. So are experiential and premium-priced retailers such as Apple and Nordstrom. But mid-priced department-store chains such as Sears and JCPenney — the stores that have anchored older malls for decades — are declining. “You used to get away with being mediocre many years ago,” Dennis says, “because the competition wasn’t necessarily that intense, and customers didn’t have nearly as much information about quality and pricing.”

The mall-ruin archeologists at DeadMalls.com have defined five stages of a mall’s life cycle. Between healthy “first-class” malls and the fifth stage, gone altogether, DeadMalls.com’s taxonomy includes second-class malls like Lakeforest and Liberty Tree, with “high vacancy or non-traditional store occupancy;” third-class malls (“areas or entire mall sealed from public”); and fourth-class malls (“shuttered or slated for demolition”).

Some malls get put out of their misery, razed and replaced with office buildings or new homes. Others receive radical surgery, such as a partial-teardown that replaces an anchor department store with a restaurant or high-end section.

For still-viable malls with some vacancies, says Dennis, there’s a way to stave off destruction: “aggressive re-tenanting, looking for different sorts of tenants that fall outside the normal mix.” Often, that means entertainment and sports experiences: bowling alleys, trampoline parks, escape rooms, rock-climbing gyms. But re-tenanting is hard to do well, Dennis says. Mall managers that lower their standards may find that their mall loses its cohesion. “Some of these property management companies are just trying to get some cash in,” he says. “It can be a slippery slope of putting in a mix of disconnected stuff.”

The epidemic of mall decline is mostly an American story. That’s because the United States is “over-malled,” as a 2017 report by the investment banking firm Cowen and Company put it. Dead malls are the legacy of a great American mall-building binge: between 1970 and 2015, the number of U.S. malls quadrupled, from 306 to 1,220 malls, growing more than twice as fast as the population. According to Cowen, the U.S. has 40 percent more shopping-center space per capita than Canada, five times more than Britain, and eight times more than Italy.

Still, some mall decay has spread across the Atlantic. The Dead Malls Europe blog, maintained by a Belgian architecture student, lists 18 dead or declining malls across the continent, from Scotland to Greece. The Slagsta Strand shopping center in Botkyrka, a suburb of Stockholm, vacant since 2010, has led concerned Swedish journalists to coin the terms galleriadöden (mall death) and spökgalleria (ghost mall). Meanwhile, American mall-revival strategies have already caught on in France. This April, the declining Terre Ciel mall in the Parisian suburb of Chelles replaced three vacant stores with Airtrix, a complex with karaoke, laser tag, a climbing wall, and trampolines.

Inside the Vancouver Mall in Vancouver, Wash., right next to See’s Candles and across from Aeropostale, stands Barbara Sheehan’s art school, the Vancouver Art Space. Eight instructors, including Sheehan, offer classes in acrylic painting, oil painting, and drawing, as well as crafty skills like pop-up card-making, alcohol inks, and jelly plate printing. About half the students are walk-in shoppers.

Sheehan relocated her school to the mall in late 2015 because it offered more space at the same rent she’d paid in a small strip mall. “The atmosphere here is pretty good, pretty lively,” Sheehan says, “and the mall does a lot of events and holiday stuff to bring people in.” Still, she can sense the mall’s evolution and struggles all around her: a constant ebb and flow of stores closing and opening.

“This mall is definitely trying to stay alive by having less shoe stores and more activity-based venues,” she says. “There’s also an escape room place here.” The Sears, one of the mall’s founding anchors since 1977, closed last year. Round1 Bowling and Amusement, a Japanese chain of entertainment centers that combine an arcade, karaoke bar, pool hall, and bowling alley, is reportedly among the tenants that will go into the old Sears space.

American mall-revival strategies have caught on in France: the declining Terre Ciel mall in the Parisian suburb of Chelles replaced three vacant stores with Airtrix, a complex with karaoke, laser tag, a climbing wall, and trampolines.

Among the Vancouver Mall’s new alternatives to retail stands one that has been there since 1983, a harbinger of what malls could become. The Vancouver Mall Library, a branch of the Fort Vancouver Regional Libraries system, stands right outside the JCPenney. It’s busy, lending out more than 600 items and fielding three dozen reference calls on an average day.

Barbra Meisenheimer, the branch manager, says library quiet is hard to achieve at the mall. “A lot of our patrons look at us as just another store,” she says. “You’ll hear kids say, ‘Oh can we buy this movie?’ or, ‘Can we rent this movie?’” When loud cell-phone talkers outside the door disturb patrons, Meisenheimer shushes them.

But what the library loses in atmosphere, it makes up for in traffic. Regulars at the Vancouver Mall Library include schoolkids in summer and residents of nearby senior apartments, who come to read newspapers and learn to use Facebook to write their grandchildren. Meisenheimer also finds herself welcoming new residents to the community, issuing them library cards and directing them to their neighborhood branches. “We issue a tremendous amount of library cards to people we may never see again,” she says.

The Vancouver Mall Library is one of the few libraries in an American mall, but Meisenheimer thinks that should change as malls evolve. “Malls have to appeal to a broader range than people just shopping,” she says. “Libraries would be really smart to get their foot in there.”

Since it started staging plays at Lakeforest Mall, Best Medicine Rep’s audience has grown from Gaithersburg locals to new fans from around the Washington, D.C. region. Newcomers often cite a D.C. theater critic’s favorable review of Morogiello’s play “Engaging Shaw” this past fall. The play about Voltaire, “Philosophus,” by Connecticut writer Colin Speer Crowley, has likewise been well-reviewed. Best Medicine is a professional theater company — it pays its actors, directors, and playwrights — and attracts talent from around the region. The lead actor in “Philosophus,” Terence Aselford, is a 30-year veteran of the D.C. theater scene.

“What the mall provided us was a tremendous opportunity to grow and survive as an institution, because we have a space,” Morogiello says. And inexpensive rent has other benefits. To qualify for the Washington area’s Helen Hayes Awards, he explains, a theater company needs to put on at least 16 performances of each of its productions. That’s hard for small nonprofit theaters without their own space, because rental costs can be immense. But it’s no problem for Best Medicine, with its affordable storefront lease.

Meanwhile, Best Medicine is bringing new traffic to Lakeforest. Ruby Tuesday, the last remaining restaurant at the mall, does great business on theater nights, Morogiello says. Actors not only drink at the mall; they shop before and after rehearsals. “A lot of shopping centers would do well to add something like this,” Morogiello says. He’s happy to bring traffic, and a new gathering place, to his hometown mall.

“What I love about malls is that they always were community centers,” says Morogiello. “It was always a place where you would see your friends, in the old days. You would see your parents and other people from the community hanging out and shopping.” It’s a good fit for Best Medicine Rep, he says, since it aims to build a community through shared laughter. “I feel that we feed into that old-school mall mentality of bringing joy to people,” he says. “It’s just a matter of getting other people to buy into the joy.”

Published on June 26, 2019

Growing up in Adams County, a sprawling, semirural community outside of Denver, Ser Herr visited his neighborhood library at least once a week, making a beeline to the children’s section. “It was just literally books,” Herr, 31, remembers. “Once in a while my mom would rent a movie for us. But it was about as simple a library as you could get.”

Today, Herr’s most-frequented Adams County branch is an open-concept building outfitted with a coffee shop and decorated with realistic-looking trees, complete with leaves that change color with the seasons. The library system’s name itself has changed; it now brands itself “Anythink.”

The temple of books is changing, as communities like Adams County reevaluate the institution’s role in public life. For over a century, that role was to be the main source of materials and information, says David Lankes, director of the school of library and information science at the University of South Carolina. “A lot of people think of libraries as a place that collects stuff, whether it’s books, documents, music, what have you,” he says.

But now, library patrons need fewer tangible things. Patrons still check out books: Library checkouts in the U.S. dwarfed Amazon book orders as of 2014. But people can also borrow books directly on e-readers, or access them through Spotify-esque subscription services.

Public libraries have to evolve into something more tailor-made to local communities — with uses so diverse they can look nothing like a library at all.

Overall, U.S. library visits still are trending downward. The White House’s latest federal budget proposes eliminating federal funding for libraries, an unlikely move that, if passed, would disproportionately affect areas that can’t rely as much on tax funding and friendly local governments.

That means that, to survive, public libraries have to evolve into something more attuned to modern needs and tailor-made to local communities — with uses so diverse they can at times look nothing like a library at all.

Farewell to Dewey

The transformation of the Adams County system owes a lot to broader economic fortunes. When Herr was growing up in the 1990s, much of the county was struggling economically. So was its library system, which had a $4 million operating budget and just four branches to serve 325,000 residents over 1,200 square miles.

“The buildings were kind of ’60s, aging, under capacity, dark,” recalls Pam Sandlian-Smith, who came on as director in 2007. “Eighty percent of the collections were older than 20 years. We didn’t have funds to buy basic supplies like pencils and tape and poster board.”

But by the mid-2000s, the Denver area was starting to transform into a booming tech and industry hub, and the Adams County libraries were granted an influx of additional funding — Because of a mill levy increase in 2006, the system was able to qualify for certificates of participation that helped fund a $60 million building project. Rather than spend it all on new editions and cosmetic repairs, the library system underwent a total facelift — from radically reconfiguring its physical spaces to retooling the way it catalogues books.

An avid reader, Herr still uses the library primarily for checking out books. But he finds himself sticking around for other reasons — to study, or hold offsite work meetings for his job at a marketing firm, or to book a conference room for his church leadership group. 

And there are other ways Anythink has found to get people into its seven campuses: studios for producing podcasts and music; 3D printers; ample programming. The libraries held 470 children’s programs in 2018, ranging from STEM workshops to music and movement classes. In the summer, goats visit the libraries, part of a program to teach children about farming. The broad menu has paid off: In 2018, the small county’s library system had 108,555 cardholders and 1,130,415 total visits, both increasing roughly 40 percent over 10 years.

“It’s always packed in there,” Herr says. “I’ve been there when they’re about to close and they have to turn off the lights to force everybody out.”

Some of what Anythink did was just a matter of rebranding. (Buzzy names are a trend; In London, libraries are called “Idea Stores;” a system in Montana goes by “ImagineIf”).

“People told me I was ruining the profession, I should give up my credentials.”

But changing the library’s image has also meant doing away with some staples of the library experience — most notably, the nearly-150-year-old Dewey Decimal System, which organizes nonfiction texts by way of an intricate, numbers-based hierarchy. After a few standalone branches across the country experimented with jettisoning Dewey, Anythink became the first library system in the U.S. to abandon it entirely.

At first, the move was all-but-scandalous in the staid world of information science. “People told me I was ruining the profession, I should give up my credentials,” Sandlian-Smith laughs. Even now, she’d advise against it for academic libraries, or bigger outfits with more complicated inventories.

But many of the focus groups Sandlian-Smith assembled before the Anythink overhaul said they couldn’t make sense of the catalogue, or find anything without help. The new system, modeled after bookstores, is word-based. So instead of listing all cookbooks under a master number — 641 — Anythink labels them “Cooking,” then creates new categories as needed: Cooking-Baking, Cooking-International, Cooking-Healthy, etc. Sandlian-Smith says this model also allows the library to separate academic textbooks from more popular reads, and to better account for other media: music, movies, even less-conventional items like recording equipment and outdoor gear.

Your friendly librarian

Like the library industry writ large, Anythink has also grappled with staffing. As programs and event planning become more intrinsic to the library’s role, the job of the librarian is becoming more customer-facing, geared toward community engagement, not always suitable to the stereotypical introverted bibliophile. Anythink has hired many people from the hospitality industry; its job postings include words like “generous” and “team-oriented.”

“The folks who might self-select to go to library school might not be the people who are going to be happiest or successful in public libraries now,” Sandlian-Smith says. “I have this conversation all the time with other library directors. You need to be recharged by being with people and making sure that they’re having a good experience. It’s a different type of work now, and everybody doesn’t fit.”

Lankes, at the University of South Carolina, says the college curriculum for library sciences is starting to evolve accordingly. “If we’re talking a century ago, [the prerequisites were] being tall enough to reach the top stacks and clear handwriting,” he says. “Now our curriculum has to deal with yes, cataloging and management — but increasingly soft skills, and figuring out what a specific community needs. It’s a big shift.”

And what communities need from their libraries varies as much the communities themselves. Even within Adams County, that changes from branch to branch. Poorer neighborhoods might need more in the way of basic utilities and internet access; those with more families need after-school programs and bigger children’s sections; other branches have maker spaces and piano rehearsal rooms.

Those needs evolve in surprising ways. When Anythink launched a decade ago, its flagship branch boasted a vast, state-of-the-art computer lab. From the start, almost no one used it, something the rise of the iPhone only exacerbated. “It was a huge surprise to us,” Sandlian-Smith says. The room was soon converted into a printmaking studio.

According to Lankes, that ethos of flexibility is a far cry from the original, Industrial Revolution-era conception of libraries, which tended to all look the same. Anythink’s transformation has been widely lauded in library circles; Sandlian-Smith is a frequent speaker everywhere from industry conferences to the Aspen Ideas Festival. Library directors across the country and as far away as The Netherlands get in touch for advice.

And the changing needs of consumers are prompting changes in academic libraries, as well. “At the same time that books increasingly lie dormant, library spaces themselves remain vibrant,” wrote Dan Cohen, Northeastern University’s Dean of the Library, in a recent piece in the Atlantic. “Snell Library at Northeastern now receives well over 2 million visits a year—as retreats for focused study and dynamic collaboration, and as sites of an ever wider array of activities and forms of knowledge creation and expression, including, but also well beyond, the printed word.”

Not all library systems can reinvent themselves so dramatically; $60 million funding hikes don’t grow on trees. But both Lankes and Sandlian-Smith say libraries have the chance to be resilient, in part because of their baked-in emphasis on sharing.

Rural systems that can’t invest in new buildings or Anythink-style rebranding can still get resources more easily, thanks to the internet. New York’s public library has a program to license WiFi hotspots to low-income neighborhoods, making resources independent of a physical space whatsoever. “If you have a phone that can connect, you can have a library wherever you are,” Lankes says.

But, he adds, “the physical space, that’s something that all the great virtual services in the world can’t provide.” For Sandlian-Smith and Anythink, space — and how to use it — remains the central concern in the library system’s future plans. “We need more,” she says. Future branches may include gallery spaces for touring art exhibits to come through, or co-working spaces for startup businesses and freelancers.

Sandlian-Smith says her team is working with local neighborhood developers on how and where to include new library buildings in their plans — something that “never would have happened 10 years ago.”

“We’re not working in isolation,” she says. “We’re being asked to be part of the conversation — not just about the future of libraries, but the community. I think that’s remarkable.” 

Julia Beck contributed to this article.

Published on May 21, 2019

We huddled in the parking lot of the Senior Center; warm coats, hats, gloves; hands wrapping Styrofoam coffee cups. It was nearly midnight, and we were filled with nervous energy, probably borrowed from the movies: Strike Force Delta assembling for a pre-dawn covert op. A team leader verified our presence. We grabbed pretzels and granola bars for fuel.

Then we paired up in cars and headed out in search of the homeless.

One designated night each year in cities across the country, volunteer groups like ours conduct an annual Homeless Census, under the guidance of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Our counts of people help government agencies and nonprofit funders decide where to allocate funds for shelters, food pantries, and other aid. The date is always in winter, the time late night or early morning, when people with homes are most expected to be in them.

In larger cities, volunteers follow well-mapped routes, established protocols, and rules of engagement. The real pros sometimes deploy “decoy” homeless actors to test the count’s coverage and accuracy. But our group in Lawrence, Mass., a hardscrabble, low-income former mill town, would mostly wing it. We received minimal training and little guidance, which contributed to the sense of adventure. And we knew that any numbers we could generate would beat none at all. In essence, we had embarked on an odd, emotionally twisted, inverted scavenger hunt, actually hoping to find people living in bad conditions, knowing that if we were “lucky,” we might qualify the city for additional funding.

Why should the homeless be expected to be findable — on display — in order for us to count them, and in order for them to count?

In the first hour, we didn’t find anyone we could honestly list as “unsheltered” for the night. We saw kids in the McDonald’s parking lot; people headed home from the clubs; a guy walking a dog. Before long — much quicker than you might expect — the giddiness of the adventure wore off and the boredom of fruitless searching set in. Driving down streets in the middle of the night was not much different from driving down streets anytime, except there was less to look at. But boredom can lead to reflection and insight.

We discussed the possibility — and ethics — of just inventing some numbers and heading home: wouldn’t it be better to lie than to find no one? Wouldn’t it be better to lie than to find someone? And why should the homeless be expected to be findable — on display — in order for us to count them, and in order for them to count?

We also thought, more consciously than usual, about what it meant to have — or lack — a home, something you might have assumed we’d already thought a lot about, since our team was composed of urban planners who worked every day to develop affordable housing. I wondered what it would be like to be right there: that corner, that stoop, that bench. I became aware of the very many rungs I would need to fall down the social ladder to find myself on the street for even one night.

Mentally wandering a bit, I next considered where I might be — if homeless, but not here outside, in plain view. I knew of an old industrial yard across the river, along a former rail-line, not much used in these post-freight days. We drove down the dirt frontage road parallel to the tracks and came over a rise to a large lot behind a fence. As the scene opened up in the headlights, we strained to look, hoping to discover people sleeping in their cars — which is exactly what we found. Only these were the black and white patrol cars of Lawrence’s finest, and inside were three on-duty police officers. We’d found their hidden napping spot: uh-oh. I seemed to recall something about letting sleeping cops lie.

One officer turned his light on our car, freezing us while he stepped out and approached. Confidently ignoring the way he’d been caught in flagrante dormien, he asked what we were doing there in the middle of the night. We explained our quest and he sleepily struggled to make sense of it.

“So you’re looking for people living outside?” he asked, as if unable to remember the word homeless. “Follow me.” And so we did, our car creeping behind his through a warren of abandoned access roads. We came to a spot where the railroad ran under a bridge. He pointed out his window to a spot up in the iron trusses, then drove off, leaving us alone to puzzle it out.

We left the car doors open and the motor running as we approached the area he’d indicated. We saw a small cardboard shelter wedged up under the bridge, six feet off the ground. We heard someone stirring inside: one more person we’d woken up in our search. (Why did this need to be done so late?)

In a brief conversation through the cardboard — we never found a door — we confirmed that someone was living there, and actually counted two people, based on his statement to that effect. Technically we were supposed to “visually verify” everyone we counted. But given the cold, the lateness of the hour, and our general respect for privacy, we figured it was close enough for Lawrence.

We somehow found our way back to the Senior Center, happy to have something to report on our tally sheet. Only when talking about it much later did it occur to us that we should have offered some help — some money, or at least some of our snacks.

Published on May 15, 2019

Dread filled Cleveland on the eve of the 2016 Republican National Convention. The GOP was poised to nominate Donald Trump for president, and press coverage voiced concerns about violence, like the street fights outside the Democrats’ 1968 convention in Chicago. Trump himself had stoked those fears. If a brokered convention denied him the nomination, “I think you’d have riots,” he’d predicted.

But when demonstrators gathered in Public Square — a park that had reopened, after a massive renovation, just two weeks before the convention — none of that happened.

Other host cities of major-party conventions had created so-called “free speech zones” that penned protesters into fenced and forlorn spaces. Cleveland, instead, invited speech into Public Square. The city set up a stage and sound system on the Speakers’ Terrace, a curved platform built into the square’s south end. Protesters took that as a cue to congregate all across the park’s six acres: Marchers paraded through, activists performed street theater, and policemen on bicycles wedged their front tires between arguers to deescalate their debates. The 220-year-old town common managed to absorb the rage of protesters and Trump supporters alike.

“Having spaces where the adrenaline and stress of the event could play out,” says landscape architect Veronica Rivera, “allowed for people who might have very different views to discuss them without any major confrontations.” That was no accident: She and her colleagues had redesigned the park with huge crowds and public speeches in mind.

Today, when public discourse is at its coarsest and many people seek community in the virtual world, the reshaping of the six-acre Public Square is a fascinating case study in landscape as destiny. Two years earlier, Rivera notes, the park “was basically just used for transit — a huge bus stop.” The goals of the $57 million renovation project were manifold, from encouraging pedestrian use to turning Cleveland’s often-quiet downtown into more of a neighborhood.

But central to the plans, and to Cleveland’s image of itself, was a revival of Public Square’s dormant tradition as a civic space devoted to public expression.

“I always feel like it’s an open space,” says Nora Romanoff, associate director of LAND studio, a Cleveland nonprofit that managed the square’s renovation. “And I always feel like it’s a space where people can say what they think.”

Cleveland has one of the best historic public discourse traditions of any American city. It dates back to city founder Moses Cleaveland, who plotted out Public Square in 1796 as a New England-style town common — and to Tom L. Johnson, mayor from 1901 to 1909, who encouraged Public Square’s free speech tradition and held his own rallies and speeches there.

After Johnson’s 1911 death, a statue of him was erected in Public Square’s northwest quadrant. For decades, Clevelanders rallied in front of it: for Depression-era protests supporting the unemployed and steelworker strikes, for 1960s protests against the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. But by the 2000s, Public Square’s identity as Cleveland’s common ground had faded.

A big part of the problem was geography. Two wide thoroughfares, Superior Avenue and Ontario Street, crossed through the square, dividing it into four one-acre parks. Each quadrant felt disconnected, surrounded by car and bus traffic. At a public forum about the square in 2003, residents complained that it wasn’t pedestrian-friendly and didn’t feel welcoming. Few wanted to hold events there.

Slowly, support for a massive redesign began to build. In 2009, two local nonprofits hired the firm James Corner Field Operations — which had just reshaped a former elevated railroad into New York City’s High Line park — to rethink Cleveland’s oldest public space.

The firm came up with a bold proposal: to turn the divided park into what Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson called “one big square.” They would eliminate the crossroads at the park’s center, closing Ontario Street and allowing only buses, not cars, on Superior Avenue.

The resulting open space, they believed, could help revive Cleveland’s free-speech tradition. Planners did spatial studies on how many people could gather there and how they’d circulate in and out. “We could fit tens of thousands of people in this square,” says Romanoff.

After the Republican National Committee accepted Cleveland’s bid for the 2016 convention — which included the promise of a renovated Public Square — donations from local foundations came in, and construction started in earnest. Rivera, Field Operations’ designer for Public Square, moved to downtown Cleveland for a year to work on the project.

“People are like water: They take the easiest path.”

She and her colleagues, working with LAND studio, took inspiration from recent trends in urban public spaces. They wanted to reclaim a neglected city center, creating an activity-filled oasis at the foot of skyscrapers, as Detroit had with its Campus Martius Park in 2004.

They planned to return the square to pedestrians instead of cars, a strategy that former New York City transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan implemented in Times Square and champions in her 2016 book “Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution.”

And they wanted to embrace the square’s unique landscape, as New York did with the High Line. To do that, they studied shadows and sunlight. Skyscrapers, especially the landmark Terminal Tower on the square’s southwest end, blocked more sunlight in the square’s south half. So Rivera designed a green landscape for the north half and a “hardscaped” south half with concrete and cobblestones.

They also studied people’s walking routes. “People are like water: They take the easiest path,” says Romanoff. “So we wanted to understand: what are those paths?”

A lot of Clevelanders crossed the square diagonally, northwest to southeast or southwest to northeast. Rivera replaced the blocky quadrants with diagonal walking paths that formed a butterfly shape, hugging the hills, uniting the terraces, and embracing an 1890s-era Civil War memorial in the square’s southeast corner.

“We played a lot with topography,” Rivera says. “The square is very, very flat. So we make sure that as you’re walking places, you don’t necessarily see everything.”

And, mindful of the square’s history, Rivera designed a curved paving-stone path near the southern edge to double as the Speakers’ Terrace, overlooking a vast southern plaza.

After decades of seeing Public Square as a half-dead space, some Clevelanders — including the project’s construction workers — were skeptical that the transformation would work. “Throughout construction, the guys in the field [said], ‘Why are you so stressed out about this? No one’s going to use this,’” Rivera recalls. “It wasn’t until the end of the construction, when they saw all the pieces come together, that they also became excited about the potential.”

At 5 a.m. on the last day of June 2016, the new Public Square opened. Within 30 minutes, says Rivera, she saw a man running, a lady walking her dog, a guy eating a sandwich in the park. “Within the first day, you saw all the activities we envisioned take place,” she says. And Clevelanders quickly became comfortable going to the square at night — something almost no one did before it was redesigned.

To Rivera, it was proof she’d designed the square at a human scale, not an automobile scale. “People are innately attracted to other people,” she says. “We like to sit and people watch.”

Rivera stayed in Cleveland through the Republican National Convention, where she saw the success of the design’s deeper goal of encouraging democracy.

“An open, calm environment with the noise of the water feature and the historic monuments around you — it brought down the tensions of the whole event,” she says. That’s the promise of the park, she adds: “It should be the place where everyone feels free to come and share their perspective in a democratic and respectful way.”

Today, new generations of Clevelanders have embraced Public Square as their reborn town common, the city’s sacred ground for free speech and public discourse. Since the Republican Convention, major protests have returned to Public Square, including the 2017 Women’s March after Trump’s inauguration, the pro-gun-control March for Our Lives in March 2018, and a festival at the end of Cleveland’s 2018 Pride parade.

“I think the redesign of the square has promoted more protests, as it should,” says Kerry McCormack, downtown Cleveland’s city councilman. “It’s more open. It makes more sense for large gatherings.”

Still, Public Square’s transformation is unfinished: Despite the best intentions of planners, it’s still hard for Cleveland to put pedestrians first. The city, pleased with the new park, considered keeping Superior Avenue closed to bus traffic, but local and federal transit officials said Cleveland would have to pay back federal grants worth millions if buses couldn’t come through the square.

Then the Department of Homeland Security, concerned about increased terrorist use of car bombs on crowds in public spaces, insisted on lining a reopened Superior with barriers. So the city has blocked the park’s diagonal pathways — and added a stoplight in the center to regulate pedestrian and bus traffic.

“This is a great unfinished work of art that we’re sitting in the middle of, that has never gotten a chance to fully function as designed,” says Dan Moulthrop, CEO of the City Club of Cleveland, sitting in the square’s terraced south end near a statue of Moses Cleaveland — and staring at the traffic light.

Despite its uncorrected flaw, Public Square’s redesign has accomplished most of its mission. Moulthrop’s organization, a free speech forum founded in 1912, has hosted several civic dialogues since the park’s renovation — including a series on “the power of place,” with Public Square as a prime example. Like other civic groups, the City Club tends to use the shaded lawn, rather than the Speakers’ Terrace, for events. Moulthrop says he doesn’t want to turn off the water feature near the terrace and deprive kids of a chance to play.

“The stage on the lawn over there: That’s a place that we’ve used a lot, and it’s perfect,” Moulthrop says.

Meanwhile, the ongoing management of the park has accelerated downtown’s conversion into a neighborhood. The Group Plan Commission spends about $2 million a year on operations, maintenance, and programming, from yoga and “goat yoga” classes to kid-friendly activities near the wading pool. In winter, the pool becomes an ice-skating rink. Green-shirted “ambassadors” hired by the nonprofit Downtown Cleveland Alliance patrol the square to keep it safe and clean.

Benné Christian, 63, who has lived in Cleveland all her life, marveled at the park on a summer Sunday evening, when 2,000 people mingled for a 2018 Black Business Expo and Taste of Black Cleveland event. Around her, people grabbed burgers and Polish sausages, custom fruit arrangements, and fliers announcing an African-American playhouse’s new season.

“I love Public Square,” Christian says. “I’m truly thrilled to see the renovation. It’s got more green spaces, more spaces where people can commune.”

Across the square sat Tom L. Johnson’s statue, gazing south at the festival, as a little boy in a sky-blue shirt climbed his pedestal to stand at his knee. Johnson looked calm, curious, and satisfied — as if he knew that a new generation had revived his promise to the city. An inscription on the back of his pedestal notes that Johnson’s statue is “located on the spot he dedicated to the freedom of speech.”

Published on December 5, 2018

The traditional office job has evolved certain indelible qualities over the past 60 years or so, becoming a steady, predictable, more-or-less mandatory part of life. We commute in and out. We sit in chairs. We type on computers. Meetings are convened. They are interminable. Coffee is often involved.

But one variable is changing the traditional office job rapidly in the 21st century: technology. Here are some emerging technologies — some incredible, some goofy, some a little spooky — that could change the office experience over the next two decades. Some are still in the tinker phase in research labs. Others may be in your office right now.

The Big Picture

What will future office buildings and plazas look like? One heartening 21st-century trend is that big buildings and city spaces are a lot more eco-friendly than they used to be. Architecture changes slowly, so near-future changesFor the eye-popping far-future stuff, check out eVolo magazine’s annual Skyscraper Competition. are likely to be small and iterative. Consider the European startup concept called CityTree, a mobile moss structure designed to scrub pollutants from the air in city parks and commercial plazas.

The Commute

The advent of the laptop computer, the smart phone, and wireless internet access have already changed the experience of commuting: Lots of us now find ourselves working while we’re traveling to the office on the subway, train, or bus.

We may soon be working in our cars, too. Some companies are designing self-driving cars that essentially function as mobile offices. Set your destination, flip a switch, and the interior of the car morphs into an office configuration: The driver’s seat swivels around, desks pop out of the floor, side windows turn into electronic displays. This isn’t just sketchbook noodling; some of these next-generation vehicles are already scheduled for production, like Volkswagen’s I.D. Buzz minivan, slated to hit the production line next year. While the first wave of these vehicles won’t be fully driverless, they’ll be built to take advantage of the technology when it does arrive. With the I.D. Buzz, for instance, you can flip seats into office mode, but you’ll need to be parked to do so.

A little farther down the development track, several automakers are now designing concept vehicles like the Toyota e-Palette, pictured above, which can serve as multi-purpose “rooms on wheels” for a full-service office-to-office commute.

Nature Calls

In the spirit of exhaustive inquiry, we may as well acknowledge that bathroom breaks are a part of office life. The future experience in this arena may be changing as well.

For some of us, in 20 years, the office experience could be unrecognizable.

A surprisingly wide range of so-called “smart toilets” are now installed in restrooms both public and private. Most of them are in Japan, which has long been enthusiastic about toilet technology. (No, really.) Standard workplace accommodations are likely to evolve toward products like Kohler’s Numiline of toilets, which incorporates water-saving technology, hands-free operation of the lid and flushing mechanism, and Bluetooth connectivity.

Weird science note: The Bluetooth option may seem ridiculous, but it’s a holdover from early designs aimed at the luxury home market. (The idea is to let you play your own music during quality time.) One unsettling side effect: Smart toilets can be hacked.

Office Space

Entire segments of the retail furniture business are dedicated to selling you on the tables and chairs and office décor of the near future — standing desks and ergonomic smart chairs. Yet the true office of the future may not even have them.

The End of Sitting is an experimental installation in Holland that imagines a future office space of dynamic geometries and surfaces. A collaboration between artist Barbara Visser and the design studio Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances (RAAAF), the project is an attempt to radically rethink the office paradigm: “to develop a concept wherein the chair and desk are no longer unquestionable starting points.”

Virtual Reality

In some fast-forward workplaces, the physical office already is being replaced by the virtual office. Case in point: Ford Motor Company. At the automaker’s facilities in Michigan, California, Germany and China, engineers spend most of their time strapped into VR headsets. They may be physically sitting in Michigan or Germany, but the real workplace is the Ford Vehicle Immersion Environment (FiVE), a virtual reality construct where designers collaborate on immersive 3D models of concept vehicles. Physical distance is irrelevant and engineers on different continents work side by side.

Such collaborative VR workplaces are popping up all over the place in manufacturing and other industries. Virtual reality is such a complex and fast-moving technology that it’s tricky to prognosticate. But based on the money and resources being poured into the field, many more office workers will be strapping on goggles and gloves in the not-so-distant future.

Speech Recognition

Speech recognition has earned mainstream acceptance with remarkable speed, relative to other major consumer tech transitions. (Just ask your Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri.) Now the office environment is working to catch up. Expect many common data entry tasks to migrate from the keyboard to the microphone — something that’s already happening for common tasks like scheduling meetings and composing memos and emails. The emerging consensus is that, in the next 10 to 20 years, speech recognition will supplant the keyboard as our primary way of communicating with various workplace machines.

The idea isn’t all that new, actually. Veterans of the personal computer revolution can tell you that workplace speech recognition tech has been around since the 1990s. Alas, to indulge in industry jargon, it has traditionally sucked. The surprising accuracy of today’s systems is due almost entirely to recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, plus better microphones.

Gesture recognition

Like speech recognition, gesture recognition is a shift in human-computer interaction, focused on body language. For those who work with the usual office setup — sitting and facing a screen — desktop toolsets like the Leap Motion system are pointing the way to the future. Leap has released several systems over the years that use infrared cameras to track the movement of your hands and fingers. Using gestures, you can manipulate data and virtual objects on a traditional computer display or, more likely, a virtual reality headset. There’s even some talk of developing an imaginary keyboard.

For now, this kind of exacting manual control over virtual objects is only useful in certain industries, such as engineering, design, gaming, and medicine. But expect to see more gesture control options in the average workplace as this technology evolves.

Welcome to the Machine

If you plot out the future trajectory of technologies like virtual reality, AI, robotics, and speech recognition, the dividing line between human and machine starts to blur. The ultimate man-machine connection is BCI, or brain-computer interface, the catch-all term for technologies that establish direct communication between the human brain and an external (or internal!) machine. This may seem like science fiction, but it’s getting pretty real, pretty fast. Last year, Stanford researchers demonstrated a BCI system that translates brain waves into letters and words, allowing paralyzed patients to type sentences just by thinking them.

In April 2018, a University of California San Francisco research team unveiled a similar neuroprosthetic device that transcribes the brain waves generated when a person hears a particular phrase or sentence. It doesn’t transcribe spoken words, mind you; it transcribes the brain signals triggered by spoken words. Think that one through and you can see how things could get scary in a hurry. On the upside, both systems require surgical brain implants for now, which may discourage the squeamish.

Follow the Patents

The United States Patent and Trademark Office operates a massive text and image database that’s open to the public. Mining the data can be tricky, but for amateur lookee-loos, free online tools like Latest Patents website make for fun excavation. Here you can track what patents are being filed by leading technology companies like Apple, Google, or IBM.

For instance, recent filings from Amazon list patents for “Robotic grasping of items” and “Gaze assisted object recognition.” Google has “Autonomous vehicle seat” and “Personalized electronic magazine.” Apple just filed a bunch of new patents that suggest the company is investing heavily in the concept of interactive clothing. Touchscreen shirts. Interactive pants. This sort of thing.

Surely, some of these technologies will make their way into the workplace — whether to expand productivity or enhance break time. For some of us, in 20 years, the office experience could be unrecognizable. So long as there’s still coffee, we’ll be all right.

Published on August 10, 2018