NOVEMBER 2000: DEADMALLS.COM FEATURE:
MIDDLETOWN, NY and ORANGE PLAZA

Mall or maul?
Transformation of Orange County

by Michael R. Edelstein

"We think that we would not go to mom and pop stores any more, but to big malls. And what we thought we were doing was saving five cents on bread and 10 cents on milk, but what we were actually doing was changing the social construction of the society." These comments were made by my wonderful colleague Patricia Hunt Perry of Newburgh in a video that I am editing as part of a project I have been running to bring ecological literacy into the curriculum at Ramapo College of New Jersey. They readily apply to Orange County.

Indeed, there has been a social transformation of Orange County in the face of mall-development affecting the scale of relationships, the health of our communities, the viability of the local small business sector, and the quality of our environment.

Take Middletown. Beginning in the 1950s, Ed Lloyd pioneered the miracle mile along Route 211. Playtogs on Dolson Avenue. Both forged a shift of business from the center to the periphery in keeping with the popularity of the automobile in post-World War II America. While Lloyd and others were community-minded in shifting the balance to the fringe from the center, they helped to put Middletown into a spiral from which it may never recover, and in the end, to create their own commercial demise. The center decayed while the surroundings grew.

For Middletown, Orange Plaza dealt the coup de grace, the transition from strip mall to mall, only to itself be taken out, in turn, by the Galleria super-mall. In the transition, the diversity of local and small businesses has been crushed in the favor of standardized and homogenized theme shopping. New wealth was created in this transformation, but it was wealth that was detached from the community, with increasing amounts going to far off investors trawling Orange County for profits.

The balance of power (and ratables) shifted to Wallkill, which virtually surrounds Middletown (a similar transformation happened between the City of Newburgh and Vails Gate and the Route 300 strip and has - or is being - repeated in our villages, as well). The sense of permanence and quality that came with investments in community was replaced with an architecture and a mode of doing business that is ever transient. Through new development on farmlands, redevelopment of obsolete commercial land uses, and corporate takeover, a frenzy of investments created an ever changing cacophony of unmusical chairs.

But the growth of malls not only changes the character of shopping. It also changed the character of communities. In 1975, my colleague Joel Kameron and I undertook an environmental psychological study as part of the natural resource inventory of the Town of Paramus, N.J. A farm community of Black Dirt celery fields until the 1930s brought the George Washington Bridge, Paramus has rapidly grown as a commercial center to the point where it could claim the busiest crossroads and the biggest retail sector of any community on Earth. And what did this gain for the people of Paramus? As we learned in door-to-door interviews and observation, Paramus has been overrun by cars. Attracted by the crossroads of major highways, cars also crowded major secondary roads, tying people up in congestion sot that getting in and out of one's driveway or neighborhood could be a major source of frustration. Outsiders cut through neighborhoods, bringing crime, noise, exhaust and a lost sense of community identity. Given the congestion, tempers were often high. People no longer walked the streets and being a pedestrian was dangerous, indeed. Families with children retreated from the major streets and were replaced by renters or commercial uses, adding to the transience. Recreation, jogging, cycling and general enjoyment of place were often displaced in the midst of a commercial feeding frenzy. A major social dislocation was unleashed that, today, may be less visible because current residents were more likely to have come after the changes took place. If one travels to Rockland County, one finds communities around the new Galleria super-duper mall braced for the same kinds of dislocation and disamenity.

   It is not surprising that in Orange Environment's comments on the first Wallkill Galleria, we were concerned about adverse economic and social, as well as environmental impacts. Such issues were never really discussed in the environmental review process, despite our efforts.

The Galleria was approved, and the new main street Orange County was created. As we predicted in our comments on the Galleria, Orange Plaza followed the fate of the businesses it had replaced. Galleria created a district of mega development, with such community killers as Wal-Mart and Home Depot soon in tow.

Even within the Galleria, a progression was evident, whereby smaller and more local business people were supplanted by national chain stores. In the end, our Galleria could be located anywhere. It is placeless and deplacing. It is an anonymous experience in a synthetic world.

I boycotted the Galleria for the first year, but as the parent of a teen-ager, I have gradually become enured to the place, particularly tolerating it when it is least crowded. But now even this tolerable experience of the Galleria is threatened by the proposed massive expansion toward the status of mega-mall. The expanded mall would reach out much further, threatening community integrity for a hundred square miles. Applauded as economic growth by this paper and others, the Town of Wallkill appears poised to rubber stamp the expansion with little consideration for the consequences. Just to force the issue, Galleria's owner, the Pyramid Corporation, apparently arrived in Wallkill with a draft impact statement already finished, not even bothering to wait for the legal steps by which a lead agency for the review is named and the need for an impact statement is determined. If that's true, this brash move will also preempt public and town involvement in determining the scope of the draft impact statement. This approach shows disdain for the law and for the people who will bear the brunt of the Galleria expansion. In today's Orange County, it is a strategy that may well succeed.

Meanwhile, similar threats confront the rest of our county. The small towns and villages of southeastern Orange County now live in the shadow of the ever-growing Woodbury Commons. A caller to the Orange Environment office recently summed up the social transformation that we are allowing. "It is as if this is no longer the Town of Woodbury, it is the Town of Woodbury Commons."

Michael R. Edelstein is president of Orange Environment, Inc., a non-profit environmental group, and professor of environmental psychology at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

This article originally appeared in the Times Herald Record news from this article.

According to a May 9, 2000 press release, Orange Plaza on Route 211 and Dunning Road in Wallkill (Orange Co.) will be getting some new tenants next year. A new 86,000 square-foot Kohls, a 230,000 square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter with a supermarket, a Bed Bath & Beyond and The Rag Shop should be ready to open sometime in 2001. The number of jobs to be created was not given.
More news about this here and here and here.

Some say the mall caused it's own demise... read about it here.

The Miracle Mile

Middletown / Walkill, New York:

Retail giants emerge and die, succumb to new retail giants.
Read about it here.

An excellent source of information about this mall and area can be found from the Times Herald Record news archive