The other day I was at the Owings Mills mall for something. A snack. As I was going in, I got the weirdest feeling....it was deja vu of another weird feeling I'd had years and years ago. 20 years ago or more.

I remember that I was leaving the mall through the entrance by the Hecht company and I had the overwhelming feeling of sadness and neglect a person gets in a place of hardship and difficulty. "One day this mall is really going to go downhill. It's going to be almost empty...it'll be like Security Square Mall, attracting a sort of down market crowd. That's funny, huh? But I'm sure it's true"....

I can't remember who I said this to, but it was probably my old buddy Kris. I said it again to several other people who gave me a strange look, because at the time, this mall was The Place To Be. There was a Sach's Fifth Avenue there, where the J.C. Penny is now. The specialty stores were exclusive. One sold only high end womens accessories. There was a hip card shop on the top floor called Dallas Alice. There were chocholateirs and nice restaurants. There were strings of clothing stores catering to professional women two for "misses sizes", one for petites, one for "junior sizes" and one for "women's sizes" - I even worked in one while I was in college. That whole concept was killed by casual Friday, which then morphed into "dress casual" which then turned into people wearing sweat pants to work.

One thing about the Regan Era: at least people didn't schlepp around looking like a bunch of refugees. We might have had poofey hair and shoulder pads worthy of the finest linebacker, but at least we were wearing panty hose. There's a lot to be said for "control top". It can make the difference between "missus" and "womens" sizes. Trust me.

But I digress.

I guess malls in general have fallen out of fashion, which is okay, since they probably suck as a concept. But for someone as non-materialistic as I try to be, I have a sort of fondness for them. One of my happiest memories is of going to Security Square Mall with my mother, brother and grandmother, and all of us stopping at the ice cream place - I think it was Baskin Robbins - eating our ice cream cones, throwing coins into the artificially blue water of the fountain in the center of the mall, making wishes and knowing it was all right because the money went to charity, so it was almost as good as putting it in the poor box at church. There was a sky light, and the light reflected off the water, and the rushing water made a happy, gentle sound. My brother would duck into the clothing racks or crack jokes in the women's underwear department, holding up the largest bra he could find and hollaring "Hey! Do you need a bra-zire?!" and then cracking up since the thing would have wrapped around me 10 times. He wasn't trying to embarrass me in particular, he was just trying to move us all along....which he usually succeeded in doing.

And once even Mom was stopped dead in her tracks by what appeared to be a man in a passionate embrace with a woman. It was actually some poor soul from the visual display department wrestling a maniquen.

So I grew up with window shopping as a social activity. Like my mother, I rarely bought anything, but I could look for hours, and was always dragged along by both friends and remote acquaintences, since I could be counted on to be patient, helpful, to run back and forth from the dressing rooms pulling various sizes, to hold closed the door, and give an honest, but tactful opinion.

Anyway, poor Owings Mills, the giant of snobbery, seems to have fallen. A lot of the stores are vacant, there's a dollar store, vending machines, a bad Chinese buffet, and one of the "anchors" is empty. The food court where crowds of girls in stylish clothing gathered with stylish bags eating salads and drinking smoothies is filled with tired gray people. Even the palm trees look exhuasted.

How does that happen, I wonder. Why do some things become "a classic" while others become old and faded? Is it just demographics? Change of the times, like the end of the dress shops? When a place is just a fad....a building....well, it has a life after that, then. All that work went into it, the laying of tile and marble, the engineering of the floors and elevators. It's still the same physical place it was when it was "Hot" and "Hip". Does like attract like? Upscale attract upscale, run down attract run down? I just find all of these kinds of things interesting.

If the mall could talk would it be sad? Would it say "I used to have a Sachs!" ? Would it be stoic, pretending nothing is wrong? Would it be happy that as it aged a more laid back crowd now keeps it company? Does it look forward to the day it will be torn down for parking, or made into something else? Does it live in the past?

Or is that just me?