The closing sale has ended at Alex Baby & Toys at Westfield Montgomery Mall in Bethesda. It has now permanently closed. Surprisingly, they depart about a month ahead of the peak holiday toy shopping season. There is once again a toy store vacuum to be filled at Montgomery Mall, although Toys R Us will be bringing its pop-up shop back to Macy's again this year.
Remember toy stores? K*B Toys, Sullivan's, the superlative Lowen's? Life gets ever more brittle, void of ever more innocent, spontaneous, quotidian joys that once informed kidhood. Now, before they're out of short pants and primary school, small people expect cell phones and the attendant Pandoric ills those electronics invite; they labor hauling homework in bookbags seemingly two-thirds the kid's own size and weight.
ReplyDeleteNeighborhoods used to have reasonably-sized houses, nice yards, and few fences demarcating property lines. [ED: At least, such was so when I was a kid, in the 1960s and '70s] Now, speculators tear down those old houses and construct massive McMansions on the plots, building to the property set-back limits, then fence in the structures to further isolate them from the neighbors, (who are an arms-length away in their own McMansions.) Kids who used to play outside in their yards --or wander over to another, to meet their peers-- now have no yards left; they've all been built over. Instead, small people these days get ferried about in the isolated quiet of European or Asian SUVs, taken for pre-arranged "play dates" or "activities," scheduled like so many office meetings they'll soon enough be compelled to endure in adulthood.
What laudits owe for vanquishing such juvenilia as a "toy store."
What joy.
So glad I'm in my 70's and not my 7's, too bad that most all we truly enjoyed and was good for us is now stilted, fake, overly protected, or cloying supervised or crammed down our throats.
DeleteRight, parents have toys mailed to their homes instead of driving around to pick them up so now the world is terrible and children are ruined forever. A totally logical take.
DeleteThe houses being closer together means it's harder for kids to meet each other? Riiiiight. There are 7 kids living on my townhouse block and some combination of them are playing outside with each other literally every day. Get over yourself, boomer. No one is going to miss your half acre lawns and strip malls.
Delete@7:35 - you miss the point. Toy stores allowed kids to roam and explore and discover things they might not have known about. Having a toy delivered to one's door presents a specific product but misses the opportunity to let someone find something different, perhaps totally unexpected, that might spark their interest in a new area.
ReplyDelete@11:21 -- "Get over yourself, boomer." Thanks for the opening bid ad hominem. That gambit proclaims razor-sharp creative instincts. You were perhaps distracted "hand-crafting" that reply to note that (A) the shopping center where this latest toy store shuttered is not what meets the criteria for a "strip mall," (B) that said shopping structure will continue to exist, albeit without a store where kids can browse for amusements, (C) it is the ubiquity of fences [around those gargantuan, bubble-gum-&-popsicle-stick-construction McMansions] that hinders greater ease of kids congregating, not the mammoth houses themselves, or (D) that, contra your assertion, the yards mentioned above were not vast, but merely "nice." Few are the houses in my Chevy Chase neighborhood that have half-acre lawns surrounding the "improvements." You are perhaps thinking of the grotesqueries in Potomac and environs, not the "reasonably-sized houses, [with] nice yards" of 20815.
The 7+ children of that townhouse block must revel in the chance to play in the street together, a la 1950s Brooklyn. Such happy memories being made, dashing between parking spaces and the neighborhood mailbox. Or do they troop off to frolic in the development's designated unpaved greenspace, adjoining the runoff catchment pool? Who needs grass to roll in & run barefoot on or trees to climb when you can spend kidhood playing on asphalt or concrete parking lots?
What was I thinking?
6:22 touchè
DeleteYou're right. These kids growing up in walkable areas with awful things like shared community space are really being screwed up. Being driven to and from the mall like grandpappy did for his kids is the only true way for our species to exist. If kids aren't surrounded by rampant consumerism all day how are they even supposed to know how to American right?!?
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