Strategic Location

Returning with books & groceries today we passed an enormous, abandoned mall. A mall like you know it: lavish & huge, taking up an entire city block, 8 or 10 stories high. We had just come from one of these, in fact. But this one, the whole thing—brand new!—was closed & rotting.

Consider the sheer quantity of riches contained within an upscale mall & what it means to be able to construct one: the land, the building (materials, AC, power, plumbing), all the merchandise itself, the food & jobs. And what it means to lose one—in this case, without every having used it. They built this colossal thing with the treasure of a nation that could not finish it or maintain it or fill it. The waste of it is staggering.

Krismon, the money crisis, that’s how everyone explains it. Krismon was a decade ago. For all the things going well in Indonesia, the economy has been stagnant for 10 years. Everywhere you go in the city—even right there out our window—there are gigantic building projects begun & scrapped. Acres of land hold only the stillborn foundations or high skeletons of buildings, spiked with rebar, filling with water. In ruins before they even existed. Sometimes they’ve left the bulldozers & cranes behind, too.

Just beyond the lost mall, squatters had built shelters in the old construction area, literally a gullied triangle of dirt between three roads. They’d roofed with cock-eyed blue tarps & squares of corrugated aluminum. Eight open doorways in a tight line, all of them filled with plastic hangers of bright laundry. Given its location alongside traffic & its clear boundaries, it had the unfortunate look of an unkempt zoo exhibit. Five women, two little girls, two babies all sat chatting on a concrete ledge in the umbrella shade of a single tropical leaf. An empty food cart, its front glass hand-painted with “Bubur Ayam” (chicken porridge), laid at a forsaken tilt, looked like one of those miniature wrecks that decorate aquariums.

In the trees above it all hung a plastic banner, still legible in cheerful orange & yellow: “FOOD COURT in STRATEGIC LOCATION.”