Chapter Four
Punks, Mallrats, and Out-of-Control Teenagers
Production and Regulation of Suburban Public Space
Adam Walsh’s afternoon abduction from a shopping mall helped to recast public spaces as imperiled by lurking criminals. His murder, the supposed kidnapping epidemic of the 1980s, and other criminal threats were not the only catalysts shifting the understanding and regulation of suburban public spaces.1 Teenagers and their activities figured prominently in the understanding of those spaces as part of the new era of suburban crisis. Their uses of public space, and news media and popular culture representations of them, undermined associations with safety and consumerism and spurred business owners, police, and parents to adopt new tactics of social and spatial regulation that exemplified suburban productive victimization.
By the end of the 1990s, suburbanites saw teens as threats to legitimate users of public space—namely, shoppers in the mall, kids playing games at the recreation center, families relaxing at the park—and to “good” kids (shopping and working) who could be turned “bad” outside the purview of parents and teachers. In response to this increasing sense of victimization of and by teenagers, authority figures exercised their power more forcefully. They imagined and policed public spaces in order to maximize their control over them and thereby remedy or at least ameliorate ascendant anxieties about the family and make the spaces safer for a particular kind of citizen-consumer.2 This spatial solution to a cultural problem in turn diminished the “public” nature of suburban space while proposing the suburban home as the safe haven from dangerous public areas and their inhabitants.
One of the most prominent suburban teen spaces of the 1970s, the recreation (or rec) center, while still part of the landscape, had virtually disappeared as a teen sanctuary by the 1990s, with many directed instead toward young children and senior citizens. By then, popular culture depictions and news media narratives showed it to be a place menaced by teenagers rather than a secure space for socializing. In response, parents and municipal leaders turned away from the rec center as a place to control suburban teens, and teens moved toward the shopping center as their home away from home. The 1979 film Over the Edge provided a frame for understanding teen danger on the suburban landscape. Based on true events, the film presented a worst-case scenario of misbehavior in which out-of-control teens cause their recreation center to close by turning it into a breeding ground for their violent behavior and substance use.3 Alongside this nearly apocalyptic vision of suburban teens, real disturbances across the country cemented the nefarious association between teenagers and the rec center. By the end of the 1980s, municipalities from Wisconsin to Florida had closed their centers or repurposed them as senior or community centers, signaling the power of the dangerous public teen image to initiate new regulations of public space in order to protect the public from teens and teens from one another.4
Similarly, real incidents of teen misbehavior and their elaboration in news media and popular culture associated the shopping mall and the video game arcade with teens and their transgressions. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), based on Cameron Crowe’s year as an undercover reporter at a suburban California high school confirmed what many suspected about the shopping center by showing teens using the mall as a venue for scalping concert tickets, finding sexual partners, and getting high.5 Newspapers and magazines published countless stories of teen mall patrons, labeled mallrats, who made the shopping center their home away from home.6 These narratives portrayed a “proliferation of teenagers at malls” that was leading to “prostitution, drug sales, gang rivalries and excessive drinking—all of which can erupt into deadly violence.”7 Even the video game arcade, once believed a place to attract and contain rowdy teens already frequenting shopping centers, became known as home to disruptive behavior despite rules specifically intended to prevent problems.8 The emergence of the arcade as a dangerous space spawned outlandish popular culture representations like the teen exploitation film Joysticks, which further implicated arcade teens in “deviant” behavior.9 In the same era, hardcore suburban punk rockers also associated the teenager with hostility, violence, and disorder in public space. Director Penelope Spheeris’s films—The Decline of Western Civilization and Suburbia—as well as hardcore’s lyrics, music, and public performances, elaborated those associations. Whether they were behaving well or poorly, teens in the recreation center, the shopping mall, and other liminal spaces embodied danger to the public and to other teens. For increasingly visible and powerful conservative leaders, teens signified a failure of the postwar suburban family to adhere to “traditional” values and produce proper citizens, as it had in the 1950s.
In response, parents, police, and mall owners reacted with stricter regulation of teenagers and their spaces, shutting down or severely curtailing the operating hours of places where they congregated. Shopping center owners modernized and professionalized their security forces. They employed greater numbers of better-trained guards who employed new technologies like closed-circuit television to crack down on the nuisances of shoplifting and highly visible loitering that discouraged shopping by other customers. Due to malign associations of video game arcades, towns from Mesquite, Texas, to Babylon, Long Island, passed ordinances to stringently regulate or even ban these spaces. Likewise, police limited hardcore punks’ ability to congregate in public, simply by harassing and arresting them, often without cause. This eventually led to many punks leaving their local environs for big cities; there they could more easily cultivate a social scene where they were not so conspicuously out of place.
This new mode of viewing and policing public space as endangered because of the presence of teens was productive for suburbanites in a few specific ways. Under this new system, teens had little choice but to go back into the home, where they were supposedly protected from the dangers of public life and could pose no harm to the public. Bringing teens back into the evidently safe confines of the home allowed parents to reassert control over their children’s lives and address fears of the decline of the “traditional” family, a fear characteristic of this age of “family values” politics (addressed more fully in the following chapter). Beyond the regulation of teens themselves, the notion of a dangerous suburban landscape supported the security culture analyzed in the previous chapter and its attendant practices. And, ultimately, the responses to out-of-control teens led to an increasing scrutiny of these spaces that substantially undermined their function as traditional public spaces and civic venues. Instead, through these new regulations, owners, their security forces, and police further made malls into spaces of privatized consumption for the benefit of consumers, shopping center owners, and municipalities while further undermining freedom of movement through other suburban spaces already enmeshed in an increasingly stringent culture of security.10
Watch Out for Children
The motion picture Over the Edge presents teen anarchy of the 1970s and ’80s as a direct result of the failures of suburban planning. Former newspaper reporter Charles S. Haas cowrote the film based on the reporting of his San Francisco Examiner colleagues Bruce Koon and James A. Finefrock. In a 1973 front-page article “Mouse Packs: Kids on a Crime Spree,” Koon and Finefrock told the stories of Foster City, California’s problems perpetrated by preteenage gangs of “mousepacks”: pipe bomb explosions, graffiti on shopping center walls, and sundry other criminal activities.11 The article presented a lawless landscape in which teen and preteen violence was a frightening aberration for people expecting the docile, rule-following suburban children of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best. In response, Foster City’s municipal government sought to control these outbreaks of youth crime. For example, it mandated that junior high school students must be let out of school forty-five minutes before the high school students so that the older ones could not mug the younger students. Koon and Finefrock wondered whether the situation in Foster City might be “a fluke or a harbinger of things to come.” This chapter argues that the “mousepacks” were indeed a harbinger. The long list of juvenile offenses in Foster City portended a new era of suburban danger posed by its own residents that would call forth new understandings and regulations of suburban spaces outside the home.
Over the Edge put the story of Foster City’s “mousepacks” on the big screen. Set in the fictional planned community of New Granada, Colorado, a stand-in for the planned communities and new towns of the late 1960s and early ’70s, the film offered a theory as to what led teenagers to misbehavior and violence.12 It showed them as bored and angry because of a stultifying suburban lifestyle that caused them to act out violently against parents, teachers, and police. The film thus held what Roger Ebert called “a funeral service at the graveside of the suburban dream.”13 Through this portrayal, Over the Edge helped construct a vision of the out-of-control teen and a frame for understanding the recreation center and its patrons as essentially dangerous, a frame that justified new policies and practices for monitoring teens.
At the film’s outset, a short preface is superimposed over a static shot of the bleak, lifeless landscape of New Granada. It attempts to put the misbehavior of suburban teens in context: “In 1978 110,000 kids under 18 were arrested for crimes of vandalism in the United States. The story is based on true incidents occurring during the 1970s in a planned suburban community of townhomes and condominiums where city planners ignored the fact that a quarter of the population was 15 years old or younger.” That preamble announces that this is a social problem film—a realistic portrayal of the failures of suburban development to address the needs of its teenage population in crisis. The teenagers in the film (played largely by nonprofessional actors) drink, do drugs, vandalize property, and assault and even kill one another. Ebert noted in his review that “the particulars of the plot aren’t all that important; we’re supposed to absorb a feeling of teen-age frustration and paranoia and we do.”14 Moving beyond the intimations of the Examiner source material, Over the Edge turned the utopian potential of a planned community into a hellscape populated by teens with nothing better to do than engage in dangerous, transgressive behavior that undermined the fabric of middle-class suburban privilege and made manifest the emerging suburban crisis of the late 1970s.
Figure 4.1. Over the Edge (1979). The film’s tagline, “Watch Out for Children,” suggested the emerging view of suburban teenagers as both dangerous and endangered. Licensed by Warner Bros. Entertainment and George Litto Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.
Yet, with the desolate landscape of New Granada as backdrop, where construction sites are silent and new housing sits empty, the film does suggest a space for its teen population—the recreation center. Apart from their school, this is the only space created specifically for them. In the film’s opening sequences, the recreation center appears as an oasis in the middle of a desert landscape. Teenagers and younger kids play games and socialize from the end of school until the center closes at 6 P.M. However, because it provides the only space for teens to congregate outside the purview of parents and teachers, the recreation center is also the place for after-hours activities like drinking, drug use, and loitering.
This behavior leads the town to close the center, sending the local teens out to misbehave across the landscape. In one sequence, their unruliness interferes with the town’s economic fortunes, suggesting the broader implications of failing to discipline teenagers. As evidenced by unfinished tract houses and open fields marked for construction now delayed, New Granada has failed to attract enough investors or residents. To rejuvenate their flagging economy, prominent local businessmen try to lure investors from Houston by portraying New Granada as not only a good investment but also a good place to raise a family, far better than the dirty, dangerous cities of the late 1970s. On the day the Houston investors tour the town, the closed recreation center is accidentally reopened. As the police attempt to close it back down, a violent confrontation erupts between officers and patrons, scaring away the visiting investors who witness the chaotic scene, and leading to the center’s permanent closure.
The town then convenes a meeting at the junior high school to discuss New Granada’s problem teens. Once the parents and other citizens are inside the school, the kids lock them in and riot in the hallways and parking lot of the school. They loot the main office and shoot guns while destroying and vandalizing everything in sight. The teens then flee toward the recreation center. A police car chasing them crashes into the building and explodes, setting the center ablaze. It burns to the ground in a symbolic and literal end to teen social life in the town.
The fiery ending highlights the problem of bored suburban teens, and their supposed propensity for violence, who lack proper recreational activities, guidance, or supervision. Rather than the placid teens of the sitcom suburb or the urban delinquents of postwar teen social problem films, the young people of New Granada are liminal figures nearly always on the verge of dangerous, sadistic acts engendered by suburban life itself. Yet they are also brimming with redemptive possibilities if only they could be directed, molded, and disciplined properly.
This was often the purpose of the recreation and youth center movement—to redeem some teens and prevent the dereliction of others. From the 1940s onward, these centers were intended to provide safe, educational spaces for redirecting teens from dangerous streets into productive activities. In the 1940s and ’50s, cities built youth centers to combat juvenile delinquency.15 President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs funded urban centers to help address the urban crisis, though they quickly became gateways for the incursion of law enforcement as part of the War on Crime.16 The suburban rec center, in contrast, symbolized the height of suburban social planning through the mid-1970s, as seen most prominently with new towns like Columbia, Maryland, and Irvine, California, supposedly designed with young people in mind.17 Yet, as a Christian Science Monitor film critic described it, the center in the fictional planned community of New Granada was “the only place for the kids to hang out,” a space that “quickly becomes tedious, and since the ‘bad’ kids are lumped there with the ‘good’ ones, mischief occasionally brews—and the community holler for the center to be shut down.”18 Instead of keeping kids safe, the rec center mixed “good” and “bad” kids—a recurring justification for regulating suburban public spaces.
Like the film’s plot, news media narratives reiterated this notion of the corruption of “good” teens by “bad” ones in recreation centers, leading parents, police, and teachers to more strictly supervise the spaces, in turn causing teens to congregate elsewhere, usually the newly ubiquitous suburban shopping mall. According to such stories, because of the centers’ increasingly nefarious associations and actual criminal disruptions, many towns closed them or turned them into less teen-specific community centers.19 The Milwaukee Sentinel reported that Greendale, Wisconsin, closed its recreation center in 1977 because of flagging attendance and reports of criminal activity.20 In 1980, a Dunedin, Florida, center was opened explicitly to cater to all of the town’s residents to avoid becoming an exclusively teen hangout with all that such a designation entailed.21 In an article about a Largo, Maryland, center, the Washington Post reported that a state parks and recreation commissioner had proposed changing a recreation center into a community center because “we have had a lot of problems. Some of the teen-agers are very disruptive and have done a lot of damage.… They have put dead cats on their [senior citizens’] cars.”22 Sponsored by civic or religious groups, many centers remained open but held little attraction for suburban teens, as the spaces became more regulated than school, home, or the mall and therefore less attractive to young people searching for spaces of their own.23 As municipalities changed teen-oriented recreation centers into community centers, more strictly supervised remaining youth centers, or closed them altogether, suburban teens continued to search for other spaces in which to socialize, with similar consequences.24
The Decline of Western Civilization
The narratives, representations, and practices of the hardcore punk scene that emerged in late-1970s suburban California further marked teens as prone to malevolence and as requiring stricter regulation in the places they frequented outside the home. Yet hardcore punks did not simply conquer these spaces and leave mayhem in their wake, as teens had at the rec center. Instead, they fought for space and visibility against increasingly aggressive actions by police and business owners who sought to realize an idealized postwar suburban social order of teen conformity and productive consumptive spaces through spatial regulation of this group of dangerous teens.
Rooted in largely nonprofessional, communal performance spaces, suburban hardcore punk, as it emerged in and around Los Angeles in the late 1970s, was not a commercial venture. It was a music form produced by suburban teens and young adults for an audience of their peers who were mostly local, a genre that both built on their privilege to perform music outside a profit motive and decried that privilege as culturally suffocating.25 The music and its social scene were public manifestations of suburban teenagers’ disaffection with what they perceived as the bland, predictable lives that parents, teachers, and mass culture sold to them as a fulfilling American ideal. This was not the world hardcore punks experienced. Instead of the loving homes, supportive parents, and social acceptance found in 1950s rerun sitcoms and their 1970s counterparts such as The Brady Bunch and Family, they observed a suburban culture marked by malign neglect and often shattered by abuse, alcoholism, and divorce—what filmmaker Penelope Spheeris called “the decline of Western civilization” in her 1981 documentary of the same name, about hardcore.26 With this title and the film itself, Spheeris signaled the connection between the crisis of the family, national decline, and the intentionally conspicuous subculture of suburban hardcore punks.27
In their music, hardcore punks represented themselves as outcasts, though they often echoed earlier critiques of postwar suburban life. Both these punks and previous postwar critics portrayed suburban communities as stultifying havens of middlebrow pleasures and emotional repression.28 These teens, however, experienced suburban life as its progeny, as direct outgrowths of this cultural milieu who could not leave but rejected their cultural inheritance. As such, they lived and performed in suburbs themselves until they were self-sufficient enough to escape. While there, they co-opted public spaces such as backyards, abandoned lots, basements, churches, and restaurants to play loud music, form mosh pits, and generally misbehave. Through their music and spatial practices, hardcore punks intentionally upended traditional suburban culture and provoked its authority figures to confront them.
They used their differences in dress and decorum to signal their insularity to fellow punks and opposition to outsiders, particularly parents and police.29 By wearing leather jackets and secondhand clothes and sporting mohawks and various piercings, hardcore punks marked themselves and became objects of discipline whose successful regulation and expulsion by local authorities reaffirmed a postwar family and spatial order clearly in crisis.30 This self-presentation strategy proved to be the crucial aspect of the emergence of suburban punks. They were identifiable public figures expressing an antisuburban viewpoint in combative public performances of aggressive, explicitly antimusical music.31 Suburban punks, then, were mostly not performing and socializing in cloistered venues but in the very suburban places they decried. These spaces proved a hostile climate for their congregation and performance where police officers almost inevitably confronted and often arrested hardcore punks.
The first suburban hardcore song, “Out of Vogue,” was recorded and released in 1978 by the Orange County, California, band Middle Class on their seven-inch, extended-play (EP) album, Out of Vogue.32 In committing to wax the first suburban hardcore album, Middle Class articulated hardcore’s style visually, musically, and lyrically. The band’s very name and album cover rooted their music in a typical suburban milieu. The cover showed two young girls in the middle of a tree-lined street, with cars parked in driveways and on the street, and rows of houses neatly arranged along the block. The scene was utterly ordinary for Orange County in 1977. With the band name, Middle Class, in the top right corner and the album name, Out of Vogue, running along the bottom and toward the right, the name and title framing the girls, the scene feels both familiar and distant. The girls appear content, but the street scene looks expansive, boring, and mundane. In choosing a band name and album title, the band could not have been more didactic—the default mode of hardcore punk. They were stating their band’s perspective as teenagers from the suburbs who were uncool or “out of vogue.” Although Middle Class would never achieve the popularity or longevity of other influential hardcore bands such as Black Flag or the Dead Kennedys, their first EP was a milestone in suburban hardcore: these were “typical suburban teens” playing their own music about their own (terrible) lives for other teens.33
Putting the record on the turntable, one heard Middle Class play a fast, loud, monotonal blast of two-minute songs. After four songs, it was over before it barely started and begged multiple plays for fans who wanted to understand the nearly incomprehensible lyrics and blistering guitar riffs. When the album was played again, half-sung, half-yelled lyrics presented critiques of the middlebrow culture that surrounded the band and their audience. On the EP’s title track, they sing: “We don’t need no magazines / We don’t need no TV / We don’t want to know.”34 Clearly they eschewed bland suburban life and the latest trends of popular culture in favor of the seemingly more authentic subculture of hardcore where they didn’t have to conform to popular styles or parental expectations. Describing their music in 1978, the band identified the rage at the heart of hardcore: “There is a certain amount of anger in the music but its [sic] kind of directionless, we’re not mad at any one person, we’re not mad at fascists or communists or anything like that, we’re just generally mad.”35 Their comments, viewed in the context of their lyrics and music, suggested that their rage was induced by their boring, comfortable, middle-class lives in the conservative suburbs of Orange County.36 In expressing that anger, the band created the archetypal attitude and lyrical touchstones of hardcore—alienation, disaffection, and anger—stemming from the failure of their suburban upbringing to live up to its legacy, a position that ironically mirrored conservative critiques of the family in the same period.37
The music and lyrics of hardcore bands like Middle Class combined the fast-paced sound and do-it-yourself production of the United Kingdom and New York City punk rock movements (epitomized in the United States by the Ramones, from Queens, New York) with the outlook of disillusioned suburban teens caught between the idealized vision of contemporaneous shows like Eight Is Enough, reruns of Ozzie and Harriet, and the reality of divorce, drug use, and economic stagflation.38 Yet Steven Blush, a historian of the hardcore scene, warns that even though “hardcore was the suburban American response to the late-70s punk revolution, … it would be wrong to say, ‘If you understand punk, you understand Hardcore.’ ”39 That was because much of hardcore expressed a distinctly American, suburban perspective by adding new content and stylistic innovations to an established punk aesthetic of rebellion and misanthropy. Hardcore bands screamed, sang, and yelped about fear, rejection, anger, and depression caused by what they thought was a stifling, generic landscape and by the barely concealed dysfunction of the nuclear family.40 To a large degree, these critiques of suburban life were not new when they emerged in hardcore lyrics. Academics, artists, filmmakers, and writers had long debunked the myth of suburban perfection (and continue to do so), and feminists had worked to demystify and change the nuclear family ideal.41 Because of their suburban pedigree, however, hardcore punks infused their critiques with a distinctive intensity and specificity. Their dissections of the stultifying fantasy of mass cultural delights masking abusive, fractured homes came from their own experiences, which made their rebellion more powerful and more noticeable to parents and police.
Figure 4.2. The cover of the first suburban hardcore punk album, Out of Vogue (1978), by the band Middle Class, depicts the blandness and alienation of late-1970s suburban life. Courtesy of Middle Class
Embracing middle-class mass cultural pleasures like beer and television as seemingly the only entertainment available, hardcore punks also mocked these same middle-class pastimes for their inauthenticity. In “TV Party,” genre pioneers Black Flag sang sarcastically about prime-time television as the singular cultural outlet of suburban life. Lead singer Henry Rollins screams: “I wouldn’t be without my TV for a day (Or even a minute) / Don’t even bother to use my brain any more (There’s nothing left in it),” while the rest of the band yells the names of popular shows (“Alice! Three’s Company!”).42 In “Six Pack,” the band treats beer—like television—as a staple of suburbia that mediates the banality of everyday life. Highlighting the pointlessness of comfort-obsessed middle-class life, singer Henry Rollins shouts, “Born with a bottle in his mouth / They say I’m wasted all the time / What they do is a waste of time.”43 While these topics seem likely subjects for songs by teenage boys, they also connote the particular relationship of the suburban punk to mass culture. These bands and their audiences found pleasure in drinking beer, eating junk food, and watching television as the only recreational activities available to them, empty gestures that passed the time. Simultaneously, hardcore bands mocked these hobbies as mindless, tedious, and suited to the suburban life of their middlebrow parents who solipsistically pursued self-gratification in their free time rather than genuine human connection or engaged parenting.44 The mass culture native to suburbia did not fulfill the suburban punk’s needs for the excitement, community, and cultural fulfillment at the heart of the promise of postwar suburbia.
Beyond critiquing suburban consumer culture, hardcore bands also focused on destroying the façade of perfect suburban families, and in this way they pulled off an inversion of the political handwringing from on high about the crisis of the family. In their song “Mrs. Jones,” the Circle Jerks ask the eponymous parent, “Do you know what your kids are doing?” The answer, they sing: “Youngest Debbie’s skipping class / Grades so poor she’ll barely pass.” Finally, they note: “The family ties are breaking down / There’s not much to do to save them.”45 Similarly, Youth Brigade sang in 1984, “You don’t understand the way we feel … / You say that we should not complain / You hear it over and over again / But you don’t seem to realize / How uncertain you’ve made our lives.”46 According to these punks, their parents had expectations that could not be met and an idea of family that proved unrealistic and ultimately unproductive for those who didn’t fit the mold of jock, cheerleader, or nerd. As for those who did fit the mold and did follow their parents into middle-class banality, their fates were worse. The Descendents sum up this dim view in their song “Suburban Home.” Lead singer Milo Aukerman glibly intones, “I want to be stereotyped / I want to be classified / I want to be a clone / I want a suburban home.”47 Hardcore songs about fantasies of placid family life, repetitive built landscapes, and mindless mass culture presented a damning critique of suburban life delivered by suburban teens themselves. That attitude, contained in the music’s lyrics and sound, would matter as hardcore punks moved into public space. They created music that voiced their antagonism and anger toward suburban culture, emotions that they also embodied through aggressive dancing and violent performances. Often the latter ended in confrontations with authorities who thought they could cure suburban teen angst through spatial regulation.
With a dearth of spaces available for hardcore performances, suburban punks created ad-hoc spaces for socializing, practicing, and performing in what became known in hardcore parlance as the “scene.” Peter Belsito and Bob Davis, documenting the scene in their 1983 book, Hardcore California, described the situation for suburban Los Angeles punks in the late 1970s: “Kids in L.A. have no real physical center to hang out in. Everything is spread out in endless suburbs. There’s a constant feeling of dislocation.”48 That dislocation invited the purveyors of hardcore to commandeer spaces and make them their own, at least temporarily. These spaces were not large venues and, for the most part, not the traditional rock clubs that were part of the burgeoning music scene on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip, particularly as those clubs refused to book hardcore shows because of their reputation for violence and property destruction.49 Instead, hardcore bands and their fans frequented house parties, church basements, recreation centers, beach parties, their own makeshift “clubs” in local restaurants, and any another space they could seize to give place to their scene. Sociologist Donna Gaines argues that for hardcore punks, “the general idea was to do it yourself, to create immediate rupture, quick community, in a place you could call your own.”50
Figure 4.3. The cover of this issue of the punk zine Flipside (Volume 36 [1982]) maps the sprawling suburban locales of the hardcore scene outside Los Angeles. Internet Archive (CC BY 3.0).
However, creating that quick, on-the-spot community was not without its consequences. Because of their unusual locations, the violent nature of the performances, and the lyrical antagonism, hardcore shows invited closer scrutiny by police. In their own zines, punks noted the prevalence of violent confrontations at shows, usually blaming club owners and police for instigating them.51 In his zine The Big Takeover, punk journalist Jack Rabid described his experience at a Black Flag show in 1980 at the Starwood, a small hardcore club in California: “I remember driving back by myself to Santa Barbara that night in my parent’s little Chevette, my head bleeding all over the seats” from the slam-dancing and being assaulted by police attempting to break up the show.52 In the introduction to the December 1980 issue of the foundational punk zine Flipside, the author bemoans a spate of conflicts caused by police who refused to let fans enjoy the show and leave peacefully. Instead, officers broke up the show mid-performance, only heightening the tension.53 In its January–February 1983 issue, punk zine MaximumRockNRoll (MRR), under the satirical headline “Stop the Presses! Late Bulletin! RIOT ON THE SUNSET STRIP!!!”, reported, “Hollywood police swept down on and tried to close yet another punk gig and hundreds of punks fought back.”54 In fanzine narratives of police confrontations, punks blamed police who did not understand their behavior and would not allow punks to police themselves. MRR argued that the show that ended in a riot was “orderly, by any standards, and that it was just another case of police harassment of punks in Southern California.”55 For punk media, this was the scene’s rallying cry. The crisis was not teen behavior but aggressive police harassment that it made it difficult to cultivate the scene.
Mainstream media saw the confrontations between punks and police differently. The New York Times rock critic John Rockwell promoted the hardcore scene as artistically valid but essentially violent. He described the viciousness of the scene as “sometimes diffused by parody, welcomed as cathartic, or explained away as outside agitation (i.e., visitors to Hollywood clubs from beach towns that most people think are part of L.A. in the first place). But at other times, the violence simply seems to define the hardcore scene.”56 Likewise, Stephen Braun, in a Los Angeles Times article titled “Battle over Punk Rock Club Reflects Rift in Values,” noted: “Confrontations have become weekend occurrences outside Cathay de Grande, a Chinese restaurant in Hollywood that gave up on subgum and fried rice three years ago, replacing its menu with punk rock shows four nights a week.”57 He continued, “Clubs featuring punk rock tend to have short life spans in the Los Angeles area. Most have closed under public and official pressure.” Ultimately, both hardcore zines and the mainstream press linked the scene to violence in public areas, thereby associating hardcore not just with violence but with confrontations with police. These associations not only connected teens with the potential for disruptive or even violent behavior, but would also buttress moves by police and mall owners to make it challenging for teens to congregate in public.
The hardcore scene’s violent reputation made it difficult to book shows at legitimate venues. Instead, fans moved the scene to more marginal suburban spaces, which eventually led to its erosion.58 Even the most popular and acclaimed bands, such as Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, had trouble booking shows at the few remaining legitimate punk rock clubs “due to radical rock shows’ notorious, if slightly exaggerated reputation for vandalism and encounters with the police.”59 Instead, according to Steven Blush, shows went down in “marginal sites in low rent ‘hoods’—usually a VFW hall, church basement, or dilapidated warehouse.”60 In moving to these sites, punks fomented hardcore as a suburban scene by moving further into the communities where many of its musicians and fans lived and where clashes with police were likely.
One of the most notorious nodes of hardcore was the Church, an abandoned house of worship in Hermosa Beach, California. Black Flag made this their rehearsal space and makeshift apartment, living alongside runaways and misfits who joined the hardcore scene.61 A writer in Flipside said of the Church, “You gotta head for the suburbs. The Church is the best place to see and feel punk rock, or else those one off gigs that we go all out to thrash the hall.”62 In The Decline of Western Civilization, the Church is shown to be a graffiti-covered basement with small closets that band members slept in. In that way, the Church was a typical hardcore space. It was cheap and small and was used by the scene for only a short time before someone expelled the punks. At the Church, the landlord evicted Black Flag and their compatriots for making too much noise. They moved to the Worm Hole, a space in Hermosa Beach where, eventually, the town council ran them out because of the large numbers of vagrants and runaways that congregated outside.63 Spaces like the Church and the Worm Hole became familiar haunts that exemplified and extended representations of hardcore punks as dangerous teens who were out of control in public spaces, representations that raised the ire of local police departments.
Beyond infamous spots like the Church, some evidence of other scene spaces can be found in hardcore zines and show flyers dating from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s.64 This evidence reveals that the hardcore scene occurred in varied and often fleeting locations because of its notoriety. Bands and fans put on shows at short-lived clubs as well as restaurants-cum–punk rock venues on the outskirts of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Regular sites included the Hong Kong Café and Mabuhay Gardens, the latter a Filipino restaurant that periodically opened and closed because of the disturbances caused by punks.65 Other flyers simply identify the location of a show with an address. A flyer for a show in 1979 identified the venue only as 5629 Hollister Avenue in Goleta, California. Currently the location of a car dealership on a busy street, in the 1980s it was probably the address of a small hall, apartment complex clubhouse, or even a vacant lot where punks put on a show. These documents suggest the hardcore scene’s transience, stemming from its reputation for violence and desire to avoid the police. That desire was nearly impossible to meet, however, for place-bound local teens dealing with suburban cops who often had little else to do but bust up punk gatherings. Ultimately, many punks got tired of police harassment and they quit or left, which ultimately minimized the presence of the hardcore scene in suburban spaces.
The story of hardcore punk in the suburbs symbolized the changing perception of teens in public space. Even though their style and music intentionally stood out from their suburban surroundings and often precipitated conflict, the policing of punks signaled a more general approach to teens and their misbehavior in public. Parents and police addressed these antisocial teens sporting mohawks, unusual piercings, and torn jeans as an easily identifiable manifestation of social disorder borne of the civil rights and cultural revolutions of the previous twenty years. Their attempts to bring order out of chaos and reverse cultural degradation by policing hardcore punks were part of a broader strategy to reform the suburban teen through spatial regulation that would safeguard public space and return vulnerable teens to the sanctuary of the home.
Through the 1980s, teens who were not hardcore punks or willing to abandon suburban living had fewer places to congregate in public space. Both licit spaces such as the recreation center and illicit ones like abandoned housing and appropriated venues were largely shut down by municipal authorities. And so the teens who stayed in their suburban locales were left with little choice but to frequent the suburban mall—the central and seemingly safest public space that welcomed everyone as a consumer.
Mecca for Teens
Developed and marketed in the postwar United States as the primary place for shopping, socializing, and participating in suburban public life, the shopping mall had by the late 1970s become the central space of a decentralized American landscape.66 Indeed, during the shopping center–building boom of the 1970s and ’80s, the mall became synonymous with American suburban life. During the boom, news media depicted the extended area of the newly ubiquitous shopping mall as the space that not only served shoppers but filled a particular void for suburban teens—a “mecca for teens” that was “more home than home.”67 The fourteen thousand new shopping centers constructed in the 1980s offered amusements and other services ranging from fast food and arcade games to movie multiplexes and record stores all seemingly tailored to teen interests at a moment when the number and capacity of other spaces and pursuits were limited.68 Other parts of the mall, like atriums and parking lots, offered venues for activities beyond shopping, such as drinking alcohol, making out, having sex, skateboarding, or even just congregating beyond the watchful eye of parents and teachers.
Still, the shopping center was not entirely unregulated, just less so than school or home, and so it seemed to represent a satisfying compromise for teens, parents, and police. Parents, in fact, understood the mall as safe compared to other public spaces. A mother from suburban Syracuse echoed this point in a 1988 newspaper interview, “Part of me says when you get a lot of kids together it’s not a healthy thing. The other part says they have to have someplace to go that’s not on the street corner. At least it’s well lit. I know she won’t get raped.”69 On its face, the mall of the 1980s seemed a safer public space for teens than a street corner, makeshift punk club, a construction site for new housing, or even a recreation center. Yet in emphasizing teenagers’ disruptive, transgressive, and even criminal conduct, the mall’s elaboration in the news media and popular culture associated the shopping center with danger not only for teenagers but because of them.
According to bygone notions in the media and popular culture, the suburb was simply a spatial articulation of traditional family values where public space was safe and the public teen was a good citizen vulnerable only to outside (read: urban) influences. Popular culture texts like the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High subverted such ideas by offering the mall as home to multiple transgressions presented as quotidian acts.70 The film presented scalping concert tickets as a legitimate enterprise for teens alongside customary mall work, like taking tickets for the Cineplex or waiting tables at the pizzeria; it thus reframed as imperiled and imperiling the American teen and the shopping mall going into a decade of massive growth for suburban shopping centers.
Most prevalent in the film are sex and sexuality as a naturally occurring part of mall space, even as the reason for some to visit or work in the mall. During her shift as a waitress at the pizza shop, Stacy (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) expresses her frustration over having to sling pizza slices in a space where her peers can’t see her. She glumly intones to her slightly older and more sexually experienced coworker Linda (Phoebe Cates), “You told me I would get a boyfriend working in the mall.” Later, Linda prods Stacy about losing her virginity: “What are you waiting for? You are fifteen already.” Soon after that conversation, an older customer at Perry’s asks Stacy out. Ron Johnson, a so-called “fox,” does not become her boyfriend. Instead, they go on one date, which ends up inside the dugout of a Little League field where twenty-six-year-old Ron deflowers fifteen-year-old Stacy. The scene is presented without a hint of judgment about this illegal tryst. Later in the film, Stacy has sex with a classmate, causing her to become pregnant and have an abortion—with no involvement from parents, teachers, or even the baby’s father. The film depicts all of these incidents matter-of-factly, suggesting not only the normalcy but also the inevitability of suburban teen sexuality given the opportunities afforded by the seemingly unregulated Ridgemont Shopping Center. The film, too, contributed to an emerging cultural logic that justified increased oversight and discipline of mall space to protect teens, in large part, from other teens.
Depictions in the news media also suggested the shopping center was both advantageous and dangerous for its teen patrons because it afforded freedom of movement and spaces for sexual activity, drinking, and drug use. Washington Post columnist Bob Levey wrote of the liminality of the shopping mall space in his 1981 article “Teens View Center as ‘Their’ Community.” The first half of the article promoted the safety, fun, and sense of community the mall provided for teens who had few other places to congregate. Levey quoted Steve Rader, age fifteen, as saying he would be at the mall day after day because “this is like a community of friends for me. This is where I feel comfortable.”71 Levey portrayed Rader as legitimately frequenting the mall: he worked there and spent money while hanging out with friends he already knew—all sanctioned activities.
But later in the article, Levey identified the “dark side” of the mall as a “teen mecca.” “According to Montgomery County, Maryland police,” Levey wrote, “the plaza’s Lot 19—a parking area along the northwestern edge of the shopping center—is notorious as a nighttime gathering place for young drinkers, or vandals, or both.”72 With many of the community’s teens at the mall, crime and rowdy behavior were also present. Levey then argued that without an increase in security personnel, the Montgomery Mall, and others like it, would continue to see fights and other disruptions of mall spaces. According to this logic, the presence of the “good” teen, like Steve Rader, alongside the drinking rabble-rousers in the parking lot would cause Steve to move from productive citizen to a dangerous presence—providing further demonstration that suburban families were failing at bringing up “normal” teens who could resist transgressive suburban subcultures.
The ubiquity of teens in malls gave rise to an effort by the news media to name the phenomenon; ultimately they settled on dubbing teen denizens of the shopping center “mallrats.” Although any teen at the mall could be assumed a mallrat, not every teen was, according to security guards and mallrats themselves. Rather, a mallrat was someone who, “thanks to two 20th century phenomena—the shopping center and the computer chip … may never again know the heat of summer. Instead, they may become what some Albany security guards call ‘mall rats,’ taking up seasonal residence in shopping malls, living on soda, ice cream and fast food and spending uncounted hours in air-conditioned arcades.”73 Mallrats were essentially teens who spent most of their free time in the mall with no particular agenda other than “hanging out” and playing arcade games. As the Washington Post described mallrats, “They shift from place to place, moving in small knots, unnoticed by the average shopper,” and “gather in the sorts of numbers that once collected at drive-in diners and drive-in theaters. And, though most of the kids tend to be well-behaved, they bring with them fights, thefts, noise and drugs.”74 The naming of the mallrat consolidated and made legible under a single moniker the image of disruptive patrons without an agenda, prone to misbehavior and disruptive to the mall’s economic and social order. This label thus suggested that teens were an invasive species taking advantage of their environment as parasites and would leave only by being forcibly removed. Still, teen misbehavior posed a dilemma for mall owners in that these customers were dangerous to the primary commercial purpose of the mall, yet also vital to that purpose as more of them flocked to malls as a refuge where they would inevitably spend money.
Pac-Man Fever and Arcade Addicts
One possible solution to the problem of unruly teens in shopping malls was to give them a place of their own in the mall where they could spend their money and would not disrupt the rest of the shopping center: the video game arcade. Mall owners and managers located arcades away from anchor stores or higher-end shops so as to sequester teens in a contained area of the mall. The video game arcade, then, was part of the broader promise of suburban shopping spaces to both protect and safely contain teenagers while allowing mall businesses to make money by providing the goods and services essential to the era’s middle-class suburban lifestyle. The checkered history of arcades, especially in shopping centers, however, tells a different story. The video game arcade of the 1980s moved from being a way to contain public teens to another home for teen misbehavior and further justification for mall owners, parents, teachers, and town officials to regulate or even ban the arcades. In turn, the increased policing of suburban public space not only facilitated the movement of video games and their players into the home, but also virtually erased the teen-oriented suburban arcade by the end of the 1990s.75
Starting in the mid-1970s, coin-operated electronic video games began to crop up in various public spaces, to the delight of teenagers and adults alike. Kids after school and businessmen on lunch breaks found standalone machines or small clusters of game cabinets in pizzerias, convenience stores, laundromats, and bars.76 As the industry matured and more games became available, aggregating the games in one space in the fashion of earlier urban pinball arcades provided a way to minimize costs and maximize profits by focusing on the increasingly popular games.77
In the suburbs, this meant the introduction of arcades into established retail spaces such as shopping malls, where teens were already gathering.78 However, mall owners and parents quickly realized that clustering teens in one space, while keeping them from disrupting other mall spaces, could also lead to security problems, which they had sought to curb.79 For this reason, shopping centers required arcade owners and operators to implement strict rules to safeguard arcade space.80 These rules aimed to stop “good” teens from becoming “bad” and to reform others by channeling their behavior toward consumption and away from corruption. Some of the rules, like prohibiting alcohol and gambling, were designed to stop the transgressive behavior associated with urban pool halls and pinball arcades, the antecedents of video game arcades.81 Other rules limiting eating, smoking, and loitering mirrored those aimed at curbing teen behavior in mall space more generally. Spaceport, a chain of shopping mall arcades, made these points clear in its employee-training video from 1981. The narrator emphasized that employees should use a polite but firm tone when enforcing the rules, particularly those concerning behavior within the arcade and lingering around its entrance lest they alienate a potential consumer. The video shows still photos of employees breaking up a group of young men hanging outside the arcade while a voiceover reminds them never to use physical force but to call security or police should the patrons resist.82 The video makes clear that teens are the arcade’s primary patrons as well as the most likely culprits in violating the rules, a paradox requiring a deft touch by employees in sorting good teens from bad. However, as one arcade operator hopefully noted, “There isn’t a single kid who leaves here with enough money to go out and buy dope”—articulating the logic of consumer-led cultural reform at the heart of mall and arcade security changes.83
An alternative to the mall arcade packed with teens was the family-friendly arcade popularized by Pizza Time Entertainment’s Chuck E. Cheese restaurant and arcade. The original, opened in San Jose, California, in 1977 by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, promoted its safe environs, wide variety of games, and cheap pizza. Businesses like Chuck E. Cheese, geared toward a wholesome experience, attempted to associate the arcade with families and safety and not unruly teenagers. However, for most of the 1980s, the mall arcade proved far more popular than its family-friendly counterpart because teens did not go there and parents could suffer only so many hours spent eating bad pizza and listening to the blaring sounds of video games and animatronic bands.84 By 1986, only a year after recording $150 million in sales, Chuck E. Cheese owner Bushnell filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as most of the industry suffered a lull.85 Still, thousands of standalone and mall arcades continued catering to teens through the mid-1980s after an initial growth spurt that saw sales of arcade video game machines grow from $50 million in 1978 to about $900 million in 1982.86 Arcade game releases peaked in 1989, only to fall nearly continuously until 2013 with the emergence of adult-oriented arcades and resurrection of Chuck E. Cheese–style outlets.87
In this respect, teen-oriented arcades, like shopping malls, were victims of their own success. In news articles, the question was not whether teens in arcades would be disruptive but rather how disruptive they would be given the large numbers of teen patrons, so-called “arcade addicts.” Local officials feared that “adequate supervision would not be provided and the place would become a hangout for teen-agers who would cause problems for police.”88 According to the news media, these officials were right. “In town after town, local officials are struggling to cope with a craze that has swept the country: Arcade videogames that gobble up the time and money of America’s teenagers.”89 A new arcade in the Plaza Camino Real shopping center in Carlsbad, California, dramatically increased complaints about teen behavior. Teen patrons began gathering near an adjacent bookstore, blocking its entrance, and also congregating at a bank of telephones, “inhibit[ing] their use by mall customers.” “A day does not go by,” the mall manager complained, “that customers do not call this office complaining of the arcade and its patrons.”90
Teen troubles went beyond disruptive behavior as the news and popular culture presented players as increasingly addicted to the games. Films such as the horror anthology Nightmares and the science fiction adventure The Last Starfighter portrayed video games as leading to trance-inducing addictions capable of disrupting otherwise normal lives.91 Most visibly, in April 1982, Time named “Pac-Man Fever” the most prominent hazard of the arcade, while the Washington Post asked whether “Pac-Man thumb [was] the anti-social disease of the ’80s.”92 These and other observers argued that the game was so fun and addictive that it struck players with an unbreakable fever for more, leading hopelessly devoted young fans to engage with all things Pac-Man to the detriment of homework and their social lives. Whether a dedication or a fever, playing the game made Pac-Man the most profitable and visible arcade game of the early 1980s. Time estimated the game and its associated properties generated $1 billion in fifteen months, rivaling the Star Wars film franchise in revenue and visibility.93 The game was even immortalized with a Saturday morning cartoon, a cereal, numerous spin-off games such as Ms. Pac-Man, and a hit single, “Pac-Man Fever,” written and performed by Buckner and Garcia that reached number 9 on the Billboard charts in 1982. Addiction to the game became a central concern of parents, teachers, and culture critics who argued that it compelled teen players to loiter at the arcade and paved the way to their dangerous behavior there. A parent from Centereach, Long Island, argued, “They mesmerize our children, they addict them and force them to mindlessly pour one quarter after another into the slots. We see 15-year-olds playing these games at 10:30 on school nights and during school hours. We want them out of our town.”94 The games were not simply popular but were an addiction that critics saw as a real danger to schoolwork and a healthy moral life, a threat that could best be addressed through stricter control of arcade space.
Despite the implementation of strict rules and attempts at rigid enforcement to maintain order among mallrats and arcade addicts, teens did continue to congregate, spend money, loiter, and cause trouble in malls and arcades. A manager of three malls in Wichita, Kansas, said, “There’ve been times when we’re sorry we have a game room. At other times, we’re pleased they have somewhere to go. Occasionally we have to use a little persuasion on them from the security police. We had to make an example out of two or three of the real troublemakers. The rest just come to enjoy themselves, and they do spend some money.”95 This fundamental paradox of the video game arcade in the shopping mall of the 1970s and ’80s exemplified the larger contemporary recoding of suburban public space. Even when teens were largely removed or distracted from other public spaces, including malls, they created security problems in these new, supposedly safe spaces. These troubles in turn created a new understanding of safe space that did not include teenagers or required new strategies for properly policing teens within it, and led to greater supervision of everyone who entered mall space.
Even lighthearted cinematic fare like Pinball Summer (1980) and Joysticks (1983) showed the arcade space as home to teenage debauchery.96 Part of an exploding exploitation genre that sought to attract a teenage audience, these films featured supposed fads—like video games or roller derby—liberal use of foul language, and depictions of sexuality focused mostly on female nudity, as seen most prominently in the Porky’s series. Although they were a small part of this kind of fare in the 1980s, arcade movies made explicit connections between video game arcades and transgressive suburban teen behavior already visible in arcades and the news. Comically amplified to appeal to their teen audiences, these movies suggested that the concerns of parents, mall operators, and town administrators were exaggerated. However, by trafficking in the standard motifs of 1980s exploitation movies while making light of the colorful media image of the video game arcade, they also elaborated on those narratives, preserving and promoting the arcade’s association with teen sex, substance abuse, and all-around bad behavior.
In Joysticks, teen customers and employees of Bailey’s arcade must defend themselves against concerned parents and business owners who object to patrons’ activities. The actual space of Bailey’s arcade is presented as capable of altering the behavior of its patrons and employees, turning all who enter into freewheeling bacchanalians. All of the characters—including skilled game players and ostensible heroes Jefferson and Eugene, nerd employee Jonathan Andrew McDorfus, and antisocial punk King Vidiot (a clear allusion to the hardcore scene)—enjoy sex, drugs, and alcohol as a result of their association with the arcade and one another. The arcade’s main critic, Joseph Rutter (Joe Don Baker), agitates for its closure by emphasizing the place’s lurid reputation. On entering Bailey’s arcade, he claims, “you are hit by a stench of filth that covers the premises.” Portraying himself as a concerned parent of a wholesome teen customer of the arcade, he declares that what happens there every day is a testament to moral decay in society. Exaggerating the concerns of real parents and conservative critics and politicians about family decline, Rutter argues that the arcade is a breeding ground for morally detrimental behavior.
Ultimately, the teens at Bailey’s don’t so much defend their behavior or the sanctity of the arcade space as deflect responsibility. Like justifications provided by mallrats about why they misbehave, the main characters rationalize their behavior. They claim they were forced to misbehave in the arcade. With no other outlet besides hanging out at the mall, the 7-Eleven convenience store, or the arcade, they plead that losing the arcade would further limit their options to congregate in suburban public space and actually lead to continued bad behavior. While the film was not intended as a realistic portrayal, its predominant images conformed to those imagined by the arcade’s critics and disseminated in the news media. In that formulation, arcades were teen hangouts that endangered “good” teens by putting them in proximity to “bad” ones. Despite the filmmakers’ attempts to present arcade hijinks in the film as essentially harmless, Joysticks echoed and enhanced visions of transgressive teens in public, further associating the arcade with poor teen behavior and facilitating movements to more closely police it.
Other texts made similar associations between poor behavior and the video game arcade, including allusions to the hardcore punk scene of greater Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Black Randy and the Metrosquad released their song “I Slept in an Arcade” in 1979.97 The song recounts the peripatetic lifestyle of a punk rocker who rubs elbows in Los Angeles with porn stars and fights with police but, ultimately, is homeless, finding a place to sleep only in an arcade. The song reinforced the association of the arcade with degenerate teens, in this case notorious hardcore punks like those in Black Flag and the Germs, while also suggesting that the arcade was a home for these disaffected teenagers. Similarly, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio anthology series Nightfall broadcast a story entitled “No Quarter” on March 4, 1983. “No Quarter” follows a story line similar to that in the film Nightmares, in which a teen listens to punk rock on his Walkman as he masters the games at his arcade and eventually gets addicted to them. When shown, then, the arcade was framed as home to addictive games and as socially dangerous. Taken together, these texts hardened the link between teenagers and their participation in seemingly dangerous subcultures in the central spaces of suburban life that called forth new security practices to address social problems.
Videomaniacs and the Public Interest
The seemingly addictive power of video games and the potential moral and social hazards of the arcade space inspired protests and regulatory responses from parents, teachers, town administrators, and mall owners. The immediate goal of each group was to prevent disruptive behavior in the spaces or close them down if they could not. Business owners and municipalities, for their part, created new policies and practices to focus teens on spending money, and parents and teachers sought to reform teen behavior through new regimes that would ideally bring teens back into the suburban home. Further, the suburbanites’ fear of and for teenagers in that era motivated them to increase surveillance and scrutiny of public spaces, which meant that spaces like the mall exhibited fewer of the hallmarks of civic public space, and furthered the local dominion produced through their Nimby protests and responses to criminal threats happening at the same moment.
Most states empowered municipalities to regulate businesses and impose zoning within their borders, including specific ordinances regarding coin-operated gaming establishments. In 1984, Bloomfield, New Jersey, for example, required arcades that sought to add more than twenty gaming machines to an arcade to employ professional security guards who had to be off-duty police officers.98 The town council passed the law in part to deal with crime in and around the arcade, including bicycle thefts and graffiti. While the latter part of the ordinance requiring off-duty police to work as security guards was struck down by the New Jersey Supreme Court, the court did find the requirement of security personnel was “a reasonable measure to protect the public interest,” including the safety of “video arcade patrons.” In this way, the court articulated the same regulatory logic as parents and mall owners in addressing teen behavior.99 In 1983, Vienna, Virginia, banned businesses from having more than three video game machines, because “parents are worried about kids wasting money, staying out of school and ‘hanging out’ around the popular machines.”100 Other cities, such as Palm Springs, California, had local ordinances that prevented establishments from having more than four video games to prevent the congregation of teen patrons.101 Similarly, San Gabriel, California, passed a moratorium on issuing arcade licenses pending investigation into the effects on “public health” of video game arcades.102 The lengths to which these municipalities went to police arcades and slow their growth demonstrated the power of two images in the suburban public consciousness: the out-of-control teen and the arcade addict as public menaces who needed close scrutiny on the suburban landscape lest they corrupt other teens and degrade public morals.
Other communities moved to ban arcades or limit access to patrons over seventeen in order to combat the risks associated with “videomaniacs.”103 Bradley, Illinois, prohibited children under age sixteen from playing video games in arcades located in shopping malls.104 White Plains, New York, banned arcades altogether in its Galleria Mall.105 Near Washington, D.C., critics speculated that “video game arcades located near residential neighborhoods might introduce undesirable elements into the community,” a clear allusion to keeping out black teens from the adjacent city.106 In Brookhaven, New York, experts found that “the problem is with the sleazy atmosphere that can develop around them [arcades], and the element of child exploitation”; while a Boston-area official explained, “The games have led to major complaints.… There are increases in crime, pedestrian traffic, noise, and disruptive conduct.”107 These strict laws showed the power of the video game arcade in raising the specter of the public teen as victim and victimizer. Operating under the premise that teens could be both, suburban towns used new regulations to discipline teens toward productive consumptive behavior or push them out of these public spaces and back into the safety of the home.
Protecting Shoppers Means Protecting Profits
Even against this backdrop of negative news reports and popular culture representations, bans proved an unwieldy and unproductive solution, particularly because they negatively impacted the profits of mall and arcade owners, themselves important political stakeholders in suburban communities. In lieu of all-out prohibition, these proprietors implemented private solutions to accommodate teens and their wallets while also protecting the space and reputation of the shopping center and arcade. And so the shopping center of the 1980s and ’90s experienced an overhaul in security tactics that included a move toward professionalization of personnel, introduction of technology such as closed-circuit television (CCTV) that increased scrutiny of all mall customers, and implementation of curfews for those under sixteen. These new policies increased surveillance of mall space for all patrons while helping push teens back into the home to play video games and hang out. In discouraging socializing among patrons, particularly teens, and housing business that may bring that demographic to the mall, these policies undermined the long-term viability of many shopping centers, especially as e-commerce arrived, despite the desire to protect shoppers and evict dangerous patrons.
The shopping center industry was concerned about disruptive teens primarily because of profits lost to the petty crimes they committed and the negative perception of malls that came with narratives of mall crime and disruption. In a November 1978 issue of Shopping Center World, a leading industry journal, mall owners identified shoplifting, loitering and drinking, and vandalism as their top three security concerns—all crimes predominantly associated with teenagers.108 Similarly, in his column from March 1979, mall security expert Dr. Harold Gluck alerted his readers to the supposed “plague … called shoplifting.”109 According to mall owners and security experts, teens posed a visible and disorderly presence in shopping centers that undermined the space’s profit motive—a motive that was superseding the purpose, envisioned by midcentury mall designers, of serving not only as a space of commerce but also as a civic space for sprawling suburban communities.110
Articles in Shopping Center World also emphasized “loss prevention” in addressing insurance liability, the costs of hiring and training staff, preventing theft, fire-proofing, and effectively lighting walkways and parking lots to avoid lawsuits.111 The journal’s security writers, including Dr. Harold Gluck and retired professional thief Mike McCaffrey, sought to combat the notion that the aimless, shoplifting teenager was the most dangerous threat to the bottom line while still addressing the highly visible threat of the disruptive teenager. Gluck emphasized that it was professional thieves who were more dangerous because they were looking to live off their booty, whereas the teen shoplifter stole for a cheap thrill or to get the latest fashion.112 In trying to convince shopping center executives of numerous, less visible but high-risk threats, Shopping Center World acknowledged the pervasiveness of the disruptive teen and loitering mallrat images among its audience of mall and store owners, and this reinforcement helped orient the evolving security policies of mall owners in the 1980s around teens.
With both the nuisance of mallrats and the threat of professional thieves in mind, mall owners and operators shifted their security tactics and strategies to providing a comprehensive response that would ideally handle both visible social problems and less visible but more costly threats simultaneously. The authors of Shopping Center World urged mall owners to make their security teams larger, more professionalized, and more technologically advanced. William R. Brown, in the article “Protecting Shoppers Means Protecting Profits,” emphasized the use of CCTV monitoring to prevent crime, provide evidence for prosecution, and to monitor the shopping center more effectively and efficiently for concerning, if not explicitly illegal, behavior.113 This was a new use of CCTV, as it had not begun as surveillance technology. Rather, cable television pioneers developed the technology to provide broadcast TV access to low-lying areas and urban apartment and hotel dwellers who could not receive a direct, over-the-air signal.114 Indeed, through the 1970s, CCTV was mostly an addendum to broadcast and cable television programming, such as sporting events shown in bars, or speeches and sermons put on screens for overflow crowds.115 In the 1974 edition of the Closed-Circuit Television Handbook, author Leon Wortman acknowledged the use of CCTV for security, among numerous other purposes. Yet he mentioned the security-related use of this technology only for policing the gates and other entry points for industrial manufacturing sites.116 He did not suggest or acknowledge commercial security use in shops or malls to regulate spaces open to the public.
Yet, by the end of the 1980s, shopping centers had adopted CCTV nearly universally as the technology got cheaper and more effective in recording images while making the policing of mall space more efficient.117 Although the efficacy of CCTV surveillance in stopping crime is difficult to assess, the presence of cameras, functional or not, suggested constant surveillance and encouraged patrons to discipline themselves lest they be caught on camera breaking mall rules or the law.118 While some courts have found CCTV surveillance tantamount to police officers moving in and watching the public, the use of the technology is actually quite different. It allows a small number of personnel to monitor the many spaces of the mall almost at the same time from a central location while also recording behavior for possible criminal prosecution or banning from the mall—making possible a much more comprehensive canvass of the space than a few police officers walking a beat could effect.119 Initiated in large part in response to disruptive teens, this advance changed the very nature of mall space as patrons came to understand that they were likely being watched. While this awareness might have enhanced a sense of safety for some, for many it discouraged free association and expression in the heavily policed, quasi-public space of the mall.120
Beyond new technologies like CCTV, the security writers for Shopping Center World stressed the importance of hiring well-trained, professional security workers in sufficient numbers to be visible throughout mall space, rather than the poorly trained and badly paid forces of the previous era.121 Seasoned thief—turned-columnist Mike McCaffrey pleaded for a new kind of security force by emphasizing the constant threat from thieves: “Remember, at all times, that your store is under surveillance by someone who knows how to steal, perhaps even someone who is a professional and [as] good at theft as I was.”122 The journal’s staff attempted to shift industry attitudes to favor practices and new tactics for regulating mall space to prevent both teen misbehavior and the costlier damage being done by professional criminals.
The popular security manual Principles of Security explained best practices in retail security, including private security education. It advises a multistep screening process for hiring guards, including a background check, honesty test, credit check, and psychological evaluation. Once hired, the authors recommend, staff to be licensed for weapon use should undergo a program including at least thirty hours of firearms training.123 Although the industry attempted to create a more professional and efficient security force, this goal was not always met in shopping centers in the 1980s. In 1988, U.S. News & World Report noted a spate of crimes committed by security guards, including theft, murder, rape, and kidnapping.124 Security experts warned that despite the move toward better training and background checks, “For $3.35 an hour, you’re not going to get a West Point cadet.”125
Ultimately, the shift in mall security continued to move the indoor shopping mall away from the original conception of a central space that not only housed stores but also served the community through public gatherings and cultural performances.126 With Larry Smith, visionary mall designer Victor Gruen had written in 1960 that proper mall planning “also brings into being community facilities, such as auditoriums and meeting rooms. This is done with the express intention of creating an environment which, if properly utilized, will establish the shopping center as the focal point for the life of a community or a number of communities.”127 Gruen and Smith continued that shopping center security would function as a “public relations” service, helping customers find parking and load their vehicles rather than preventing crime.128
Instead, the 1980s mall exhibited a privatist ethic in policing its seemingly open space by using professional, private security forces working at the behest of mall and store owners to “get tough on teenage rowdies” and to promote shopping rather than loitering.129 This step-up in mall security and the parallel rise in private neighborhood security helped private personnel to surpass public law enforcement officers in number during the 1980s.130 Security expert Anthony N. Potter wrote in 1983 of the change in shopping center security, “Today, the walls of my office are lined with bookcases containing over 1,200 volumes on private security, a knowledge explosion that is symbolic of the growth of the industry to the point where there are now two security officers for every law enforcement officer in the United States.” Revenues for private security firms increased 12 percent a year, and the total number of security guards rose 300 percent from 1969 to 1988.131 The Hallcrest Report II, a 1990 survey of private security, noted that at the end of the 1980s, “private security is more than twice the size of federal, state, and local law enforcement combined.”132 In a 1989 article in Shopping Center World, Robert Bond argued that shoppers were feeling safe again because of the revolution in shopping center security over the previous decade. While new security measures may have made customers feel safe and possibly protected the bottom line, they more closely policed suburban space, making more clear to patrons that mall space was not as free and open as government-owned and -regulated public spaces.133 Though intended to reduce the presence and activity of suburban teens in the mall and curb crime, these measures also had the effects of subjecting all mall patrons to increased scrutiny and encouraging rule adherence through panoptically induced self-discipline.
Despite the advances in mall security, the problem of the disruptive mall teen did not go away in the 1990s. The complaints from store and mall owners as well as shoppers about teen behavior at the mall remained largely the same as those about the 1980s mallrat—loitering, drinking, vandalism, and general disruption.134 Still, shopping center owners were in a quandary as they continued to court lucrative young consumers without eroding the image of the mall as safe for other customers. Before the full advent of online shopping in the twenty-first century, teens represented a huge share of consumer spending, preferred visiting the mall to shop, and spent upward of $100 billion there by 1996.135 Stuck between addressing continuing security issues and welcoming teens crucial to the bottom line, some shopping mall owners created curfews for teen patrons to augment larger numbers of better-trained security personnel. The curfews were designed, like earlier measures, to keep teens coming to the mall but focus them on shopping by requiring adult escorts on weekend nights. While not the first to institute a curfew, the Mall of America, then the nation’s largest shopping center, implemented a new rule to better regulate the approximately three thousand teens who visited the mall each weekend and to combat an image of the mall as “Fight City.”136 Maureen Busch, Mall of America’s associate general manager, argued, “They fight, use bad language and often intimidate and disrupt guests. The potential exists for even more serious incidents to occur. We have a responsibility to take action.”137
To meet this responsibility, the mall required anyone under sixteen to be accompanied by a parent or someone over twenty-one after 6 PM, Friday–Sunday, while also adding thirty people to its security force. In total, it employed 150 security officers who manned 140 closed circuit television cameras while providing 130 emergency call boxes for patrons.138 In addition to raising thorny questions about First Amendment rights to assemble in “public,” the policy was risky as this was “an extreme measure to control teenagers, who are also valued customers.”139 One teen remarked that she would not be caught dead with her parents at the mall.140 Others felt the curfew was an overreach that punished good kids because of the behaviors of a small number of teens.141 An editorial from USA Today chastised the mall owners: “The curfew, legal or not, is a poor solution that sends the wrong message to kids. After all, we’re talking about the Mall of America here. Not the Mall of Albania.”142 The Mall of America even went as far as to hire a group of “Mighty Moms” and later “Dedicated Dads” to help enforce mall policy and de-escalate conflicts.143
Implementation of the curfew at the Mall of America built on a growing trend of city and municipal curfews for teens. By the mid-1990s, hundreds of America’s biggest cities, including Minneapolis, had youth curfew laws targeting violence, drug trafficking, gang activity, and truancy; more than one thousand smaller jurisdictions had similar laws.144 However, those laws, and their shopping mall iterations, were criticized over unfair application of the rules, with the most prominent critique being that law enforcement and security personnel used the curfew to racially profile and disproportionately detain teenagers of color. As the new curfew was announced at the Mall of America, civil rights leaders criticized such action, while young black patrons expressed anger, feeling they were the target of the new rule and noting how they were already being followed once they entered individual mall stores.145 Gary Sudduth, president of the Minneapolis Urban League, remarked upon hearing of the possibility of a curfew, “Given the mall’s earlier attempt to restrict bus access to its site, we can only conclude that racism is playing a role here. It seems to us that the Mall of America believes that children of color will not have a parent—or a car—readily available for their visit to the mall. Therefore, they believe, the new policy requiring the presence of a parent will reduce the number of non-white young people in the mall in the early evening.”146 Skepticism of the curfew was well founded. In 1996, when the curfew rule was instituted, a New York Times article dubbed Minneapolis “Murderapolis” and noted that the city’s “idyllic image has been shattered by violence, with gang turf wars and drive-by shootings on streets where children play games of kick-the-can.”147 In that context, it was not hard to imagine mall security using the curfew to racially profile mall patrons more overtly in order to prevent the mall being associated with Minneapolis’s violent reputation. Further, the fear that the curfew would be a tool of racial profiling also came from the well-documented experiences of black shoppers and patrons who experienced discriminatory treatment in retail establishments, often through the implementation of race-neutral policies.148
Despite protests and fears of declining profits, the Mall of America continued with these new policies as the owners believed “security is marketing.”149 Almost immediately, the mall saw fewer fights between teens.150 At the same time, sales of teen apparel rose suggesting that the new policies focused teens who did go to the mall on shopping rather than carousing.151 A year later, a security official representing the ownership group reported to the International Council of Shopping Center’s security conference that traffic decreased one percent, but sales noticeably increased on both Friday and Saturday. She also noted, “In the nine months before the new policy, we had 391 arrests of people under 17 years of age on Fridays and Saturdays; since then we’ve had just one child arrested.”152 Mall spokesperson Teresa McFarland told the press, the policy was an unmitigated success.153 Store owners, too, were largely pleased. Benjamin King, owner of a jewelry store on the east side of the mall where teenagers usually congregated, said, “It’s been phenomenal for us.… Before, 30 or 40 kids would be outside the front door. Kids would be throwing each other up against the glass, rough-housing, name-calling, and getting loud.”154 Five years later, mall officials still called the policy a success. “There were literally thousands of unsupervised kids. Now it’s a completely different place, and the families are back.”155 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the megamall’s success at increasing profit and reducing disruption spurred a movement of other shopping centers to implement curfews to deal with disruptive teen patrons.156
By the end of the 1990s, shopping center owners continued to increase their policing of mall space and scrutiny of patrons in an effort to maintain the image of safety and therefore profitability. As with the privatization of neighborhood and home security, the intensified policing of quasi-public space like the Mall of America was done according to parochial concerns and had similar racial effects by reinstating segregationist practices through more covert and insidious methods to promote a secure, white consumerist space.157 For suburban teens, this meant returning to the presumed safety of the home; going to the mall to actually shop, often more frequently in the company of adults; or counting on mall security to not see them as a threat.158
Despite a resurgence in arcade revenues in the late 1980s, standalone and mall arcades mostly disappeared from the suburban landscape in the 1990s. The implementation of new regulatory practices in suburban public spaces coincided with the decline of the video arcade market and the upswing in the sales of home video game systems, helping to draw teens back into the home as mall and community forces were encouraging them to leave public space.159 For game players, their home system was technologically superior, and, for parents, morally preferable as they could better watch their children. The disappearance of arcades and the forced withdrawal of teens from suburban public space signaled the more explicit orientation of public space toward private interests.
The home arcade alleviated the social and moral dilemmas of the mall arcade by transferring the powers of oversight and regulation back to parents while allowing the arcade industry to reform itself. Many arcades became family-friendly and chose not to court a large teen audience.160 In 1989, an operator of a North Carolina mall said of the arcade in his shopping center, “The emphasis isn’t on teenage boys anymore. We have something for mom, we have something for dad, something for children. We have something for everyone.”161 These venues also benefited from the new shopping center security practices that helped make arcades safer. By the end of the 1980s, video arcades had “made a comeback in malls after having been dropped by many centers in the early 1980s because of the sometimes unruly behavior of teenage patrons.”162 Yet, just as many casual gaming venues such as bars and convenience stores had been replaced by the arcade in the late 1970s and early ’80s, the family-friendly arcade eclipsed the teen-friendly version, and that version has yet to return to the height of its popularity in the early 1980s.
Real teen behavior and its elaboration and exaggeration in news media and popular culture produced suburban public space as dangerous both to and because of teens. In these places, teens drank, smoked, gambled, had sex, and generally caused disturbances for citizens, police, and members of their own social group. The response to teenagers’ presence in suburban public spaces facilitated a new policing of public space that attempted to reform teens or exile them from those spaces and reintegrate them into the home. In doing so, this spatial regulation was part of a new era of privatized policing of public space in which private police forces outnumbered municipal, state, and federal law enforcement and subjected those who move through that space to increased scrutiny by private security.
At recreation centers designed for teenagers, actual incidents of violence and substance abuse, and their narrativization in news media and such films as Over the Edge, associated these spaces with transgressive behavior. This depiction helped bring about the closure or reorientation of recreation centers across the country in the 1980s. Similarly, though not associated with any single space, the suburban hardcore punk scene caused a parallel surge in the policing of public space. In their music and public performances, punks themselves produced their scene as violent and antisuburban. News stories enhanced this image with tales of aggressive dancing and antisocial behavior. Although director Penelope Spheeris sought to contextualize their behavior in The Decline of Western Civilization and Suburbia, her films largely reinforced the notion of the suburban hardcore punk scene as antisocial. These images enabled police and municipalities to regulate the scene out of suburbia. Continually harassed at live performances and pushed to sites on the margins of public life, many hardcore punks left the suburbs for more amenable spaces in major American cities where their scene would not be considered such an aberration.
The teen havens of the shopping mall and the arcade changed as well. Mallrats and arcade addicts’ transgressive behavior and its representations in the news media and popular culture marked them as dangerous and endangered figures. Municipalities and mall owners responded to these seemingly malevolent teens with new measures to protect “good” teens as well as other shoppers who were making legitimate use of mall space. Many towns passed restrictive ordinances regulating video game arcades, while mall owners professionalized their security forces and modernized their surveillance technology. As a result, the new regulations of space largely erased teens from suburban public life and also subverted the very notion of suburban public space itself.163 Ultimately, the responses to teenagers in public space normalized the stricter surveillance of that space. Together, these responses epitomized suburban values in valorizing private property rights and extragovernmental solutions to social dilemmas while showing little regard for public goods such as open, democratic space.164
Suburban parents, though occasionally troubled by the content of video games, were happy to welcome their children back into the home, where they could be guided in their popular culture choices and segregated from large groups of teens thought to be bad influences.165 Teens could play a vast array of games and avoid the possible hazards posed by other teens or police harassment in public space. This endorsement of parental guidance of teens at home was undergirded by the stricter policing of suburban public space, thus aligning the priorities of families and mall owners as to the regulation of public space. These actions complemented suburban desires for increasingly noncivic pursuits with regard to everything from endorsing school choice to Nimby resistance to trash incinerators and nuclear power plants.166
However, as many teens made the home their central space of recreation, it was not necessarily as safe as parents might have hoped. The following chapter explores how parents and culture critics came to see the popular culture products coming into the suburban home as undermining parental power and the sanctity of the home. This reaction helped bring about new regulations—of the home itself.