In Search of Vital Nutrients at the Lloyd Center

Last week actually marked a bit of shift for me in recent Portland stay. Throughout the summer, I had concentrated mostly on the Metro area as a whole, going from suburb to suburb to get a feel for how they fit within the big PDX gestalt.

But when I ran out of my vitamin supplements last week, I found myself looking up the location of the nearest Vitamin Shoppe, which turned out to be in the Lloyd Center, which is Portland's grand old urban mall, built in 1960 and one of the largest shopping centers in the world at the time. It is located on the East side just across the bridge from downtown.

I eagerly embraced a reason to visit the mall for the first time. To be honest, I'm a bit of a mall tourist. In my youth I railed against them, as many people did who witnessed the destruction of old downtown districts in the 1970s and 80s.


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But that anger has long passed in me. For one thing, downtowns found a way of coming back. Moreover, I've made much greater peace with the functionality and even beauty of malls. This is made easier by the fact that it is now malls, rather than downtowns, which have been on the skids lately. The great era of indoor mall building is over.

That's also why over the last few years I've made a practice of going out of my way to visit certain well known malls. e.g. the Mall of America last summer in Minnesota.  Heck, back in the old days, I even wrote Wikipedia articles about malls (and successfully defended them against deletion).

So all of that made going to Lloyd Center a bit of a worthy pilgrimage to start a new phase of exploring inner Portland in more detail.

Wanting to soak in the urban experience of it, I eschewed the Freeway and instead drove down East Burnside all the way to 12th and went past Benson High School across the Banfield Freeway on the 12th Street bridge.

From there, one approaches the Lloyd Center on a winding boulevard, as one should. Parking was easy in the large garage on the south side of the mall.

The Vitamin Shoppe was thankfully on the other side of the mall, in a side building separated from the main mall by a small access drive. This gave me an excuse to give myself a tour of the mall on my way through it.

1991--the first woman ever to complete two triple axels in a single program

It is quite large and impressive. Recent remodeling has left it filled with bright sunlight over an expansive food court on the third floor. I bought lunch at a hamburger place there. The rest of the third floor is offices of various professionals and businesses. The stores on the second level had a healthy mix of shoppers. Lloyd Center is not a dead mall.

But you tell you're in an older part of the city---the department stores all have electronic anti-shoplifter gateways across their wide entrances. At the Barnes and Noble, the usual security is buttressed by a a grumpy faced security guard.

The fact that the Lloyd Center has a Barnes and Noble is a healthy sign. Dying malls don't support a Barnes and Noble. They support discount book outlets, if at all.

All this gave me a warm fuzzy glow, thinking that the skating rink on the first floor, where a certain infamous Olympic skater one took to the ice, will remain open for the forseeable future.

But that's Portland for you. It has defied the laws of urban decay gravity better than almost any other American metropolis over the years. I first noticed that during the late 1980s and early 1990s, during visits here, and learned the reasons for it from my local friends. But the ongoing fruits of that are still visible today. It's just that it's far more advanced, and more people are in on the secret.