Where There’s Smoke

of the formerly mullet-topped American generation raised on Orange Julius and Hickory Farms free samples when I say that few things are as painfully nostalgic (or as hauntingly sad) as a shopping mall in the winter of its life. My people mourn every lost anchor store. We stand at the gaping maw of an abandoned L.S. Ayres with its barren display windows and ghosts of Clinique counters past—and we cry single, slow tears. So a place like Washington Square Mall, sprawled across 965,000 square feet of scuffed beige tile at the busy corner of East Washington Street and Mitthoeffer Road, feels like hallowed ground—even if its near-empty corridors, dressed-down