I BELONG to the last generation of mall rat. My experiences at the Lloyd Center Mall as a kid transcended commerce—it was where I had my first brushes with counterculture, whether it was the first CD I ever picked out that could tenuously be considered “punk” (Weezer’s The Green Album), or the first pair of skate shoes I bought (even though I never skated). The mall was a place where you met up, killed time, and talked shit.
Now it’s one of the only places I can go in Portland where I know I won’t run into anyone.
Directly to the south of Irvington is the Lloyd District, a commercial area in an aesthetic stasis. It’s home to central Portland’s most impressive strip of fast food restaurants. Despite the fact that the area borders one of the city’s most affluent residential neighborhoods, Lloyd institutions like Cadillac Café, Taste Tickler, and Helen Bernhard Bakery hark back to an era when Northeast was still uncool. The heart of the district is the Lloyd Center—the city’s oldest urban shopping mall. Though hardly a tourist destination, Lloyd Center is a uniquely inviolable local landmark to Portlanders who grew up in the inner city—and it’s currently going through some big changes.
Conceived in the early 1920s by oil magnate Ralph B. Lloyd as a self-contained community replete with housing, businesses, and a 24-story hotel, the Lloyd Center didn’t become a reality until 1960, seven years after Lloyd’s death. While the mall may not have lived up to Lloyd’s original vision, it was nonetheless considered a marvel of post-war ingenuity. Lloyd Center was referred to as a “consumer cornucopia” by Time magazine, and Oregonians touted the 100-store mall as the largest retail shopping center in the country at that time. The Lloyd has nearly 200 stores now.
In the summer of 2014, Lloyd Center announced it would be undergoing $50 million in renovations under new owners Cypress Equities—its largest overhaul since the shopping center was converted from an open-air mall to an enclosed space in 1989. Early 2015 saw the closures of Lloyd Center’s Regal-operated indoor movie theater and Nordstrom—its last remaining original department store—and on December 31, 2015, Billy Heartbeats, a ’50s-style diner and the mall’s only bona fide restaurant, announced it would be closing its doors, too.