About a decade ago I fell down the rabbit hole of instant photography. It was a hell of a time to do so; Polaroid’s film operations ceased a few years prior due to the corporation’s failure to stay relevant, and the successor company which bought the last film factory was still in its costly, open-experimentation phase of reverse-engineering the medium. No fun when at the time I was still reliant on retail slave wages. Expired film was, however, still cheap and obtainable — and if you were lucky sometimes a stack from a friend’s exiting entertainment biz fell into your lap.

Early in 2011 I got my mitts on a working SX-70 – an elegant leather and chrome-bound contraption housing some of Polaroid’s better optics and a maze of mirror trickery providing true SLR viewing, all of which collapses into something resembling a large novelty Zippo lighter and fits in a coat pocket. 1977’s Alpha 1 redesign – my find – perfected the camera by adding neckstrap lugs and a tripod socket. Ideal for where we’re going.

2011 is also when I was knee-deep in my Dixie Square Mall project. The mall opened in 1966 at the tail end of postwar prosperity, the prime of the civil rights movement, and immediately preceding deindustrialization and white flight in Harvey, Illinois. A lasting plague of violent crime and severe poverty in Harvey, and over-malling of the Chicago Southland doomed the 800,000 square-foot shopping center after a mere twelve(ish) years in business. By the mid 1970s the situation at Dixie was so volatile that it became the poster child for what is now known as a dead mall; and from that point on, corruption in Harvey largely ensured its purgatory.

Now in its third decade of abandonment since landing its place in cinematic infamy, the end was near for the decrepit carcass of the most famous and infamous consumerist monument-turned-icon of suburban blight. After several false starts, state and local governments were finalizing a plan to demolish the mall using surplus disaster relief funding.

The fascination with Dixie Square was popularized in the mid-aughts thanks to the 25th anniversary of its Blues Brothers appearance, a newsworthy shitshow attempt to redevelop the site spearheaded by John Deneen, and the efforts of a documentary team which unfortunately never came to finalization. Dixie Square, and what content was online at the time, was my introduction to urban exploration and hooked me into the dead mall phenomena, having been exposed to it by local relevance a short time prior. I began documenting the site in 2009, and soon the mall developed a collective of Dixie Square history buffs as social media grew more prevalent. This cult-like following helped to popularize the dead mall content seen today.

It was, in fact, another Dixie Square researcher who digitized years of newspaper archives, and found a flyer for the mall’s Watland Camera Shop advertising the SX-70 that inspired this Polaroid series. Also a desire to shoot with a period-correct camera. My SX-70 came with to the mall for both 2011 visits, this initial trip using 2009-expired 600 film which resulted in the desaturated colors and yellow cast. An ND4 filter was used to stop this film down to the SX-70’s native speed of about 100

Above is actually what remained of Watland’s Dixie Square location. Save for its labelscar-barren storefront, it was gutted to the bare walls in a 2006 partial-demolition that boiled down to little more than a publicity stunt. The foreground debris was shoved across the concourse from the demolition of Woolworth’s — itself destroyed in a 2004 arson attack.

The other side of the mall, toward its JCPenney anchor, was a little more recognizable. This schoolhouse mural is a remnant of Blues Brothers filming: a fake storefront set up to make the mall look open. Dixie’s promenades were empty and shuttered by November 1978, with the last accessible stores riding-out the winter into 1979. When Universal came to town that August, the mall had to be dressed up with storefronts, merchandise, signage, new cars in the parking lot borrowed from a local Buick dealer, and stunt actors filling-in as shoppers. The scene was so realistic that in the final cut, squads of the Harvey Police Department can be seen at entrances to the mall’s parking lot, keeping the public from mistakenly driving onto the set.

The damage left from filming of The Blues Brothers was never repaired, and upkeep at the mall deteriorated throughout the 1980s. By the end of the decade it had been broken into and pilfered of nearly anything worth stealing. Any surviving glass was smashed, and the outside walls were riddled with gang tags. A woman was murdered there in 1993. Arsonists tried several times to light the place up, but it became so waterlogged from openings in the ceiling – originally intended to let summer air into the mall – that the fires snuffed themselves. JCPenney bore the brunt of the water damage and suffered numerous floor collapses in its final years – the idled escalators were especially unsafe to walk on toward the end.

My tenth-total trip to Dixie, five months later, proved to be the final visit. It was a grey November morning, the day after Black Friday. My day off after a mildly-irritating daybreak shift for a certain red star store… I thought of this visit as a warped sort of therapy.

I brought the same camera but used some of the post-Polaroid film by The Impossible Project: black-frame, black & white. First shot of the service corridor behind the D-block of stores developed nicely in the shade. The second – of the former Hardy Shoes – got taken by the wind and exposed to sunlight, a no-no at the time due to a weak protective opacifier layer in the film (that wasn’t fixed until much later). It was the final shot I took inside the mall – within six months it was gone and the site remains vacant to this day.

As I re-scanned the photos for these musings, I looked at this last botched shot as an appropriate conclusion to this project: a dead mall, now a ghost mall.

The [jonrevProjects] are funded by reader tips and print sales. If you like what you’ve seen or learned, please consider becoming complicit in our crimes of knowledge and buying me a coffee! Or come see us in Waukegan during ArtWauk!