Teeming impermanent pizzasystems of pizza

Mama Lucia

Alfeo’s La Pizzeria

Mondawmin Mall

In the previous review, Pizza Club advanced a Strident Theory about the function of nostalgia in landscapes of pizza enjoyment. Feeling spiritually depleted by our own righteousness, we fled the slick post-historical nihilism of Remington’s curated foodcourt and went to the mall. Advocates of authentic urban lifestyles tend to deride the mall as a hollow simulacrum of town-square-plus-Parisian-arcade, and celebrate the death of so many suburban malls as sign of improved moral hygiene. Now that we’ve been to R-house, however, we feel that those who live in hollow simulacra should not cast stones. Moreover, Baltimore City is a contender for the birthplace of the modern mall, by way of an urban shopping center whose designer once claimed it was “built for the pedestrian, not the automobile.” Our collective pop culture memory of the mall and what it signifies doesn’t encompass its multiple conflicting lives, nor its possibilities. Here’s Rem Koolhaas admonishing us to “break out of the windless present of the postmodern back into real historical time, and a history made by human beings.” Let us do so on the wings of mall pizza.

The mall c. 1958

Same mall, new cladding

Opened in 1956, Baltimore’s Mondawmin Mall is among the earliest examples of the retail development formula that would define shopping for the rest of the 20th century: at anchor in a sea of parking, facing inward towards a burbling fountain and gestural town square, the American main street folded in on itself. It was enclosed and upgraded in the 60s with escalators, air conditioning, and palm trees to conjure that weightless, weather-less realm, the space station or biodome. Even in the pre-digital era, the mall anticipated virtual reality as a fantastical place of refuge when the earth and human bodies are no longer viable, but business must go on – a Cold War origin for today’s dematerialized worlds of online accumulation.

Retro malls may look charming in old photos; they also look a lot like space-age escape pods for white people fleeing to the suburbs. Mondawmin was a prototype for these pods, but also an exception to their logic: located amid historic rowhouses three miles from downtown, it served city residents with retail, a grocery store, a post office, and community meeting space. Aggressive blockbusting had already flipped the surrounding neighborhoods from white to black by the mid-1950s. "We expected to cater to colored patrons of the area when we built it," said mall manager Jerome McDermott in 1958. He spoke to a reporter from the Afro-American newspaper as activists picketed the aptly-named White Coffee Pot, the only Mondawmin tenant that refused to serve black customers. The Coffee Pot, hiding behind “company policy” in the midst of a thriving integrated shopping center, became a focal point for civil rights sit-ins until the city passed an ordinance banning segregated public accommodations in 1962.

The Baltimore Afro-American, Sept. 27, 1958

The Rouse Company, the mall’s master planners, grafted their modernist vision onto a town plagued by systemic racism and about to enter an economic freefall that no developer could remedy. Jim Rouse moved on to Cherry Hill, NJ and Columbia, Maryland, seeking a less history-encrusted canvas for his utopian aims. In northwest Baltimore, white and middle-class flight continued and competing malls opened in the suburbs, making an unspoken appeal to white shoppers' racist anxieties. After Sears migrated to Security Square Mall, the suburban frontier circa 1973, Mondawmin survived for decades without an anchor store. It received sporadic attention from various management companies, but mostly drew energy from its own local sphere, boosted by the construction of a Metro station in 1983 that made it a major transit hub. Today, occupancy is once again high – in addition to national brands, many tenants are small chains or independent businesses. With the decline of the Howard St., Pennsylvania Avenue, and Gay Street retail corridors, the mall is one of the most accessible places to buy stuff in the city. Also to get a slice of pizza, which Pizza Club does with some regularity.

Subjective data from our long-ago mall Pizza Club meeting is here combined with more recent memories and impressions. Pizza Club finds the pizzaspaces of Mondawmin to be inviting and robust, though we’d like to see more public seating. Mondawmin evolved out of the strip mall, whose restaurants run their own dining rooms, thus it lacks that signature of 1980s and 90s suburban malls, the food court. However, customers today purchase food from multiple different vendors, and vendors now sell from outward-facing counters or kiosks. Thus, food-court-style seating would be a welcome adaptation to the times. We get the sense that mall managers view this kind of hanging out as a security concern. However, we believe that the premise of the millennial food hall, which charges a hefty premium for the experience of sitting in a “communal” space that evokes customers’ childhood mall nostalgia, should apply in the actual mall as well.

Pizza outlets are among the few places in the mall where one can repose, and are utilized for this purpose throughout the day. On the second level, the well-established Mama Lucia presides over a space generously fitted with padded booths and the marble faux-finishing of a Renaissance palazzo. Their pizza descends from the same permutation of New York style that produced Sbarro's – that is to say, classic Mall Pizza – with exotic, topping-laden options that fortify a single enormous slice into a whole meal. The plain cheese pie, though, reveals impoverished building blocks: crust a bit soggy and floppy, not quite risen in the middle; “a lesser mozzarella”; salt permeating all. Deviating from the New York norm, Mama Lucia’s dough seems to utilize butter to obtain a rich pastry-like texture that further contributes to its stomach-filling qualities, and a general atmosphere of pizza opulence befitting the mall’s theater of consumer bounty. “It's making my stomach hurt," said Kate. We ordered a Sicilian slice, and regretted it, like one regrets “the nub of an eggplant parm sandwich after the eggplant is gone.”

Mama Lucia, plain and Sicilian

Downstairs, the newcomer Alfeo's La Pizzeria occupies a less ornate space, generically suited for any fast food operation, yet also cocooning the patron in cavernous depths away from the corridors of commerce. The contrasting pastel color scheme, fluorescent lights, and slatted benches cause the surfaces to oscillate in a hypnotizing manner. 

We found their crust to be crunchier, with a cracker-like bottom, and with a lighter more delicate crumb. Indeed, the tenderness of the crust, so unexpected in a realm of hard edges, was quite supurb. No misbegotten efforts at rustic leopard spots, just an even lightly-browned finish. The cheese was standard bodega blend; the parmesan shaker is there to be used. Pizza Club obtained cheese, sausage-pepperoni, and olive-and-green pepper slices. These toppings were not necessarily worth bothering with; the significance of Alfeo’s is that they have a good mastery of their oven, producing concentric rings of crust, sauce, and cheese, properly browned and bubbly, with slight border caramelization, and you can get this at the mall. The specialty pies, though not as baroque as Mama Lucia’s, offer meals of various genres (taco, cheesesteak, spaghetti) chopped up and heaped on a pizza. We note that both mall pizza parlors are amply-staffed to feed lunch crowds in a timely manner.

Alfeo's. Pictured: toppings

Decent by-the-slice pizza is rare in Baltimore, only possible in places like Mondawmin where the crossing paths of shoppers, commuters, workers, and local residents assure a continuous churn of fresh pies. The front counter of Alfeo's faces the mall's original centerpiece, a spiral staircase arcing down from the second level, suspended above a round tiled fountain. A 2004 renovation demolished the narrow floating catwalk that extended over the fountain from the base of the stairs, replacing it with a wedge-shaped platform draped over the water like a lopsided pizza slice. Though probably an abomination against modernist architecture, the new design makes the space appear inviting and communal. Yet the platform opens on to nothing – no tables and chairs to follow through on the welcoming gesture. People sit on the rim of the fountain, on top of the inscribed warnings, “Please do not sit.” 

The future is floating stairs

“The formless proliferates, the formal withers," observes Rem Koolhaas, mourning the obsolescence of the Rousian God-like planner, in whose absence fanciful cladding, spandrels, and space frames proliferate with no “rules, regulations, [or] recourse”. Pizza Club is inclined to say, “good riddance, give us the mutant, hybrid, ungovernable rhizome”; we’re not crying over spilt modernism at the mall. However, underpinning Koolhaas’s aesthetic complaint lie the “promiscuous and oppressive” imperatives of capitalism that run rampant without a benevolent planner to keep them in check -- imperatives which generate little enduring local value and leave a trail of waste and exploitation. Observe mall management trying to minimize the “risk” that the presence of human bodies entails, moving them through as quickly as possible while still capturing their dollars, dredging fleetingly-tossed pennies out of the fountain.

No the future is this wedge

The mall is a hybrid form, with contradictory values ascribed to it by communities, developers, and corporations. Many have suggested it as a model organism for Western-style capitalist democracy. “In the end," writes photographer Sze Tsung Leong,"there will be little else for us to do but shop,” suggesting that our pretenses of participatory self-governance inevitably crumble into the gravitational field of global capital.

Many Baltimoreans celebrate the longevity of Mondawmin Mall and its status as one of the most profitable malls in the country. We are proud to be good citizens of the urban market while suburban locations find themselves on deadmalls.com. Yet despite our exemplary patterns of consumption and generous taxpayer-funded corporate subsidies, we have no actual vote in the republic of shopping, nor do its rulers owe us any transparency. Target, the mall's anchor store since 2008, pulled out last year with no explanation, leaving residents who relied on the chain for essential household items to infer that its location in a black, low income neighborhood somehow outweighed its reliably high sales. At least the community could protest the White Coffee Pot's overt segregation in the 1950s; Target, unable to pick and choose its clientele, fled in the middle of the night.

Mondawmin’s ability to thrive with or without a major anchor will be a boon to the portfolio of Brookfield Property Partners, a global commercial management firm that purchased mall operator General Growth Properties in March. Perhaps the new management will anoint the abandoned Target, and the rest of the mallscape, with Koolhaas's litany of "re-'s": "restore, rearrange, reassemble, revamp, renovate, revise, recover, redesign,” return on investment. Perhaps they’ll want to “transcend” the mall’s association with the 2015 uprising, which began with police cordoning students in the parking lot as they tried to commute home from school. While creating a glossy simulacrum might be better for PR, such erasure isn’t possible here; people don’t forget. Mondawmin has an actual history, not as a sealed escape pod but as a permeable node in the city’s fabric, and that’s what has kept it alive.

If the mall is a space for the modest exercise of the only freedom that remains to us -- shopping -- at least it has good pizza. However, Pizza Club believes there are other things we can do in the end, to prevent the end or to hasten it, as your preferences dictate. Politics, conflict, and memory are antithetical to shopping, yet paradoxically built into the mall. In the case of the White Coffee Pot, Maryland’s supreme court ruled that the Mondawmin plaza was a free-speech zone where “property rights must give way to human and Constitutional rights,” and activists slowly worked through the existing system to end legal segregation. Alternately, there was that time someone rammed their truck into the side of the building and made off with an entire ATM. Pizza Club doesn’t want to debate you about whether robbing a bank is political, but we recall a recent subprime mortgage crisis when that bank scorched our neighborhood without facing any consequences. We hope someone handed the driver a slice of pizza as he peeled away.

Mama Lucia: ⅜ slices

Alfeo’s La Pizzeria: ⅝ slices

Mall architectural history courtesy of Jackson Gilman-Forlini

Photographs by Graham Coreil-Allen

While the pile of crust grows skyward

Molina Pizza (R-House, 301 W. 29th St., Baltimore MD)


The proposition that anything good will ever come of humanity is increasingly in doubt as far as Pizza Club can see. At a distant point in the past people constructed systems of morals, perhaps only as elaborate edifices for power and domination, and history is a long catastrophe in which we constantly fail to uphold these loophole-riddled doctrines except when they serve to oppress the weak and extort wealth. Speaking of elaborate edifices for power and domination, a few months ago (maybe up to a year ago, time is meaningless) Pizza Club visited the R-House in Remington.

The R-House is a carefully-curated reimagining of a mall foodcourt, set in a reclaimed auto body shop. In the late twentieth century, teenagers needed cars to get to the mall. The mall was a place where many people in the coveted Millennial demographic first experienced a consumerist simulacrum of an urban town square. The town square was a gathering-place where one engaged in shared discourse with friends and strangers under terms of mutual respect as part of a pluralistic social fabric. It’s also where deviants were executed by hanging, and witches burned at the stake.

We were prepared for the pizza at R-House to be very good. We understand that everything about the R-House is wholesome and responsibly-sourced, returning millennials to a comforting and functional dining format without denting their self-image as food connoisseurs.
 
Pizza Club worries a lot about nostalgia: is it a toxic feeling that keeps us from recognizing the truths of the past and the urgency of action in the present? It can keep us in thrall to a myth of the familiar, familiar as in familial, family, the magic circle of capitalist atomization dividing 'us' from 'them'. It's an interesting time for nostalgia, as city-dwelling Millennials begin having babies and moving (back) to the suburbs. Development projects targeted at this demographic are actively erasing the urban-suburban distinction by creating suburban shopping centers in the city and dense pseudo-urban tracts in the suburbs. This smooths over many aspects of city life that might be unattractive to former suburbanites used to a certain level of homogeneity and convenience, while lessening the friction of ultimately returning to a suburb – both settings offer basically identical condo-plus-retail-and-parking-garage complexes, a smog of familiarity that spreads across the landscape.

Pizza Club appreciates that a gathering space such as R-House is genuinely useful, flexible, and welcoming for many. Though its spirit animal is the “indebted freelance millennial coffee connoisseur on a bicycle who craves community and authenticity,” people from all over the city will use this space for their own purposes of hanging out, and that is great. It has an awesome area for kids to run free and play with giant padded blocks. It makes your life easier and probably helps the environment because you can stay in one place instead of driving around to various scattered small businesses. In 1952, real estate developer James Rouse had a similar idea for how to modernize urban consumption. It was called the Mondawmin Mall. In 1763, the city of Baltimore had a similar idea for gathering farmers and merchants together for better consumer access. They built public markets. Interestingly, these precursors sold things that you took home with you, in the case of public markets, providing fresh produce to most city residents; the millennial food hall sells a transient experience of food.

When it first opened, R-House suffered from a significant food-court oversight: amid expensive coffee, fried chicken, and ice cream, there was no expensive pizza. The Seawall Development Company and Urban Pastoral Collective, a “next generation, boutique Development Firm” that seems to curate the various R-House vendors, set out to fill the void this past summer by creating Molina.

Here we come to a sore point in the pizza discourse which R-House unintentionally jabbed with their release of a highly-produced promotional video offering a fictionalized backstory for Molina. The video features wind blowing through fields of wheat and basil in the Old Country as a lovely young woman tells her family’s story of living off the land and baking bread according to the Old Ways. Then American soldiers arrived for the Great War and the cheerful Italians served them irresistible focaccia. Our protagonist fell in love with a GI and came to the New World bearing the gift of pizza. Pizza Club is not questioning anyone’s personal family history, nor do we have any interest in policing the historical narrative about the origins of pizza in the United States. However, as an objective gloss of the Pizza Club community’s audience response, I will say that many found this video confusing.

A sophisticated consulting firm created a pizza counter to go in the food court they designed. That’s fine and makes perfect sense. Why play the authenticity game in this postmodern moment when everything is a hologram of a pastiche conjured out of the amnesiac miasma of the internet? Perhaps the name of the consulting firm, “Urban Pastoral”, suggests an answer – the backward-looking pastoral genre, melded with the millennial love of the urban and sustainability, has conjured this disjointed gesture of nostalgia for a distant past that screens a more immediate nostalgia for our own childhood malls, advertisements for Prego pasta sauce, and belonging, if only for an hour, to the Italian-immigrant family at Olive Garden, which always seemed a lot friendlier than my actual Italian immigrant family.

We must set this unfortunate video aside. We regret ever watching it and will now put it out of our minds.Think about the first vs. the second belltower scene in Vertigo. Think about anything else.

Given the high standards of the R-House, Pizza Club was ready to take its shrill Marxist critique/bitter class resentment and wad that critique/resentment into a tiny ball and cram that ball into an $8 waffle cone of premium Old Bay-flavored icecream and then shove that icecream into a planter full of succulents and walk away from it. We cleansed our souls of anger and opened our hearts to gracefully accept that food from food halls tastes good.

We’d already played out the script in our heads: people are correct to Uber here from Canton and wait in a 40-minute line for pizza because these rugged young men in flannel shirts are doing a brilliant job crafting a high-quality product that stands alongside other distinguished Baltimore pizza offerings while adding something new and intriguing to the mix.

Cheese pizza

However, this was not the case. Many Pizza Club members described their Molina experience as “uncanny” – as Ben put it, “too close to real, but not quite.” What we ate “didn’t read as pizza,” said Mark. The ingredients “don’t marry, it feels disconnected.” Small bits of toppings are lost on a vast, dry crust, which is rather like an under-dressed flatbread (about six years ago, in a smokey backroom, flatbreads were quietly re-named “Neapolitan pizza”?). The crust was leavened and cooked correctly, fluffy on top and crunchy on the bottom, Todd observed, but “the taste… I don’t know. It’s like pizza.” Conversely, Mark noted, “It’s not like pizza. This is so strange.”

“It feels very anonymous,” Stacie remarked. We got a couple of dry, plain-ish cheese pies, and one with numerous toppings, including superficial traces of pesto, red onions, and cauliflower, that Ben described as “dazzle camouflage on a battleship.” 

Dazzle camouflage pizza

The logistics of Molina had yet to be worked out at that early point. Most of our pies were cold because no one had called out our order while we sat ten feet away for half an hour. An attempt to sample their pizza more recently ended in failure because it was “half-price night”. We stood in a line, but the stall did not appear to be taking orders because they were frantically filling previous orders from people who reported that they’d been waiting for forty minutes. This level of demand suggests that Molina will have no problem selling pizza within a crowded food court, but may need to staff up if they intend to offer deals. In a final, cheap-ass attempt at critical objectivity, Pizza Club mooched half a slice off a friend a few weeks ago. Because Pizza Club was hungry and drunk, we did not obtain usable results from this sample. Therefore, we acknowledge that Molina may have made significant advances in its pizza-craft that we are unaware of.

In addition to the origin story recounted in their promotional video, Molina also claims the distinction of making the only “New Haven style” pizza in town. The layering of Old and New World identities is certainly something that Pizza Club can get behind, but we just want to know why. Is anyone from New Haven? Is that where the lady in the video began her new life in America? Members of Pizza Club familiar with the New Haven style describe it as charred and chewy, often including clams, but did not see a strong kinship with the pizza at Molina.

Molina promised to add to Baltimore’s pizza scene with a by-the-slice option, which is certainly lacking in the premium pizza market. Ben noted that “a slice of this pizza is the single cheapest food entree you can get at R-House.” This makes it an adaptive choice if you’ve been pressured to meet friends there, need food, but for whatever reason do not want to purchase a $14 sandwich. However, this type of pizza is ephemeral in nature; there’s a reason that Neapolitan places only serve pies fresh out of the oven. It doesn’t lend itself to re-heating, as the crust becomes brittle and the interior sponges up what little moisture was sitting on top. The New York slice, with its viscous cheese blanket, is infinitely more forgiving.

They have, as promised, obtained fine ingredients, including “legit” prosciutto, nice cheese, and fresh herbs. For sauce, they utilize what Ben terms “that weird spare acidic tomato situation,” associated with the idea of “freshness” but adding little flavor. These ingredients are used very sparingly, such that a basic cheese pie with basil featured two basil leaves, four dollops of cheese, and a lot of crust that nobody ate. Every pie had a lot of crust that nobody ate. We were buried in the accumulated crusts of half-remembered pseudo-histories.

Crusts of forgotten ancestors

Why do we care about pizza at this point? Would it be better not to perceive that anything is wrong, to accept the machinations of capitalism that determine our lives and choices and just feel good that we can technically pay for an $18 pizza which leaves us hungry? Why is it ok that the pleasure of spending money irresponsibly is the only pleasure that our society condones? Why are we blanketing the landscape with pastoralized monuments to a memory of the mall food court? Molina’s pizza tastes like the failure of nostalgia, the impossibility of returning to something “better” that wasn’t very good or that someone else imagined for us. We’re stranded in the present, there is no going back.

The almighty purse

This is just a story about a place filled with items which some people can buy and other people can’t, which some people enjoy and others do not enjoy. Obviously any commercial site could have a similar story. In the case of Molina, the material substrate of their pizza is really not worth putting into your body if you have alternatives. If you’ve already committed to spending time at R-House and you need a flat food made of bread, Molina’s pizza won’t hurt you. It may cause you to feel full yet hollow. Children in the play area may be stacking pizza crusts into fortresses, knocking over the fortresses, and building them again. You may briefly feel dizzy as the pile of debris before you grows skyward.
5.5/8 slices