Jeff Keen

Check out this 1950s promotional video for Austin that I found. This is so dated, and so great.

@7:13 - Twin Oaks Shopping Center. Today, this place is one of those dime-a-dozen dumpy strip malls in the heart of South Austin.

One of the symbols of progressive community living, American style, is a shopping center. Clusters of attractive stores centrally located in a suburb are rapidly replacing highly congested downtown shopping areas. And we in Austin certainly boast the most modern of these new commercial developments in the Twin Oaks Shopping Center. Stores of all types fill every family need with a variety of reliable reasonable products.

Twin oaks is easy to get to. There’s plenty of parking space for all. All we, the customers, have to do is drive in and park and then take our time, browsing here and there, buying foodstuffs and clothing, taking advantage of services stores—the cleaners, the laundry, and the shoemaker.

The theory behind the shopping center—the idea which has made it an immediate success—is simple. People today do not have the time to do their day-to-day shopping downtown. Parking space is, as we all know, difficult to find. The shopping center, on the other hand, located within easy reach of our homes, offers speedy, comfortable service for all of our ordinary needs. We don’t have to fight our way through traffic.

And Twin Oaks in particular offers such comfort to its customers that once there shopping becomes a pleasure rather than a chore, and we find ourselves lingering in these beautifully designed stores, doing our buying the modern way. The Austin way. The Twin Oaks Shopping center way.

Constants in life: never enough parking, never enough time.

Check this out: my great grandparents’ wedding in 1904. Those mustaches! My great great grandfather (seated) looking so much like Daniel Day Lewis! The sheer and utter joy spilling out of their faces!

I did a little research on the lack of smiles in Victorian-era photos, and what I assumed originally was a result of having to stand perfectly still for a photo turns out to be incorrect. Instead, smiling in a photo back then was viewed in the same way as today’s duckface: totally unacceptable.

“A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.” - Mark Twain

A pretty fascinating slideshow of scenes from the mall in 1989.

I remember my local mall around that time, and parts looked a lot from these photos. What was different, though, is that instead of it feeling like this bizarre other-world as it does when looking at those photos, it felt like magic.