An Open Letter To Northline (2023)
4400 North Fwy, Houston, TX 77022
by Farrah Fang
Part 3 of 3

They call you “Northline Commons” now, an attempted rebrand, but the infamy is forever embedded into the land you stand on. You will always be “Northline Mall” to my 90s soul. I have countless tales to share, some I can’t even recall, like the photoshoots I participated in as an infant or meeting one of the original Power Rangers. There are the moments I got caught stealing Pokémon cards from one of your stores, memories of playing air hockey in the Tilt arcade, and who can forget Magic Johnson Theatre?! I could write a novel dedicated solely to documenting the cinema seats’ slow decline from decent to piss-stained.

Upon further research, I found chisme about you that shook my core. Prior to your name change, the address of “4400 North Fwy” didn’t designate Northline Mall. While much of the information surrounding your past life is lost to time, I was able to locate the address “113 Northline Mall” which seemed to belong to the movie theater (1). Most archaic ads for the mall will place you simply at the intersection of I-45 and Crosstimbers, north of the 610 Loop. During your reign, you endured three separate collapses, the first occurring only three weeks after opening in 1963 (2). Maybe the land was rejecting your presence? You were meant to be one of Houston’s first “weather-controlled malls,” but heavy rain had you in disarray for your first and second collapse in 1989 when the roof area over the food court fell in (3). Then there was the 1997 incident when a twenty-foot wall collapsed and killed three people, injuring more (4). The collapse made national headlines, and my Mom even knew one of the victims. To me, the series of accidents were far from coincidental. Either you purposefully attempted to self-destruct, or the land really was cursed. Death and pain bled into the soil and that energy would still be felt long after your final demolition.

By the end of the 90s, you had peaked, and the quality of the mall began to swiftly decline. Evidence of crime placed you and Northsiders in further distress, ultimately leading to an eventual closing. In 2005, it was announced that you would be made over into an open-air shopping center and many Northsiders were eager for the change and new jobs (5). However, some were rightfully weary of what this would eventually entail for the rest of the neighborhood, populated by mostly low-income families. Your demolition would not arrive until 2007, finally ending your era as Northline Mall, leaving little documentation behind that you ever existed (6). Many Northsiders would have to go off the photos or items they collected over the years to remember you. Some only had their memories, as the land would be reconstructed into something completely different. By that time, many stores like Cici’s Pizza and Palais Royal had already been relocated and more were under construction. The Northline Mall parking lot and other sections were torn down, making way for the coming METRORail, the new community college building, and rumors of a Walmart (7). Your rebrand would mark a new era for the Northside, one that brought its own set of problems. 

I could not even remember the details of how you used to look. I recall the Pizza Hut outside of the mall, where currently the Burlington Coat Factory stands or maybe the NHEC high school. It is honestly too difficult to remember the specific dimensions of the old you. I do remember a different movie theater that preceded Magic Johnson, a post office and the grandiose sign that read “Northline Mall.” The decade and a half that had transpired since the end of that chapter birthed an entire generation of stories with your new face as Northline Commons. When I left for college in 2010 and returned the next summer, more development had transpired. By that time, the Walmart had opened and centered itself as the new hub for Northsiders, something the community had desired for years (8). In 2013, the METRORail finally completed its Red Line, ending right behind the Walmart and allowing more Houstonians to travel to the area (9). From a certain perspective, one would say your new makeover had immensely benefited the Northside. However, I always believed this new “Northline Commons” would follow the same infamy that plagued your time as Northline Mall. The land remained the same. The Northside was still the Northside.

My ear to the ground came from my Mom who worked at the Northline Walmart from 2012 to 2023. Her stories spanned over a decade and revealed the unfiltered truth to how the community operated. You, as Northline Commons, were now filled with different retailers, different workers who saw the best and worst that the Northside had to offer. Walmart, however, would act as the center of the land, experiencing the most foot traffic as it was one of the closest groceries stores in the Northside aside from Fiesta down the street. She was witness to daily incidents where customers were caught stealing or fighting employees and other customers. She saw them walk throughout the store naked, creating spills to fake accidental falls, hiding under vehicles in the parking lot, and taking baths in the restrooms. Every fall, she recorded the tops of all the buildings and the parking lot as it filled up with hundreds of migrating birds, reflecting the Hitchcock movie all too well. Every winter, she saw countless houseless folks finding ways to get police to arrest them so they would have a warm place to sleep for the night. My Mom was constantly berated by customers, privy to some of the most obscene moments she had ever seen in her lifetime. But despite all that, she became a familiar, dependable face to her community. In 2017, we lived in the apartments behind you, behind the Shoe Carnival, when Hurricane Harvey rampaged Houston. My Mom was one of very few employees who immediately went to work during the devastation and helped the Northside receive aid when many other stores were incapable of opening for weeks. In fact, because she had always lived close to the area, she was always at Walmart putting in the work for the Northside during every major weather disaster. The unfortunate part was that the customers and workers of all of Northline Commons rarely ever appreciated or thanked her for her commitment. The Northside was never known for kindness or gratitude, and her stories of your time as Northline Commons solidified that.

This is partly why I believed that you, as a revamped shopping center, were meant to disappoint. I avoid saying that you failed because truly, you reflected the neighborhood and the city of Houston all too well. Your history may have contained positive moments for some, but it was always full of deterioration. Add that to the Northside’s inability to escape the harm it perpetuated, and we have an area rife with toxic consumerism, unhinged behavior, and poverty-fueled sorrow. I lived in the Northside most of my life, and I knew its truth better than most. I worked at the Fiesta on Airline and I-45, the Ross at Northline Commons and even applied to work at Walmart but didn’t pass the drug test at the time. Every location involved terrible wages while serving some of the most inconsiderate customers the city could offer. They believed that they themselves employed you to work for them. Considering that you bagged their groceries, cleaned up after them, and held their hand through every shopping experience they garnered, they had a point. I dealt with all the classic Northside archetypes. I serviced the “Why don’t you speak Spanish?!” Latinos, the viejos who demanded I help carry the heaviest pieces of furniture to their cars, the boujee tías who threw fits if you didn’t return clothes they obviously wore, and even the machista foos that all left their home in a white tank and Nike slides.

In 2012, while walking home at night from Fiesta, cutting across you and your closed stores, I was almost robbed by a group of men who flashed a gun at me. I instantly laughed at them when they told me to hand over my phone and wallet, knowing my bank account was negative. At the time I thought “I’m not the one,” a defensive stance that the Northside streets had taught me very well. However, these were probably people who knew where I worked, had seen me daily and if they wanted to harm me, they could have. While working at Ross from 2014 to 2016, a different customer would try to fight me every single day. Some wanted to throw fists because my manager wouldn’t let me give them a large bag and others because I told them to get in the correct line. It would be people of all ages and genders, disrespecting me and expecting me to not only endure their harassment but remain subservient. In customer service, in the Northside, people didn’t typically care if you were just trying to make a living. They would take their aggression out on you the moment they felt like it. I knew this from the way my Mom was treated at Walmart, from my family’s experiences working in the Northside and from my own. There was smoke for everyone at Northline Commons and of course, being a Northside native myself, I never held back from a fight. The strain of dealing with that kind of aggression, all while being underpaid and undervalued by my jobs, led me to ultimately find work elsewhere, away from the Northside.

While I trusted that you never had a chance to be a prosperous center for the community, Northline Commons did not benefit from being the final stop of the METRORail Red Line. Houston always had a problem with evictions and taking proper care of its citizens. Over the years, the issue had only been exacerbated. With that in mind, the Red Line would be a center for solicitors, carless folks, and houseless individuals. It traveled from the NRG Stadium all the way to the Northside and funneled in all sorts of Houstonians that otherwise wouldn’t have been able to reach this neighborhood as easily. Homeless folks who wanted to stay out of the heat or had nothing else to do would travel back and forth, leaving a large quantity of them to wander your stores and parking lots. Their lack of care and housing contributed to many unfortunate incidents where they and other citizens were harmed. The amount of homeless individuals in the I-45 and Crosstimbers area would grow substantially after the completion of the Red Line. Now, while I too have been homeless throughout my life and my activism promotes better housing options for all Houston citizens, I knew very well how dangerous poverty could be. People who have nothing left to lose do not care who they hurt, intentionally or otherwise. I had my own encounters with houseless folks in the area, and I knew firsthand how the Northside only instigated the worst behavior from people.

One evening in 2016, my cousin parked in the lot behind you near HCC, with his girlfriend in the passenger seat. A man got off the Red Line and walked to this lot, saw my cousin, punched his car window, pulled him out, and began choking him. There was no provoking, no dialogue between the two. It was random, quick, and terrifying for my cousin. The man eventually stopped on his own and took off, leaving my cousin on the ground of the parking lot. Police would later inform us that the man was homeless, under the influence, and just released from the jail downtown earlier that day. My cousin survived but the incident scarred him, his girlfriend, and our entire family. Not every houseless person in the city was violent, but the conditions of being homeless in Houston and the nature of the Northside did not give them the best trajectory for success. The police had no intention of helping that man seek rehabilitation or housing and probably benefited from having all homeless citizens end up in the Northside instead of other areas of the city. While it may be hard for you to admit to yourself, Northline did in fact inspire violence.

There were positive aspects to the rail. Every Rodeo season, people parked near HCC and took the Red Line all the way to its opposite end. With more efficient access, more people were now able to commute to jobs across Houston, jobs they wouldn’t have been able to travel to without the METRORail. In fact, from 2015 to 2017 when I worked for UT Health, I would take the rail every day from the Northside to the Medical Center. It was a great improvement considering our city heavily relied on motor vehicles for transportation. However, by this point of my life, I knew that some good did not stop suffering from occurring. The rail carried all sorts of different Houstonians, and some happened to incite the same disturbing behavior. I was a witness to many fights, arrests, acts of public intoxication, and overdoses while riding the train. I had seen the same happen all over Northline Commons, just at a higher rate. I had done my best to avoid this physical violence while standing up for myself, but I was not immune to getting hurt.

One night on my way back home from work in the fall of 2017, a group of men followed me from the train to the side of Walmart and jumped me. They scouted my presence the moment I entered the rail, knew I would get off at the last stop at Northline, and waited until I was close to the Walmart parking lot. They beat me up as they screamed transphobic slurs. They burned my right hand with a cigar and left me in the parking lot bruised, bloody, and erratic. My Mom later found me on the ground of Northline Commons after she got off work. You were witness to it all, and I can’t even blame you for doing nothing. The police did nothing as well, not filing a report as my frantic behavior suggested to them that I was high, even though I wasn’t. From then on, I never took the METRORail by myself ever again. I quit my job at the Medical Center and became a recluse, unsure if I would see my attackers again around the area. This was a major turning point for me and my love of the Northside. You had betrayed me specifically, but the entire neighborhood made it known that despite being a native to the land, I was not welcome. I had always fought back when challenged, just like the Northside had taught me to. Unfortunately, as I’ve detailed in this open letter to you, you that calls yourself “Northline Commons,” harm runs deep into the landscape and will always be inescapable. Your infamy never really ended.

Hunter S. Thompson said that “Houston is a cruel, crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence” (10). While the quote is often misunderstood and much longer, it stands to be true from my experience living in this city. You, whether you were Northline Mall or Northline Commons, acted as a miniature city, vividly reflecting Houston and the Northside. The METRORail still is not properly guarded, only surveilled by METRO employees who will fine anyone riding for free. The negative aspects to its function persist today. Northline Commons, you are still vibrantly unsafe and cold, despite the city experiencing summer most of the year. The Northside is still populated by victims of poverty and people with total disregard for others. People predicted that altering you from a mall to an open-air shopping center would bring great change to the area, but I think it just brought out the worst in you and our people, or maybe it just allowed these energies to evolve. Your rebrand as Northline Commons had worked so hard to paint a gentrified depiction of the hood. But in that, you failed miserably. The hood never left the Northside, and all you did was allow it to have more ways to bleed. Your perimeters collected decades worth of trauma, from the days of Northline Mall to your more modern face. I write this letter not to challenge you to change as I am not that optimistic, but to vent and archive my knowledge. As I mentioned earlier, so much of your past is forgotten, and I do not want my experiences to suffer that same fate. The mall of my childhood will always be on the lighter side of my memories. Northline Commons, you will always haunt me. While the entire area of I-45 and Crosstimbers is now as infamous as you, I can’t imagine my 90s soul growing up and being shaped by any other neighborhood in Houston.