Photo of the Day: Fountain, Shops at Riverside, Hackensack NJ

One of the most vivid memories of my youth in Bergen County, NJ, was the recently opened Paramus Park Mall. It wasn’t just the food court—an innovative feature of malls in the 1970s—but its fountain.

I knew I wasn’t the only one fascinated by it—shoppers not only thronged around the waterfall and accompanying vegetation, but pitched pennies into it.

That feature would soon be copied in enclosed malls across the U.S. But as many of these retail emporiums have transformed into open-air structures or even non-retail uses and maintenance became more expensive, they became less common. (Though it remains enclosed, even Paramus Park removed its waterfall a couple of decades ago, evoking considerable nostalgic mourning among area residents.)

One place where you can still see a fountain, albeit in modified form, is The Shops at Riverside, a few miles south of Paramus Park. While walking through the mall’s corridors yesterday, I heard the familiar sound of my youth, and snapped this picture.

As I discovered, what I heard didn’t come from a waterfall but more like a whirlpool. Water is pumped through an open cavity, which comes back to a lower basin before falling down a sloping surface.

(See Colum Marsh’s July 2018 tribute in Canada’s National Post on why mall fountains represent “a community oasis,” with “the tonic quality of a city park: welcoming and restorative.”)