The old food court at the Westgate Plaza still had a working soda machine last Tuesday

I was poking around the upper level near the shuttered Orange Julius, and the red light on a Coke Freestyle was just glowing, humming away like it was 2015. My buddy thinks it's creepy and part of the decay, but I felt it was a weirdly hopeful little glitch, a piece of the past still running on autopilot. Do you find these leftover functioning bits more unsettling or kind of comforting?

3 comments

3 Comments

sams2524d ago

Man, I read about this old power plant that ran on automatic for years after the town left. Just lights on in an empty building. Isn't that the same thing? A machine's job is to do its job, so maybe it's not creepy or hopeful, it just is. Makes you feel small, like the world keeps ticking after we've all moved on.

ray_foster671mo ago

Read an article once about places they call "liminal spaces," like empty malls or abandoned offices. That Coke machine humming along fits that feeling perfectly. It's not really creepy or hopeful, just a machine that nobody told to stop. Makes you wonder what else is still running out there, forgotten.

piper5581mo ago

Totally get that. I saw an old arcade game still lit up in a boarded-up pizza place last year. Same weird vibe, just doing its thing.