Fortress or pharmacy?

Fortress or pharmacy?

by Garrison Frost

In a police state, one of the first signs that things are going seriously wrong is when the government starts building fortresses in the heart of populated areas. The giant cement edifices can serve a number of purposes – prisons, police stations, military bases, arms storage – but in the end they all end up conveying a single message. This is the government telling you, in the language of architecture, that you have no chance against the iron will of the state. And every time another one of these buildings go up near a school, by a shopping center, on a major highway or near a tract of homes and apartment buildings, that message is made even clearer.

So, already aware that the big buildings had been going up all over Los Angeles and the South Bay for the last few years, I wondered what to think when construction started on one just a few blocks from my home. Was the government closing in? Was this a place to stockpile weapons for the civil war? Would troops stomp out the front door of this place and march in the streets? Was this a prison to house dissidents from my neighborhood?

Actually, it meant none of these things. It was just a new CVS drugstore going in.

Of course, I'm exaggerating my state of panic, but one has to admit that there is an oddly consistent aesthetic at play with the new chain drugstores, one that is nothing short of ... totalitarian. These don't look like buildings where one can buy toothpaste, greeting cards, batteries and birth control pills. No, they look like the kind of places where people are taken after men with dark masks break into their homes and drag them away.

Walgreen's, Savon, CVS and Rite Aid – different stores owned by different companies. And yet, the look is strikingly similar.

Nearly all of the new stores are built on spacious corner lots. While one might argue that this increases the store's visibility and accessibility, one could argue that the reverse is also true. This type of siting also makes it possible for people in the store to better monitor our approach.

The stores are usually set back behind vast parking lots. So big are the parking lots, in fact, that it's clear that sufficient parking isn't the goal. The lots are rarely even half full. Moreover, if you've been in these stores, you know that any more than a handful of customers at the registers is enough to completely overwhelm the staff. No, it doesn't look like parking is the purpose. No, one could argue that all the extra space around the store is really just to set up clear lines of fire. This kind of no man's land has been a standard feature of military forts and bases for hundreds of years. Really, it's really just one step below a moat.

Then there's the building itself. Again, the door is set in the corner to ensure the best lines of sight. But any military planner will tell you, the door is the fortress's weakest point. So in every one of these new drugstores, the corner of the building with the door is built up into a tower, usually with openings above the entrance. Sure, Rite Aid will tell you this is mere decoration, but you can easily imagine the extra bulk around the door coming in handy when the villagers rush forward, just as the openings above the entrance make it easy for employees to rain gunfire or pour hot oil on potential intruders.

Then there are the walls. In short, they're not like the walls of your house. If you've ever seen one of these things built, it's all I-beams and cinderblocks. The walls are thick, made to withstand almost anything. And although the stores rarely have any enclosed space above the ground floor, the walls are built high – very difficult to scale. If there are windows at all, they're placed very high. It would be almost impossible to reach those windows from the outside. Particularly if an employee was covering the area from that window.

Sure, it's entirely possible that that this is just a design trend, a way of communicating a certain kind of institutional reliability. But I'll tell you this, when the terrorists invade my neighborhood, I'm not running to the police station. I'm headed to the local CVS or Walgreen's, where my safety will be guaranteed. Hopefully they'll let me and my family in.

(Sept. 20, 2006)