A darker side of business in Maryland is on display in The New York Timesthis week, with a Baltimore-based filmmaker and YouTuber serving as the narrative guide.

Steven Kurutz’s “An Ode to Shopping Malls” summarizes a trend many of today’s consumers are familiar with: the gradual demise of the enclosed shopping mall. The Baltimore suburbs offer prime examples. The story describes Dan Bell’s haunting video tours of the Owings Mills and Marley Station malls, places he visited or frequented in his adolescence during the boom of the American shopping paradise.

“They had loud pop music echoing through the mall, and I’m looking down this corridor, and there’s no people, no stores open,” Bell said of a visit to the now-demolished Owings Mills Mall. “It was really a sobering moment.”

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