BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids

The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism

Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities

Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes (with Jane Thompson)

Contents

Introduction: Why We Go to the Mall

Chapter 1: Every Day Will Be a Perfect Shopping Day

Chapter 2: The Garden

Chapter 3: The Mall and the Public

Chapter 4: Make Shopping Beside the Point

Chapter 5: Whose Mall Is It Anyway?

Chapter 6: Dawn of the Dead Mall

Chapter 7: The Postapocalyptic Mall

Conclusion: The Mall Abroad

Image Plates

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

A Note on the Author

Also Available from Alexandra Lange

They look as if they have been dropped by a helicopter flown by a blind pilot, from some giant architectural supermarket in the sky.

—ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE, SHLOCKTON GREETS YOU, NEW YORK TIMES, NOVEMBER 23, 1976

Introduction

Why We Go to the Mall

From the turnpike the American Dream was a great gray blob. An earlier version of this mall, then named Meadowlands Xanadu, had worn its tacky heart on its sleeve, its vast expanse a riot of blocks and stripes of color, the patterns dramatizing the precipitous angle of the indoor ski slope as it rose from the parking lot. But now the building reposed glumly on the roadside horizon, less distinct than the green sweep of the Meadowlands or the bowl of MetLife Stadium, home of the New York Giants. Only in one spot—the outward curve of the Nickelodeon roller coaster—did American Dream’s facade break its dourness, as if this ride alone could not be contained.

Inside, despite my multiyear study of the history of malls, I found myself lost. Atrium seemed to follow atrium, one with a chandelier, one with a vaulted wood ceiling, one with a plastic garden, without any sense of hierarchy or connection back to the outdoors. Long halls papered with photographs suggested that one day glamorous stores might follow, but the stores that were there—Zara, Bath & Body Works, Amazon 4-star—weren’t anything I needed to leave New York City to visit. Down in the lower level, near the minigolf and aquarium, signs of life: the scent of Auntie Anne’s, a pastel boba storefront, masked families on their travels to the ski slope, to the indoor beach, to the candy store. After more than a year of quarantine, largely confined to my Brooklyn neighborhood, I found myself touched and thrilled by their linked hands. In May 2021, when it seemed like the summer might bring an end to the Covid-19 pandemic, seeing parents and children out and about having fun together brought me a spike of joy. I wanted to see people, I wanted to watch people, I wanted to be among people. We were all seeking that at the mall.

But as I wandered, pretzel and bubble tea acquired, this joy dropped away. There were just not enough people. Fifteen years in the making, three million square feet in area—developed by the same Canadian company that brought indoor pirate ships to Alberta and indoor amusement parks to Minnesota—American Dream felt empty. Beyond that, it felt unmoored. Sure, that was partly due to the pandemic, which closed the mall months after its 2019 opening, bankrupted department stores once slated to be anchor tenants, and made people afraid to gather. But I also felt, at a cellular and architectural level, that this was a mall that had gone too far. Too far from highway to parking lot to atrium. Too far from food to fun to frivolous purchase. While there’s an amusement park at the literal heart of the Mall of America, giving visitors the collective thrill of the screamers on the roller coaster, American Dream had me venturing down a long, generic hallway to peer through the fronds of a stick-on palm-leaf decal to glimpse a Japanese-style artificial beach. At their best, malls create community through shared experience (Thrills! Tastes! Tunes!). Their architecture supports that purpose, starting with an ambitious and unmissable fountain that becomes the place to meet. If you asked me to meet you at American Dream, I would have no idea where to go.

The American dream—bootstraps, frontier, white picket fence—crossed paths with malls when they emerged in the decades after World War II, as the United States reinvented itself. In 1954, for the first time in American history, the number of children born crossed the four million mark, a level that would be sustained for each of the next ten years. The GI Bill of 1944 and federal highway acts approved in 1944 and 1956 subsidized the growth of the new residential suburbs to house these booming families, and the roads to reach them: more than a million new homes built per year, and more than forty-two thousand miles of highway. What most initial postwar development failed to incorporate, however, was the type of central—and centering—space that had been part of human civilization since its earliest origins. In subsidizing the home and the road, the government failed to subsidize a place to gather. Something essential to human nature had been missed: People love to be in public with other people. That momentary joy I felt seeing happy families is the core of the mall’s strength, and the essence of its ongoing utility. In postwar suburban America, the mall was the only structure designed to fill that need. People and money and controversy and larger and larger structures followed. So, in its turn, did the culture. The late twentieth-century United States doesn’t make sense without the mall.

American Dream, East Rutherford, New Jersey, Gensler, December 2019. (Photographs by Ross Mantle)

I knew going into this project that I, born in 1973, was part of the Mall Generation, raised on the smell of those pretzels, able to tune out the Muzak and find my car in a multilevel parking garage. As a design critic, as a child of the 1980s, and as a person devoted to the idea that architecture should serve everyone, the mall was my ideal subject. Like design for children, the subject of my last book, the mall was ubiquitous and underexamined and potentially a little bit embarrassing as the object of serious study. Shopping, like children, was a topic for after hours; and malls, like playgrounds, were places dominated by women and children. Go on Etsy and you’ll find numerous unironic bumper stickers that read A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE MALL. What I didn’t realize was that I had been on the ground for the inception of urban inventions like the festival marketplace at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, and that, even in my current Brooklyn neighborhood, I was shopping on a pedestrian street that was one of the city’s responses to the flight of white dollars to the suburbs. Once I started looking at shopping not as a distraction but as a shaper of cities, I saw its traces everywhere. While architecture history tended to focus on suburban houses, and planning history looked to the highways, the shopping mall fell into the cracks between the personal and the professional, as if we as a culture didn’t want to acknowledge that we needed a wardrobe, furniture, and tools for both.

When I began writing the proposal, I was still nervous, so I mentioned the idea of a book on malls to as many people as I could. Would they be excited? Would they be dismissive?

I was emboldened by the almost universal response: Oh, let me tell you about my mall. In contrast to many other forms of public architecture, which embody fear, power, and knowledge, the mall is personal. People told me about their first jobs, their first piercing, their first boyfriend, their first CD. I found I could sketch the plan of my first mall from memory, down to the placement of the RadioShack. When I emailed an archive for a picture of what was arguably America’s first shopping center, the librarian wrote back with the needed links and added, As a child of the 1990s, I’ve got many a fond memory of the mall, including the fad kiosks (pogs, especially). The core of the mall’s story was architecture, my chosen field, but the personal anecdotes pointed to all the other stories that needed to be told to paint the full picture: urbanism, practicing driving in a deserted lot; identity, collecting Pogs; maturity, going on those teenage dates. Here were hundreds of buildings, connected to everyday life and ordinary people, buildings (as I discovered) that design history had been sidelining for decades.

The less common response I got was also less satisfying. Oh, people said, you’re writing about dead malls.

Whereas once the mall appeared a seat of glamour, these respondents could only call to mind the deserted atriums of recent photography, video, and social media chatter. Online communities like Reddit’s r/deadmalls may allow legendary malls to live on virtually, but I was also concerned about malls’ next life in the real world. I did not want to write about death for the same reason that I would be happy never to go back to American Dream. Zombie malls—physically present but stripped of animation—evoke neither the consumer pleasure that their makers intended nor the creativity and community that online message boards overlaid upon the empty halls, the quiet fountains.

That’s where the predominant malls are dead narrative fails. Yes, technology and a pandemic boosted online shopping. And yes, we need to drive less and walk more. But in the rush to dance on the mall’s grave, we risk treating the mall as only a disposable consumer object and neglecting the basic human need that it answered. We also risk throwing away the ever more valuable resources of space, material, and familiarity built into the DNA of the mall. Both a defense of and a new life for the mall are possible, but only if we open our eyes to the many roles, and many changes, the mall has undergone through the decades.

Asked by clients in Los Angeles, Detroit, and then Minneapolis to create new paradigms for the emerging postwar landscape, the Viennese émigré architect Victor Gruen developed a template: collections of stores linked by communal space and organized for strolling. Park once and spend the day. Fountains, playgrounds and carousels, and cafés accommodated women and children who might otherwise be isolated at home. That’s where this book begins, in the 1950s, with the mall as a fill-in-the-blank addition to postwar suburban planning.

Subsequent chapters, each one covering roughly a decade, complicate that origin story. The 1960s bring architectural ambition, with the country’s best architects and landscape architects designing a building that can change with the fashions. The 1970s bring the mall back downtown, enlivening former industrial buildings and pedestrianizing streets in an attempt to revitalize the city. The 1980s bring roller coasters; the 1990s bring pop stars; the 2000s bring dead malls and faux Main Streets. Along the journey from J. L. Hudson at one end of the concourse to Neiman Marcus at the other, there are encounters with innovators like James Rouse and Jon Jerde, with bards like Joan Didion and Ray Bradbury, with social critics like Calvin Trillin and George Romero, and with mall walkers who simply want to get on with their mornings. Some encounters are less pleasant: Mall cops have targeted teens, local law enforcement has ejected protesters, and municipalities have turned roads into moats to make it difficult for bus riders to even reach the mall.

Themes emerge: The central importance of good eats, from low-cost Woolworth’s lunch counters to international food halls. The difference in experience at the mall for the Black youth and the white octogenarian, for the arcade dweller versus the middle-class mother. The ways landlords and tenants seek control through design, surveillance, and even housekeeping, and the ways skateboarders, protesters, and photographers hack the mall for their own ends. When I say mall, you see a place in time, one shopping trip, one amazing afternoon. But even in my lifetime, the mall has changed and changed again. It’s an architecture born to be malleable, and in that malleability lies its future.

My first mall was Northgate Mall in Durham, North Carolina. Northgate was nothing special—low and tan and boxy, with an L-shaped run from Sears, at the west end, to Thalhimers (then Hecht’s, then Hudson Belk, then a multiplex cinema), at the south. A dogleg, like the elongated crossbar of an F, jutted out from the center of the long side with a lineup of businesses best accessed from the parking lot: Kerr Drug, the dry cleaner, a beauty parlor. One of the first local lessons I learned when my family moved south was derived from weekly trips to Northgate and another shopping plaza: Kerr was pronounced car, just as the lion in the supermarket chain Food Lion was pronounced line. My northeastern mouth adapted, just as we all adapted to driving to Kroger for groceries, to Kerr Drug for medicines and toothbrushes, to Sears for clothes. In our previous life, groceries and toothpaste had been within walking distance; my parents even owned a woven-cane backpack large enough to hold several brown paper bags of food.

It was at Sears that I first began to put myself together. I drifted one back-to-school day in August from the girls’ section, just inside the glass doors from the parking lot, to the boys’ section beyond. Boys’ was smaller and darker, with no natural light, and all the clothes blue and brown and army green and plaid. I picked out a gray canvas jacket with a soft flannel lining—a jacket like one I would wear today, sold for a hundred-plus dollars as a chore coat slimmed and vented for a woman’s figure—and declared myself set for fall.

Past the shoe tables and the cosmetics counters lay the mall proper, a straight shot of beige quarry tile and track lighting, interrupted by a red-and-gold vintage-style carousel at the intersection of the main run and a short hallway leading outdoors. The McDonald’s at the corner was too small for the in-house playgrounds that many franchises added in the 1980s, so families with Happy Meals and shakes would spill out the doors to let their kids take a turn on the carousel’s leaping horses. In high school I babysat an obliging toddler, and a trip to Northgate for fries and a ride was a good way to break up a long weekend day. Ariel was tiny and blond; I was too. After a while I learned to interpret the hard looks we got in the line for a Happy Meal: People thought I was a teen mom.

Northgate was originally built in 1960 as an open-air strip serving the immediate Walltown neighborhood, a strip held down by that same Kerr Drug plus a Colonial Stores supermarket and a Roses five-and-dime. In the early 1970s, facing competition from newer enclosed malls, developers added a department store at each end, the Sears and the Thalhimers. In 1986, the year I became a teenager, it expanded again, adding another passage and a new building for Thalhimers. This was its peak moment of prosperity, with low-, middle-, and upper-middle-range department stores and passages filled out with national chains including RadioShack and Spencer Gifts. The organization known until 2021 as the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) has a handy chart of shopping center classifications based on square feet, typical anchor stores, and the size of their trade areas. Northgate began as a neighborhood center, its business built around the supermarket and a sales area of three to six miles; then it ascended to regional mall status, with a sales area of five to fifteen miles, thanks to those department stores and the enclosed line of boutiques.

During my years as a middle-schooler lurching toward personal style, and as a high school student lurching toward freedom, the mall gave me somewhere to go. Northgate may have been run-of-the-mill, but it was close, and it was clean, and it offered enough variety that there was always something or someone to look at. Other places I might have gone—the strip of independent storefronts along Ninth Street, or Durham’s own former-factory-to-retail conversion, Brightleaf Square—included the kinds of boutiques where young people are closely supervised, and the kinds of bakeries where you might run into a teacher from school. The mall provided the balm of anonymity.

By the time I was in my teens I stopped shopping at Sears and became more brand conscious. The first store I sought out was the Gap, then in full stacks-of-rainbow-sweaters flower. I remember the texture of its drawstring navy-blue plastic bags, soft and squishy around my purchases, and eventually collected one, two, three, four crewneck Shetland wool sweaters. Northgate wasn’t a nice enough mall to have its own Gap; I had to go to South Square, located off the divided highway between Durham and Chapel Hill. South Square had a barbell plan, with a department store at each end plus a bonus one off the central atrium. J. C. Penney served the lower-end shopper, Hudson Belk the high-end one. South Square offered a squeamish sort of freedom and some of the pretension of a super-regional mall: two levels, a fountain and greenery, a food court, a department store with an arched, elegant entry off the parking lot.

Photographer and filmmaker Michael Galinsky spent the summer of 1989 chronicling malls, applying the techniques of masters like Robert Frank and William Eggleston to what he saw as the new street. As a Chapel Hill native, he made sure to stop at the local mall¹—South Square—and his 2019 book The Decline of Mall Civilization includes photographs of days I might have been there, riding the escalators in the atrium.

South Square Mall, Durham, North Carolina, Summer 1989, from The Decline of Mall Civilization. (Photograph by Michael Galinsky)

South Square is where I got my ears pierced at a Piercing Pagoda kiosk. South Square is where my father mortified me by breaking into a tiny boogie in response to a snatch of real jazz that broke through the Muzak. South Square is where I skim-read the adventures of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, leaning against a Formica shelf, because my mother would never have let me buy books as trashy as the Sweet Valley High series. South Square is also where I bought my first miniskirt at the Limited when my freshman-year roommate made fun of the Sears-esque wardrobe I took to college. She thought I was hiding in those Gap sweaters, those rolled and tucked Levi’s 501 jeans, those flannel shirts. When Max takes Eleven on a shopping spree in the Netflix series Stranger Things, whose third season is set at the Starcourt Mall, I could relate. Like Eleven, I needed a makeover.

The mall that bore the brunt of my teen angst wasn’t even in Durham, but in Raleigh, the state capital, a city ringed by beltways so complex I’ve never untangled them. Crabtree Valley Mall was fancy, a super-regional mall that drew its customers from a twenty-five-mile radius and had brands seen nowhere else in the state. It had a Workbench, where I picked out my post-bunkbed spindle bed, elegant and timeless. It had the locally owned jewelry store, where my dad would sometimes buy my mom a gift of handmade jewelry, with hammered links and semiprecious stones. Most importantly, it had a children’s boutique that sold Esprit, the it brand for the teenager who didn’t want acid-washed anything.

You might think, surveying this mall ecosystem, that Northgate would have had the most precipitous decline. In the early 1990s, retail watchers began to say that the United States was overmalled. Rather than staking out new territory, mall developers simply built structures one ring of suburbs out from existing regional hubs. Shoppers attracted by new stores, and new architecture, would abandon the older option, mimicking the cycle of planned obsolescence seen in the products those stores sold. New malls cannibalized the old, but their carcasses proved less easy to dispose of than used cars, toasters, and fast fashion.

But in Durham it was South Square that went down first, closed in 2002 and demolished in 2004. Its anchor department stores had abandoned it for the Streets at Southpoint, a new mall built as a lifestyle center a few miles away. Lifestyle centers are designed² to look like pedestrianized city blocks, with shops opening outward, outdoor cafés, fountains, and trees, just like the urban interventions of the 1970s but with less pesky public-owned space. Southpoint’s high-end stores and distinctive materials made it the first worthy rival to Crabtree Valley’s high-end experience in decades, a sign that Durham and Chapel Hill had arrived as luxury markets and were worth the time of developers with big-city portfolios. Shoppers responded to the flattery with their feet; the new mall attracted a million visitors a year.

After South Square was demolished, and Southpoint came to dominate, Northgate shrank back but persisted. Storefronts for local entrepreneurs replaced national chains. The Friends of the Durham Library moved in near the Sears, opening a used-book emporium whose proceeds supported the library. As the department stores departed—Sears to bankruptcy, Macy’s to restructuring—their giant shopping spaces were filled in with entertainment: a ten-theater cineplex and, later, a franchise of the Sky Zone trampoline park.

Facing a future in which shopping is, perhaps, the least of their functions, malls will survive by adaptation to new cultural desires: as incubators for immigrant businesses, particularly food; as containers for active entertainments; and as the Main Streets for new mixed-use neighborhoods. As big blank boxes in the middle of big empty parking lots, their structures serve as a land trust for the twenty-first century, but that land needs to be redeveloped with more care for the environment than big boxes and blacktop provide. Current plans for Northgate include total demolition of the fifty-five-acre site, with the mall to be replaced by a mixed-use development with homes, offices, and shops. Residents of Walltown, the adjacent historically Black neighborhood, have fought with the developer for the inclusion of affordable housing, fearing displacement. In response, a representative of the developer wrote to the mayor that "asking private landowners³ to solve the City’s issues is a misdirected mission."

The late critic Michael Sorkin would have agreed with that Durham developer’s conclusion, if not the logic that got him there. Sorkin earnestly wished for the death of the mall. In the introduction to Variations on a Theme Park, he describes how Disneyland, developer James Rouse’s festival marketplaces, and the gentrification of historic city neighborhoods all partake in the same simulation of freedom:

The theme park presents⁴ its happy regulated vision of pleasure—all those artfully hoodwinking forms—as a substitute for the democratic public realm, and it does so appealingly by stripping public urbanity of its sting, of the presence of the poor, of crime, of dirt, of work. In the public spaces of the theme park or the shopping mall, speech itself is restricted: there are no demonstrations in Disneyland.

All of this is true: From their earliest days malls were built for profit on private, colonized land, with their own maintenance staffs, their own security forces, and their own trees and benches and fountains. The limits of their public nature were tested as early as 1968, in a Supreme Court case pitting unionized grocery store workers against the owners of Logan Valley Plaza. In his majority opinion, Justice Thurgood Marshall described⁵ the portico and parking lot of the Pennsylvania shopping center as the functional equivalents of the streets and sidewalks of a normal municipal business district and suggested that union protests today might be civil rights protests tomorrow. Malls restrict freedoms, from curfews, to codes of conduct, to standards for types of businesses, signage, and music. They are a compromised and often architecturally despised form, an ersatz version of a more ancient high street.

At American Dream I felt every bit of that compromise, from the generic marble of the floors, signifying luxury, to the Instagram influencers’ museum designed to give your visit an appropriately peppy backdrop (and the mall some free publicity). You can’t imagine a protest at American Dream, but you also wouldn’t want to protest there—it’s a no-place, connected to no community that I could recognize. In 2021 the American dream is too complex and diffused to be contained in a single gray shell.

At the same time, the mall has offered freedom. Freedom from a hot day in Texas. Freedom from a boring afternoon alone in the house. Freedom from the isolation of old age or disability. In its architecture are embedded affordances often unavailable in the public realm, like air-conditioning, all-day seating, inexpensive food, and frictionless automatic doors, escalators, and elevators. Private ownership is the price we pay for a bit of city that’s a little easier to take, one that can serve as an on-ramp to the real deal: the tension between the comforts of the mall and what we give up to experience them has been baked into the mall from its start. This ambiguity colors all the dialogue around it, from the way looks like a shopping mall is considered an architectural insult to the way mall rats are considered unproductive members of society. Glee over the dead mall fails to acknowledge the lack of alternatives, and the economic, demographic, and thematic transformations that the mall has already undergone. Could malls make one more shift? Could they embrace their public role without so much private resistance? The first step in answering these questions is to travel, step by step and mile by mile, the road the mall has already taken, from simple strip center to big gray box, from carousel to roller coaster, from afterthought to cultural icon.

Chapter 1

Every Day Will Be a Perfect Shopping Day

Victor Gruen could control many things, but he could not control the weather.

He had become an American citizen. He had become a licensed architect, first in California and later in twenty-five additional states. He had built a design team in Los Angeles capable of taking on the challenges of a city expanding to fit the automotive age. He had asked his wife and former design partner, Elsie Krummeck, for a divorce. He had installed his mistress, journalist Lazette van Houten, in an apartment of their own in Greenwich Village, and met a client deep-pocketed enough to make weekly transcontinental flights possible.

When interviewers asked the short, stocky, bow-tie-wearing architect where he found the focus to develop the often-fantastic designs for the boutiques, department stores, and shopping plazas that made his name, he responded, On planes. Several airlines had made him an admiral to mark his frequent-flier status. On a fall Saturday in 1948 he was doing just that—working on a plane—surrounded by his dictation machine, sketchbook, and notepad, when the flight from Los Angeles got rough. A storm accompanied by dense fog had closed all the airports along the East Coast, and his plane had to make an emergency landing in Detroit.

Gruen was not one for downtime. He had visited more American cities than most, hopping around the country with Krummeck as they plotted new stores for Grayson’s, an affordable Los Angeles–based chain that grew rapidly during wartime. But Detroit was not among them. Detroit retail was dominated by Hudson’s, a family-owned business, located downtown, said to be the second-largest store in the world. Gruen thought he’d make a pilgrimage.

"Before bedtime, I decided to wander¹ through the very center of the metropolis. The walk did not take much time," Gruen reported in his posthumously published memoir, Shopping Town. Everything seemed outdated, run-down, and lifeless. There was only one dramatic exception. Amid the stagnant desolation, the ten-story block-long J. L. Hudson department store, with its seemingly endless brightly lit windows, was like a bulwark . . . Every time I took a step away from the main street, I entered desolate slums, from which, smelling danger, I retreated quickly.

The next day, Gruen embarked on an eight-hour driving tour of the city, exploring everything around the center he found so desolate. His guide, the father of a colleague, told him that real life . . . happened exclusively in the suburban areas. These, too, left Gruen cold: palatial villas along the lakefront, a patchwork quilt of boxy houses on individual plots of lawn, empty living rooms visible through picture windows.

In passing, it seemed to me that through each of these windows I saw the same floor lamp with plastic shade, the same vase, the same flowers on the same table. This was what lay between the main roads. The margins of those main roads were also a patchwork: a garishly advertised parade of filling stations, hot dog stands, department stores, snack bars, liquor stores, supermarkets, chain stores, used-car lots, and funeral parlors, each in its own one-story structure, most served only by limited parking parallel to the road. In short, it was a mess—of traffic, of parking, of residents, of shoppers. At one time Detroit’s radial system of wide roads had been forward-thinking, but the streets had failed to keep up with the expansion of residential neighborhoods outside city limits and the movement of the automobile industry to the same. What had once been a compact city with leafy residential neighborhoods and a tight downtown core of art deco office towers, anchored by Hudson’s, had become sprawl. In the space between the picture window and the filling station, Gruen saw opportunity.

Sprawl was not news to Gruen. In the decade since Viktor Gruenbaum had immigrated to the United States from Vienna, fleeing Austria after it was annexed by Nazi-led Germany, he had continued to keep an eye on the future. Upon arriving in New York in 1938 he found a job designing corporate pavilions for the New York World’s Fair, opening in Queens the following year. In a run-down factory building in East Harlem, Gruen and two hundred other designers, most fellow European refugees, began to build a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot model of America in the year 1960—a vision sponsored by General Motors and