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The Glory Days of the American Mall

Sean Penn (right) and Robert Romanus in ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ (1982). Photo: Universal/Everett Collection By Rich Cohen April 29, 2023 12:01 am ET In 1982, the mall meant freedom. You were dropped off at noon and picked up at dusk. In the hours between, you were left to roam in the preferred fashion—in a teenage pack. Some started at The Sweet Factory, then spent the afternoon dipping a hand into the candy bag like a wino with a bottle. Some started at the food court with caramel corn or Orange Julius. We all made a point of stopping by the knife shop to examine the throwing stars and Bowies. “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” was our mall epic, as “Apocalypse Now” was the epic of the Vietnam War. It captured the mood, and, in doing so, told us where we were going and where we had been. If I think of this now

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The Glory Days of the American Mall

Sean Penn (right) and Robert Romanus in ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ (1982).

Photo: Universal/Everett Collection

By

Rich Cohen

In 1982, the mall meant freedom. You were dropped off at noon and picked up at dusk. In the hours between, you were left to roam in the preferred fashion—in a teenage pack. Some started at The Sweet Factory, then spent the afternoon dipping a hand into the candy bag like a wino with a bottle. Some started at the food court with caramel corn or Orange Julius. We all made a point of stopping by the knife shop to examine the throwing stars and Bowies.

“Fast Times at Ridgemont High” was our mall epic, as “Apocalypse Now” was the epic of the Vietnam War. It captured the mood, and, in doing so, told us where we were going and where we had been.

If I think of this now, it’s because we are living in the twilight of the shopping mall, which wasn’t just a concentration of planters, fountains, escalators and tundra-like parking lots, but a way of life. In the 1980s, there were around 2,500 malls in America. We’re down to 700 today. Forecasters expect there to be just 250 in a decade—killed by the internet, by recessions, by social media, Covid and computer games, by an accumulation of trends that’s made many of us, in our darkest hours, long for mullets and acid-washed jeans.

It’s not just the convenience we miss, but the lifestyle. More than just another million square feet of retail, Northbrook Court in suburban Chicago was the first place I experienced autonomy, freedom from parents, teachers, coaches. It’s the land of my second birth. As Otis Redding sings, “You don’t miss your water till it’s gone.”

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The modern mall grew alongside suburban car culture. For those of us relegated to towns in the outer ring, it offered the compactness of a city. It boomed in the plastic, air-conditioned, germ-free, world-striding America that appeared after World War II. Credit for its creation goes to Victor Gruen, an Austrian architect who fled the Nazis in 1938, meaning that the mall comes from the same Viennese hothouse as psychoanalysis (Freud) and the Incompleteness Theorem (Gödel).

Anyone can draw a blueprint. Gruen created a landscape. His 1956 design for the Southdale Center in Edina, Minn., was the kernel that popped into innumerable last-minute shopping sprees, Christmas Eve breakdowns and aimless adolescent afternoons. It seemed there were as many malls as school districts in America by 1985, which is why Malcolm Gladwell said Gruen “may have well been the most influential architect of the 20th century.”

The Shopping Center in Paramus, N.J., which opened in 1957, was the first to actually call itself a mall. (The term comes from the Italian pallamaglio, which describes a playing field.) Other early examples include the Harundale Mall in Glen Burnie, Md. (1958), the Big Town Mall in Mesquite, Texas (1959), and the Chris-Town Mall in Phoenix (1961).

When Northbrook Court—my Paris, Baghdad and Berlin—opened in 1976, it was anchored by seemingly immortal department stores: Lord & Taylor, Neiman Marcus (aka “Needless Mark-Up”), . The fact that all three, and other old department stores like Marshall Fields and I. Magnin, have stumbled or gone defunct is another factor in the demise of the mall.

The shopping mall was one of America’s last shared spaces.

Analysts date the dip to the 2007 recession, which delivered a blow from which the mall has never really recovered. It’s a demise measured in retail dollars and vacancies, but something ineffable was also lost. The shopping mall was one of America’s last shared spaces, a common where kids from different towns and backgrounds could mingle and size each other up. Its downfall means one less place for people to escape their screens.

For me, the sadness of the moment is crystallized in a phenomenon known as the dead mall, ghost mall or zombie mall, a once-bustling shopping center that’s been emptied or abandoned. The Carousel Mall in San Bernardino, Calif., the Jamestown Mall in Florissant, Mo., the Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio—retail ruins that have become a magnet for seekers of decay.

People visit these forlorn hulks as tourists visit the Colosseum in Rome. When they close their eyes, they can hear the last echo of a vanished culture—the slurp of Slurpees, the splash of pennies in the wishing well. Turning slowly, the concourse rising dimly above, they marvel at the scale and ambition of these antique people. It’s like “The Giving Tree”: having sacrificed everything else, the mall is content for us to enjoy its ruin.

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