How Well Do You Know the History of the Shopping Mall?

In recent history, the mall has become negatively associated with consumerism. and the advent of online shopping has signaled their demise. In the 1960s, three new malls opened on average every day in America, but shopping districts eventually became over-saturated. In a sign of the times, 2007 was the first year since 1956 in which no new malls were constructed. It’s estimated that hundreds of malls have closed over the past decade.

The idea of providing cover for shoppers was first seen in 18th-century Paris. The Passage du Caire (named after Cairo, Egypt) opened in 1798 with a fishbone-inspired glass roof to give shoppers shelter from the elements as they shopped the narrow arcade. The shopping center featuring mostly fashion wholesale is still open today.

The world’s first year-round indoor mall opened in 1955 in Luleå, Sweden. Architect Ralph Erskine had the idea to build an entirely enclosed mall, which, unlike the open-air malls already seen in America, could provide a pleasant shopping experience year-round when temperatures in Sweden dropped to -42 degrees Fahrenheit. Erskine’s development was called, quite simply, “Shopping,” and is still open to shoppers today.

Shopping malls were designed to pull retail commerce traffic to the suburbs, and this especially affected urban shopping areas. In response, architects began to focus on how to retain shoppers downtown, and Chicago’s Water Tower Place led the way. The mall was built across eight floors and flanked by a 74-story skyscraper to create a vertical shopping center packed with luxury retailers, perfect for densely packed urban architecture and its residents. The vertical shopping center is still a popular mall in the middle of downtown Chicago.

In 1890, Edgar’s department store owner James Edgar had a custom Santa suit made, and he started visiting with children in his Brockton, Massachusetts store. Before too long, children from all over New England were coming with their parents to tell Santa their Christmas wishes. This spectacular bit of holiday cheer and good marketing was adopted almost immediately by other department stores, and the shopping-mall Santa has remained a holiday fixture for more than 130 years.

Hollywood has made use of the sprawling interiors and architecturally impressive exteriors of Los Angeles area malls. “Fast Times at Ridgemont,” “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” all filmed at the Sherman Oaks Galleria (although the mall today has been so extensively remodeled it looks almost nothing like it did in the movies). While Cher Horowitz went to the mall to soothe her upset feelings in “Clueless,” it was filmed at another LA mall, the Westside Pavilion.

More than a century before shopping malls, department stores were major retail destinations. Samuel Lord and George Washington Taylor opened their first goods store in New York City in 1826, and it grew into a luxury department store chain with locations across the United States. The first female president of Lord & Taylor, Dorothy Shaver, took the helm in 1945 and introduced the concept of personal shoppers, and brought upscale fashions into suburban malls. Lord & Taylor went out of business in 2020.

Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen designed the first suburban open-air shopping mall in America near Detroit in 1954, and the first enclosed mall, the Southdale Center, in Edina, Minnesota,in 1956. Gruen wanted to counteract the dominance of the automobile by replicating the sociable spaces and the foot traffic of the open-air marketplaces in Europe.

In the 1980s, malls were not just about shopping. They were for grabbing an Orange Julius in the food court, hanging out in front of the fountain, and, just maybe, watching a performance by teen pop sensation Tiffany. In 1987, the “Tiffany Shopping Mall Tour” introduced the 15-year-old New Jersey native to her peers in the environment where she felt most comfortable — the mall. Some footage from the tour made it into the music video for her hit cover of “I Think We’re Alone Now.”

In 1982, the Minnesota Vikings moved out of the Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, leaving the large stadium vacant. Many proposals were put forward for business development on this 78-acre plot of prime real estate, but 10 years later, the Mall of America, opened with more than 330 stores employing over 10,000 people. It’s still recognized as the largest mall and entertainment complex in the United States.

Shopping malls became a huge part of American culture in the 1970s and ‘80s, and they often featured in another cultural phenomenon: horror movies. One of the most celebrated was George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” (1979), in which zombies rampaged through a mall, providing an excoriating critique of consumer culture. More recently, Netflix’s “Stranger Things” series has revived the horror mall trope.

The word “mall” originated in St. James’s Park in London, where the game Pall Mall (similar to croquet) was played since the 1670s. The word “mall” came to mean shady greenways in general, and by the 1950s, it was used to describe outdoor pedestrian shopping areas. When enclosed shopping centers were being designed a few years later, the name “mall” was borrowed. The slang “mall rat” was applied to the teens who hung out at the mall in the mid 1980s.