The architect Victor Gruen (née Viktor Grünbaum) was an Austrian Jewish émigré who fled the Nazis in 1938 upon arriving in the United States, he began designing eye-catching shops and other commercial projects in a European modernist style. The story of the mall, like so many quintessentially American things, begins with an immigrant. Is it any surprise that we want them to be so much more? Malls are not necessarily the communal spaces we would design for ourselves, but in a country short on alternatives, they’re the ones we’ve been given. They’re public, sort of, but also private, providing convenience at a price. They offer freedom-from parents, strict rules, the weather-even as they’re policed. “At their best, malls create community through shared experience,” Lange says at their worst, they’re temples to consumerism. It’s not an institution, officially speaking, but it is social, a rare type of place intended to encourage hanging out. “In contrast to many other forms of public architecture, which embody fear, power, and knowledge, the mall is personal,” Lange writes.
What makes malls the object of both longing and disdain? The civic purpose of the mall-unlike libraries, schools, and museums-has never been entirely clear. In contemporary “ruin porn” photography, the empty shells of malls represent the just deserts of late-stage capitalism.
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In the third season of the ’80s-nostalgic TV show Stranger Things, it’s simultaneously a place of teenage possibility and a Russian front for a sci-fi lab. In George Romero’s famous 1978 movie, Dawn of the Dead, the mall is a home for humans and zombies alike. They’re loaded symbols within our culture, inspiring feelings of allegiance or contempt. Malls are fixtures of our physical and psychic landscapes, embedded with social and personal histories. Shopping is part of our daily lives, as are the spaces where we do it. The mall is “ubiquitous and underexamined and potentially a little bit embarrassing,” the design critic Alexandra Lange notes in the introduction to her new book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. When people asked where I was from, I’d answer, “a soulless suburb of New York City with no culture but lots of malls.” By the time I moved away for college, I was over the world I left behind. Once I was old enough to go to malls on my own, I met up with friends at the two main ones in White Plains, the New York City suburb where I grew up: the Galleria, where I got my ears pierced at Claire’s, and the Westchester, a shiny new beacon whose upscale nature was reflected in the fact that it had carpeting. You could tell the story of many suburban childhoods through a progression of visits to such anodyne shopping centers.
There, my mom would peruse high-end stores that didn’t have locations in our hometown, while my dad would take us kids to buy cookies and eat them on the steps that formed the mall’s gathering spot. Fields cookie summons up a weekend in the early 1990s when my parents would pack me and my siblings into our Volvo station wagon and drive us half an hour over state lines to the mall in Stamford, Connecticut.
But getting a snack there was never about the quality of the food itself. Fields does not have the best cookies, especially in a city teeming with boutique bakeries. In the days before the pandemic, when I visited the Museum of Modern Art, I would stop at Mrs.
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