First jobs. First piercings. First boyfriends. How the mall shaped our lives – and why we get emotional about de-malling

In 2017, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota — the largest mall in the United States —announced a writer in residence. The 5.6 million-square-foot shopping centre encompasses, like the West Edmonton Mall and the Woodbine Centre in Etobicoke, a theme park and a Hard Rock Café, unlikely backdrops for a literary experience. Brian Sonia-Wallace, an L.A. poet, recalled the moment in a piece for the Guardian: “A quick Google search turned up reams of articles skewering the residency as nothing but a shameless publicity stunt for the biggest mall in North America,” he wrote, “deriding the idea that a writer would come and be inspired by a Nordstrom or its customers.” Undeterred, he sent in pictures of himself and his typewriter, along with a writing sample. He won.

By the second day he was running a tally of the number of people who, after reading the custom poems he dutifully produced for them, proceeded to cry, right there, in front of the Nordstrom. Like a first-season Santa, he was confronted with a trip to the mall that was also an emotional experience.

American architecture critic Alexandra Lange would not be surprised. Lange has spent her career writing about the ways design — from corporate campuses to children’s play areas — influences our most intimate selves. Doing the research for her new book, “Meet Me By the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall,” Lange had her own version of the Santa experience. “People told me about their first jobs, their first piercing, their first boyfriend, their first CD.” She also found herself musing on her own relationship with malls. “The mall was our practice city, training wheels for the real world.”

Is there anywhere quite like the mall? On a summer afternoon, the chill of the air conditioning makes your skin prickle, the food court offers four kinds of french fries (and sushi, burritos and dumplings). In its heyday, still captured in films like “Mall Cop” and TV shows like “Better Call Saul” and “Stranger Things,” it sometimes seemed everyone was there — from sticky-fingered toddlers at the candy kiosk to 80-something mall walkers doing laps and teenagers moving like schools of fish through a retail ocean.

Even before the pandemic years, a sense of unease haunted those gleaming promenades. It wasn’t only economic, although foot traffic was already falling in February 2020, according to a recent report by Deloitte. Across North America the dead mall seemed symbolic of a civilization in decline, its facade of tawdry consumerist delight visibly cracking at the seams. Luxury malls, though thriving, felt decadent, a little obscene. It is only apt, Lange points out, that in movies a mall is as likely to stand as the background for a zombie apocalypse as for the more mundane dramas of its teenage denizens.

It is easy to see the decline of the mall as a kind of victory. Victor Gruen, the architect who designed the first one (the Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, which opened in 1956) grew to hate his creations and their descendants. Malls have been blamed for the death of urban downtowns and a privatization of public spaces that can exclude everyone but the users (married, white, suburban women) and uses (buying things) they were designed for.

And yet, the mall turns out to be much more than a collection of shops with an unevenly enforced loitering policy. The history of the mall, as Lange tells it, is the history of the twentieth-century city itself. Even in its earliest form the mall offered more. Childcare, for one thing – like the nursery at Phoenix’s Park Central Shopping City that offered free babysitting with validation in the 1960s – and employment, too. Shopping helped open the doors of public life to women, many of whom still work at the mall. As of 2016, 60 per cent of Ontario retail employees identified as women, though the pandemic has likely affected numbers, and the industry is dogged by issues of gender pay equity.

Mall design learned to accommodate the rapid changes of retail fashion. Stores, after all, come and go (RIP Jacob, the Aritzia of my youth). Food courts replaced department-store restaurants, going global as mall owners looked for ways to add novelty. Arcades made way for multiplexes, and department stores gave way to other department stores, then big-box stores, or supermarkets, or satellite campuses for local colleges. A mall’s identity was never static. It could answer multiple needs, whether for morning mall walkers or local businesses. “My business is valuable to this community,” Huzanaitu Bangura, the owner of Fab Boutique at Jane Finch mall, a store that specializes in West African fashion, told the Star’s Donovan Vincent earlier this year. “Small as it is, it needs to be here.”

As cities and suburbs continue to search for land to develop, the mall, with its sprawling parking lots and, often, transit accessibility (think of Yorkdale’s dedicated 401 exit, TTC station and GO Bus terminal), has again become a site to imagine the city-yet-to-be. But the de-malling revolution, as Lange points out, is in many ways a return to early visions of what a mall could be: some of Gruen’s, never built, designs included post offices, libraries, restaurants and apartment blocks just beyond the parking lot.

It’s also a return to the pre-mall city. Neighbourhoods were levelled to build urban malls like Toronto’s Eaton Centre, and legal cases have tested the limits of what private malls owe the public. Black Lives Matter protests spilling into the Mall of America in December of 2014 were confronted with a large screen displaying the message, “THIS DEMONSTRATION IS NOT AUTHORIZED AND IS IN CLEAR VIOLATION OF MALL OF AMERICA POLICY”; 25 people were arrested. Lange also explores the moral panic that followed teenagers into (and tried to push them out of) malls as the focus shifted away from strictly shopping and towards entertainment.

All of this raises the question as to what, exactly, we want the future of malls to be. It’s one thing to turn a parking lot into housing and green space, reversing the old Joni Mitchell line about paving paradise. It is another to repeat mistakes, to take architectural cues from malls’ slick privatized sameness instead of their flexibility, their adaptability, their emphasis on pleasure.

In Toronto, we can see anxiety about this future in the responses to the 2020 demolition of the Galleria.

There was an outpouring of nostalgia and loss. “We come here to talk about life…food,” 75-year-old regular Sidonia da Silva told the Star in 2016. There are still 25 tips on its defunct FourSquare page. (“Perfect 70s s–hole,” one commenter said. “Hope they never renovate.”) As the shape of malls changes and their number declines, mall nostalgia proliferates online in wistful memorializations of theme restaurants and fern-forward decorating schemes. Critics who, like Lange, came of age in the peak mall years of the 1980s and 1990s see in this reminiscing a chance to discover what malls might still have to teach us about architecture and real human need — for fun, for a place to go together.

An emotional history of the mall is also a history of the fuzzy boundaries between commerce and community. We go to the mall to shop. We go to be seen. We go to work or play, in settings ripe for movie montages of self-discovery or zombie-fuelled mayhem. We know they’re not perfect, that consumerism and connection aren’t actually the same. Maybe that’s why so many authenticity-minded travel blogs seem to forget that when Ray Bradbury wrote, “To not know where we are, as adults, travelling, is a dream,” he was talking about getting lost at the mall.

The mall, of course, is far from dead. Mall development is exploding in China, Thailand and Saudi Arabia and malls in South America and the Philippines often respond to gaps in public infrastructure. These malls, fully integrated into cities undergoing massive growth, offer new models, new debates about public space.

What Lange’s research reveals is that the pitfalls of malls, and the real harms they can do to communities, are neither necessary nor inevitable. “Both a defense of and new life for the mall are possible,” Lange argues, “but only if we open our eyes to the many roles, and many changes, the mall has undergone through the decades.”

Ruth Jones is a Toronto-based writer and editor

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