MEET ME BY THE FOUNTAIN

A deeply researched history of the American shopping mall.

“The American dream—bootstraps, frontier, white picket fence—did not originally include malls,” writes architectural and design critic Lange, author of The Design of Childhood and other books. While the enclosed mall had forerunners in the shopping centers of an earlier era, the modern mall was a postwar innovation brought to the U.S. courtesy of an Austrian refugee who had models in the arcades of Renaissance Italy. Of course, the American dream embodied by the mall was not available to everyone. It was a thing of the suburbs and, as such, was racially divided, “born from speculation that a whites-only version of the city…would prove to be a better return on investment.” Later mall developers built in downtown urban areas, with race slowly giving way, at least in some places, to a distaste for the teenagers who flocked there simply to have someplace to go. As Lange writes, one solution was to build game arcades in distant corners away from the anchor department stores to which grown-ups were drawn. The author covers a great deal of ground, and while her narrative sometimes threatens to become a data dump, there are numerous fruitful avenues to explore—e.g., the role of Muzak in mall culture and beyond, the metamorphosis of the mall in different regions, the origins of “mall walking,” and the slow, tortured decline of the mall as numerous factors—not least of them the advent of online shopping—came into play. Lange concludes by examining the possibility that the mall might be reborn as something more than simply a shopping space by incorporating offices, hotels, and even educational centers. And yes, plenty of shops: “Shopping isn’t going anywhere, and it’s so much nicer to do it together.”

The mall is dead—but it may yet live again, as Lange’s instructive book capably shows.