The Rise of the Zombie Mall

Hundreds of big retail centers have gone under, but the

shop-til-you drop lifestyle isn’t dead yet
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rise-zombie-mall-180973086/

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purple-rain-180973083/

The Randall Park Mall in Ohio, photographed here in 2014, was opened in 1971 and
abandoned in 2009. Amazon has built a new distribution center on the site. (Johnny Joo)
By Stephie Grob Plante

Who wants to sit in that desolate-looking spot?” Frank Lloyd Wright carped of the
atrium inside the first enclosed shopping mall, the Southdale Center in Edina,
Minnesota.

But 75,000 people rushed there the day it opened in October 1956 and marveled at
the 72 stores on two floors, the 800,000 square feet of retail, the 5,200-space
parking lot, the 70-degree controlled climate. The Austrian-born architect Victor
Gruen, already acclaimed for building the nation’s largest open-air shopping center,
had birthed a new phase of American culture.

Fancy décor and a five-and-dime store: The Southdale Center dazzled and

bewildered visitors in 1956. (Getty Images)

Over the next 40 years, another 1,500 enclosed malls would dot the landscape, from
suburb to shining suburb, insinuating themselves into everyday life so profoundly
that just “going to the mall” became a pastime. Hundreds of malls, meanwhile, have
closed and been demolished or converted, overtaken by a renewed emphasis on
walkable neighborhoods and challenged by that overwhelming force of 21st-century
living: online shopping.

But rumors of the shopping mall’s death may be premature, if the mega-mall opening
this October is any indication. The $5 billion, three-million-square-foot American
Dream complex in northern New Jersey houses a theme park, a water park, a ski and
snowboard park, an ice rink, an aquarium, a movie theater and a Ferris wheel. Oh,
and stores. Hundreds of luxury and designer stores.

The original developer, Mills Corporation, conceived of the American Dream when
Amazon Prime didn’t even exist. The project has faced 16 years of trouble, including
a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Mills Corp. The company
reportedly paid $165 million plus interest to settle the case, and sold the project. A
second developer stopped construction when a major lender broke a financing deal.
The Triple Five Group—which built the Mall of America in Minnesota in 1992—
rescued the project in 2011, but continued to battle environmentalists, neighbors and
advocates of vigorous downtowns. Economists voiced skepticism. “I don’t know
which is worse—if it fails or if it succeeds,” Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey
Sierra Club, told New York Magazine in 2011. “If it fails, New Jersey is going to be
out of $350 million in taxpayer subsidies. And if it succeeds, it will be the worst
traffic, and it will destroy shopping areas in cities and malls all over the state.”

The future of enclosed malls is uncertain enough, and they’ve been around long
enough, that symptoms of nostalgia are cropping up more and more in the
mainstream. The latest season of the hit show “Stranger Things” features a neon-lit
1980s mall, enabling a new generation to see how teens at the height of the craze
hung out—under skylights, on elevators, around fountains full of pennies.
 Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio, was celebrated for its design when it opened

in 1975. It closed in 2008. (Johnny Joo)

“Don’t romanticize it,” warns Lizabeth Cohen, a Harvard professor of American

studies who has written about the rise of shopping malls. Developers built them in
white suburbs, far removed from cities and public transportation routes, fashioning
castles of commerce for the white middle class. The mallification of America
continued through the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s (19 malls opened in 1990 alone). But by the
turn of the millennium the Congress for the New Urbanism was worrying aloud
about “greyfields”—shuttered indoor malls that fell to an oversaturated market. In
2000, DeadMalls.com began memorializing the fallen.

The Great Recession of 2008 didn’t touch A-grade luxury centers, but it pulverized
other tiers of malls. Green Street Advisors, a California-based real estate research
firm, says the country’s 37 top-performing malls account for nearly 30 percent of
mall value nationwide.

Yet Americans still go to the mall, spending some $2.5 trillion in 2014, according to
the International Council of Shopping Centers. A 2018 study from the group—which
is, admittedly, paid to promote brick-and-mortar retail—found that three-quarters of
teens still prefer physical stores to shopping online. Certainly malls are changing, as
the nation does. Paco Underhill, a market researcher and founder of the consulting
company Envirosell, points to La Gran Plaza in Fort Worth, Texas, which slumped to
10 percent occupancy before reinventing itself as a Hispanic-themed mall, in a region
where 23 percent of the population speaks Spanish.

Underhill once called the early years of this century the “postmall world,” but he now
refers not to malls but to “alls,” extravagant facilities that offer almost everything.
Life in 2019 moves at the speed of a tap, immeasurably faster than our traffic-
beleaguered roads. Why travel among home, job and fun when you can move to a
mall and never leave?
 (Image: Randall L. Schieber; Source: Data on mall reuse from Ellen Dunham-

Jones)

The idea is not so different from Victor Gruen’s original vision of all-in-one shopping,
which was inspired partly by cozy European town squares. He might like the variety
of experiences available to visitors at the massive American Dream, but it’s safe to
say he would hate the parking lots, and the impact on downtowns. Gruen had wanted
malls to blend in with their surrounding communities; instead, oceans of asphalt
isolated them. “I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and
for all,” the so-called father of the mall said in 1978, two years before his death. “I
refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments.”