A Future for the Mall?

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Brian: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We live in a world where people shop online a lot and are social distancing. In a world like that, shopping malls have become an artefact of the past. Once vibrant places to shop, eat, and just hang out, malls, most people now agree, are dying. Many are already dead, some thrive. What can examining malls reveal about the economic and cultural life of our country? Is it possible that mall spaces might have bright futures maybe as other things? Joining me now is Alexandra Lange, an architecture critic and the author of a new book, Meet Me By The Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. Hi, Alexandra. Welcome back to WNYC.

Alexandra: Thanks for having me.

Brian: Just to put you in a little more context for our listeners, you've written about structure and design in a lot of interesting ways, including your 2018 book, The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids. Why sis you turn to malls?

Alexandra: Well, it was really closely related to my work on the design of childhood. The chapter that people really responded to in that book was about playgrounds. I started to think, "What's another piece of architecture that everyone has been to, but maybe they haven't thought about how it has this long design and economic history?"

Brian: Playgrounds? Now, that makes me think of the one time that I was in the big Mall of America, in Minnesota. One of the things that surprised me about it was that there was almost practically like a little amusement park in the middle of the mall.

Alexandra: Jon Jerde, the architect of the Mall of America, his big innovation in malls in the 80s was to, "make shopping beside the point." He was the one who decided, "What if we take away the fountain and put a mini Disney land in the middle of the mall?"

Brian: A mini Disney land in the middle of the mall. In the book's introduction, you say that you were nervous to write a whole book about malls, so you asked people about the idea to see how they would react. Would they be excited? Would they be dismissive? You found that people almost universally responded, "Oh, let me tell you about my mall." Talk about that concept of my mall.

Alexandra: As an architecture critic I have a really personal relationship to buildings, but a lot of people don't. Hearing all of those people say, "Let me tell you about my mall. I have a million stories," made me feel like people would respond to this book emotionally as well as intellectually. Almost everyone has a story from their childhood about buying their prom dress at the mall, going on their first date at the mall. These are the stories that are really fun to hear, and also really create deep memories and connections between places and people's lives.

Brian: People told you about their first jobs, their first piercing, their first boyfriend, their first CD all because you brought up the topic of malls. Do you have a mall you consider your mall?

Alexandra: Yes. My mall is South Square Mall in Durham, North Carolina, which is where I grew up. That was the mall where I went to The Gap in the '80s. I love The Gap in the '80s and also where I read books in the back of the B Dalton and that my parents didn't really want me reading.

Brian: Like what?

Alexandra: Well, it was Sweet Valley High. [chuckles] Not that racy.

Brian: I have a mall. I grew up in Queens, not near any shopping mall. My experience was more of the old fashioned one of the busy street, Belle Boulevard, the downtown of Bayside, and an outdoor shopping center nearby that I don't think that counts as a mall. The mall that I could call my mall was from my college years and after in Albany, the Colonie Center Mall, a mile or two from the SUNY campus where went. We would go there to buy music and jeans and stuff. Then later when my kids were little and living in Upper Manhattan, they didn't have a mall experience at all but we would go to the Adirondacks every summer and stop in Albany for a night.

One of the things was we would go to the Colonie Center Mall and do school shopping for clothes and supplies. We would go in August. It was so much cheaper than any place we could go in the city. It was such a kick for them going from the Big Box kids' section in Sears of all things and then to the sporting goods store and the game store, and the food court. It was like Disneyland for my Manhattan kids. Do you think a lot of families had experiences like that?

Alexandra: I definitely think that. I also have kids who are growing up in the city, and they find malls this weird alien experience, which only 5% of the population feels like that I think. There's something incredibly convenient about malls, especially if you're used to shopping in the city and having to go to different neighborhoods for different things. Being able to get everything done in one place was really part of the original rationale for them. The original audience for malls was generally mothers who were at home with their children, and they had shopping to do during the day. Going to the mall made it much more convenient. You could meet friends, have lunch, maybe your kids could ride the carousel.

What your kids were experiencing was really just a decades later version of that.

Brian: Listeners, you could call in on this segment as we start to get into more of the sociology of malls, malls as part of American culture, why malls are fading, and what kinds of future they might have. Call and talk about your mall, folks. 212-433-WNYC. Maybe you still regularly visit a mall or maybe you have mall memories from when you were a teenager. If so, call and share them with the class at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Maybe you didn't go to shop. Maybe the mall was a place to exercise. Anybody listening out there who would call yourself a mall walker, you know what that is, or to eat in the food court and see friends, just the place to be. Call and tell us your American shopping mall stories.

212-433-WNYC, 433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer for architecture critic Alexandra Lange, and her new book about malls in America called Meet Me By the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. Were they so new? Do I get from your book that there really was no such thing until after World War II?

Alexandra: That's correct. Victor Gruen, a Viennese emigre architect, is considered the father of the shopping mall. The first indoor shopping mall was built outside Minneapolis in 1956. It's called Southdale. It's still in existence, though not in its original form.

Brian: Maybe it's obvious, but why did they catch on?

Alexandra: Well, number one, air conditioning. Seems very relevant right now. They were really designed to provide a four-season shopping experience. They were also designed to provide a community space in the suburbs. Postwar, the government subsidized all the building of these new highways, and they subsidized, through mortgages, all of these new suburban single-family homes, but they didn't subsidize a place for people to go that wasn't their house or a car. Gruen saw that there was really a gap there and the mall was intended to fill that gap.

Brian: It's the privatization of public space?

Alexandra: Yes. Though, without the mall, there might have been no public space. I think I make it pretty clear in the book, there's definitely an ambivalence to the mall story, I believe in public space. I live in the city. In the absence of other options, I think the mall was really a great idea and gave people an outlet that they wouldn't otherwise have had.

Brian: Though we think of malls as a particularly suburban phenomenon, in your book you also write about malls in cities like Fulton Mall in Brooklyn, and even more recently, Hudson Yards in Manhattan. I'm not sure that I've been in a space there that would qualify as a mall. Maybe you want to talk about it? Have malls shaped suburban and urban communities differently?

Alexandra: Definitely. Fulton Mall is a great example of a phenomenon in the 1970s when a lot of downtowns in cities were really getting hollowed out, fewer people were living there, fewer people were shopping there. The downtown business owners got jealous of what the suburbs had and thought, "Maybe we can make a little section of downtown more like the mall." They made pedestrian streets, they got new signage and a lot of them hired their own security guards and cleaning people as well to make it fresh and new like the mall.

Hudson Yards, I write about towards the end of the book. I think Hudson Yards is a pretty bad example of the mall because it really lacks the central gathering space and even the food court that I think people really gravitate towards in malls.

Brian: Jesse on Staten Island. You're on WNYC. Hi Jesse.

Jesse: Hi. I grew up in Queens over by Elmhurst and my local mall was the Queens Central Mall. Now that I live on Staten Island there's the Staten Island Mall, of course.

Brian: Do you have a story?

Jesse: Well, I remember reading that the Queens Central Mall used to be the mall with the highest profitability per square foot before they expanded it. Just mostly remember going there with my parents and doing clothes shopping, and then hanging out at the food court. Nowadays I don't really go to the mall that much except Staten Mall all that much, except for Barnes and Noble over there and also the AMC movie theater.

Brian: Jesse, thank you very much. Jesse, when I was a kid I too was taken to the Queens Center Mall with my parents once in a while over there like in Rego Park off the long island expressway around there. Is that where you're talking about the same thing?

Jesse: Yes. Well, there's the three malls over there now. There's the Queen Central Mall, there's the Queens Place Mall which is where the old Macy's furniture store was and then they turned it into the Best Buy and the Target. Then there's Rego Park, Rego Center Mall.

Brian: I found it a terrible experience for me as a kid because the traffic was so intense getting into that mall. What we would have to do just to get to the mall. Whereas I think for people who really live in the suburbs, Alexandra, maybe you want to comment on this, it's a much more convenient experience.

Alexandra: Most malls were located at brand new highway interchanges. Part of their planning was to make it as easy as possible to pull off the highway and into the parking lot of the mall. Of course, the downside of that is you can't walk to the mall. They're absolutely impossible to walk to. Also, many of them were pretty inaccessible by public transportation which doesn't work as well when you're in a denser environment like Queens.

Brian: Jesse, thank you. Elizabeth in Bronxville has a mall story. Hi, Elizabeth. You're on WNYC.

Elizabeth: Hi. Thank you. When the mall opened in Madison, Wisconsin, my older sister went and came back and told me there were trees inside and fountains. I was like, "No way. That's impossible." Ultimately, we all worked at the mall and three of my siblings, there are four of us, all three of my siblings met their future spouses working at the mall.

Brian: [laughs] There you go. Do you write any mall love stories in your book, Alexandra?

Alexandra: I don't but that is a story I have heard from more than one person, just the ability of people to mix and meet new people at the mall. Maybe see a group of kids from a different high school, really allowed for a much more diverse social interaction in places that teenagers especially might not have had other opportunities to get together.

Brian: Chris in Manhattan has a Westchester Mall story. Chris, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Chris: Hi. How's it going? I grew up around White Plains. White Plains, they have maybe three separate malls. You have the Galleria, the Westchester, and the City Center in the middle. There was a class division between them as well. Some shopping at one mall and then walk down to the next and do some more shopping over there. I guess I'm curious what the system is when multiple malls are in one city and what the class implications are between those and that sort of thing.

Brian: You're breaking up, Chris, but that's a great question about class divisions between different malls, even right next to each other with that White Plains example. Are you familiar with that or that in general?

Alexandra: Well, I've been to the Westchester. I haven't been to the other White Plains malls and it's pretty unusual to have them in such close proximity but the idea of having basically multiple tiers of malls in a greater suburban area is definitely something that mall developers paid attention to in the heyday of mall building. What's interesting now is that, yes, there are a lot of malls dying but the ones that tend to be doing the best are the high-end malls like the Westchester. Malls that maybe have a Neiman Marcus or a Nordstrom as their anchor, because as department store chains have filed for bankruptcy, it's a lot of the middle-income and lower-income department stores that have gone out of business and they have dragged malls down with them.

Brian: I went to, I don't even know which one, but one of those malls in White Plains maybe 10 years ago and was shocked to discover after having driven there that they charged for parking. I thought part of the design, the business model of the mall, is parking is free. They just want people to come and then you'll start walking around and you'll buy stuff. I was going to one particular store looking for one particular kind of thing. I was like, "What? I have to pay just a park here?" Was that a development that happened in a lot of places as malls started fading in their economic viability or something?

Alexandra: No, that's actually pretty unusual because convenient free parking was definitely part of the come-on from the beginning and you can see it in all of the ads. I'm wondering if maybe because the area where those malls is in White Plains is a little bit denser if people were trying to take advantage of the free mall parking and not actually shopping at the mall.

Brian: Maybe. Daniel in Valley Stream, you're on WNYC. Hi, Daniel.

Daniel: Hello, Brian. Nice to talk to you. Love your show. You were talking about Colonie Center and that brought back a wonderful memory for me. I grew up in a small town called Wynantskill New York, which is about eight miles from Albany and Colonie Center was our mall. After the Mets won the world series in '69, they did a tour and they brought some of the players and coaches, and I met Yogi Berra there. I was nine years old and he knelt down and shook my hand and I just remember huge hands but he was a really sweet man.

Brian: I guess if you're a major league baseball catcher, you probably have huge hands. Did you get an autograph?

Daniel: No. I didn't even really know who they were at the time.

Brian: Right. There was no line charging for autographs, anything like that, as you recall, back in 1969?

Daniel: No, it was a little crowded but they were just circulating.

Brian: That economy changed after a while. That's a great story, meeting Yogi Berra at the Colonie Center Mall. Alexandria, you write in the book, ''Malls have been dying for the past 40 years and yet the majority of malls survive.'' What are they in many cases, shells of their former selves?

Alexandra: Well, it's about 30% of the current, let's say 1,200 indoor malls in the US that are predicted to die in the next five years. Yes, a lot of those are shells of their former selves but because malls have been dying, their death has been predicted for some time, we can already see some places where they're doing creative things with those shells. One of my favorite examples is in Austin, Texas where the Austin community college took over the former Highland Mall and built a new campus for their college there. The local public TV station also has a new studio in another one of the former department stores.

The buildings themselves are actually fairly easy to retrofit because they're these big steel and concrete boxes. I think as part of malls' rebirth, we need to start thinking of them as adaptive reuse sites and also think about doing more mixed-use zoning so people can live and work and shop in the same place.

Brian: Was it the rise of the internet that led to the decline of the shopping mall? Is it more or less that simple?

Alexandra: It isn't actually. Before the pandemic, internet shopping was only about 13% to 15% of retail sales. It's gone way higher during the pandemic but probably when people feel safe to shop in person again, it will go down again. I think really it was a combination of three factors. Internet sales, the demise of department stores, and also income inequality in this country. There used to be a much larger middle class that was shopping at the middle-range department stores like Macy's or Belk or others and many of those people saw a huge hit to their incomes. Now they're much like more likely to shop at Target or Walmart, which just wiped out the market for those middle range of department stores.

Brian: Although you write about an app called ShopNow that's revolutionized how people spend time at the mall. Tell us about that.

Alexandra: That's an app that allows you to search all the stores at the mall for what you're looking for. It's the idea is that you can take the searchability that you used to have to do on foot by going in and out of a bunch of stores, and look for the item in a bunch of places and comparison shop before you get to the mall. I have to say, personally that is not an app that I would want to use, but it's a demonstration of how retailers and mall owners are trying to think differently about how people might interface between the online and offline worlds.

Brian: Though it takes away the traditional fund of the mall of browsing from store-to-store. Roland in Washington, DC. You're on WNYC. Hi Roland.

Roland: Good morning, Brian. How are you doing? Great show.

Brian: Thank you.

Roland: I'm passionate about mall because I grew up in a mall. I grew up in a neighborhood in Baltimore where we were the first Black couple to move into a formally all Jewish middle class neighborhood. My first job as a 5-year-old was a [unintelligible 00:20:54] and the Rouse Development Company built I think the country's first climate controlled mall about half a mile from my house. It was called Mondawmin. What Mondawmin did was, when I was a child, I'm the oldest of four. My mother would put us in the car and we'd drive downtown to the high-end Baltimore department stores, [unintelligible 00:21:16] company. Once Mondawmin was built, when Mondawmin was planned the neighborhood was Jewish upper class.

By the time it was completed, the neighborhood was Black upper-class, but because of redlining in Baltimore and blockbusting, which is how my father got the house, most of the upper-class Jews were gone on my block within 10 years while the mall was being planned in development and Black doctors and lawyers replaced Jewish doctors and lawyers. By the time the mall was finished, there was a clientele there, Oppenheim Collins, Saks Fifth Avenue. There was an indoor fountain and we actually hung out at the mall. It was climate controlled, so there was nothing else to do. We walked to the mall and bought French fries from a Chinese restaurant called Jimmy Woo's.

We sat there for hours. We met girls at the mall. I drove by Mondawmin yesterday. I live in New York, but I'm here for family business. Mondawmin is pretty much closed. Sears is gone. The Ankorstore is closed. The neighborhood has changed so much that the clientele that would have supported those stores doesn't live in that neighborhood anymore. Additionally, Jim Rowse's son called me last summer in response to an article I'd written in The New York times. He told me that his father always felt that Rowse built a number of malls around the country, but he built these malls off of arterials that were being built like 684, 484, around cities.

They were beltways taking advantage of the federal highway financing that President Eisenhower forecast. Basically, you had block busting, which helps to kill the inner city. Some cities had riots, more whites were moving out. You had redlining, which meant that there was less racial mixing. Then people like Rouse and other developers built shopping malls with Oppenheim Collins, Saks Fifth Avenue, off of arterials around the city. Nobody had to go downtown anymore. I think that helped to expedite the decline of a lot of inner cities. I've lived in Shanghai. In Shanghai, I've seen the development over the past 20 years, but Shanghai has built essentially what would've been malls in the city.

You see it, also in Xi'an and Mingshan and other cities in China, they didn't go out. They built what's essentially malls right in town.

Brian: That's so interesting.

ROLAND: I think that what happened with what happened in America is that the malls helped to kill the very vibrant cities that the malls were supposed to be helping in some people's minds.

Brian: Roland, thank you so much. What a fascinating set of observations and experiences. Alexandra, does it reflect things that you wrote about in the book?

Alexandra: Definitely. First of all, I want to say the caller's right, Mondawmin opened in 1956, just a few months after Southdale. That's why it doesn't get to be the first indoor shopping mall. It's so interesting that he brings up Jim Rouse, who's a major figure in my book. Rouse actually realized pretty early on that the malls that he was building outside Baltimore were really pulling people out of downtown. In the 1970s, he was one of the first developers to start working to put people back in downtowns. He was the developer behind the Faneuil Hall in Boston, Harbor Place in Baltimore and South Street Seaport in New York City, which he intended to be these festival marketplaces that would draw people back into cities from the suburbs, draw tourists, and create excitement around downtown again.

Brian: Roland, thank you so much for that call. Please call us again. We have to leave it there, as we are out of time with our guest Alexandra Lange, architecture critic, an author of the new book, Meet Me by The Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. Thanks so much for coming on the show. That was great.

Alexandra: Thanks for having me.

 

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