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I came of age walking around Northwest Plaza, a then-novel “outdoor mall” with a pebbly version of cobblestones and several courtyard fountains so hypnotic I had their shapes memorized. By “came of age,” I mean that I became a person who made her own choices. Not the early Montessori choices my mom cribbed from books because she could not afford their schools, but real choices, like buying a peasant top with my babysitting money and not hearing what my mother thought of it until she saw it on me. (Too late! Bare shoulders! No returns!) We went into every store, and there were rather a lot of them. My best friend drove me crazy cooing over and trying on stuff she could not afford to buy. To me, that was an exercise in masochism. I picked and debated only when I had cash; otherwise, I liked the people-watching, the daydreaming, and the Cokes and eclairs that kept up our energy.
That mall was a world, a metaverse full of possibility. Safely away from the all-knowing nuns who taught us, we could pretend to be foreign exchange students or piano prodigies or Olympic gymnasts on holiday. There were clothes to costume any aesthetic. There were boys, even, hanging around the fountains or slouched in the shadows smoking.
Now I think it sad that I came of age surrounded by stuff, in a place focused on transactions. Another friend was a Girl Scout back then, wholesome and true, and her first glimmers of an adult self came with adventures in the woods. Mine simply prepared me for feminine obsession and late-stage capitalism.
Matthew Newton’s Shopping Mall gave Northwest Plaza context—and told an even sadder story. His book (part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, edited by WashU’s Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg) focuses on Southdale Center, the oldest fully enclosed shopping mall in the country. Southdale opened in Edina, Minnesota, in 1956, and it was lavish and ambitious.
Influenced by his Viennese background, classical education, and socialist politics, architect Victor Gruen closed his eyes and saw a European plaza; squeezed them tighter shut and saw the Greek agora. He intended to sanctify shopping by mixing it with socializing, playing, and relaxing in a place of beauty. At the center’s center, he designed a Garden Court of Perpetual Spring, adding the fountains, goldfish ponds, tropical plants, and flowers once used to soften the harsh outlines of commerce. (Now, we do not bother.)
Everyone except Frank Lloyd Wright loved the original design. Wright was scathing, arguing that it had “all the evils of the village street and none of its charm.” Perhaps he saw through the frills to the future, when all malls would have “skylights and white noise, Cinnabon and Muzak, security guards and information kiosks,” as Newton notes with a sigh. “The mall experience is predictable that way, like looking at a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.” And we settle for that, because commerce has budgeted for less beauty and charm and told us how little we deserve and how much we should want—or rather, crave and buy—and how then we must live.
Northwest Plaza never felt that way. Maybe the outdoor setting allowed it to breathe, making it more a little town that a giant’s terrarium diorama. Indoor malls do have a deadly sameness, just as our strip malls, chains, and big boxes do.
Newton grew up hanging out at his own nearby shopping mall. By the time he made a pilgrimage to Southdale, it was only a shell of its intended self. The hollow remains made him curious, in a bittersweet way, about the evolution of the mall—right up to its current death throes. Victor Gruen would be sick with disappointment. He knew good planning had to do more than offer convenience, lots of free parking, and all sorts of stuff. Good planning had to connive, meeting our psychological and aesthetic needs. People had to feel safe and happy, able to dream. That was why he insisted on a jumble of amenities: residential, social, medical, and recreational as well as retail, with civic and educational facilities seamlessly inserted. Fill all those needs at once, he thought, and you fill the existential void.
Today’s malls symbolize the existential void. Places that used to be upscale now feel dystopian, and the malls that were cheerfully middle-class are ruins. There is nowhere for a kid to toss a penny and dream a wish.
Gruen saw the start of this decline, as “architects and developers obsessed over retail footprints, lease rates, and the maximization of selling space” rather than the quality and creativity of the experience. Malls had become machines, nothing more.
Participating in the fantasy? Now it is more like participating in Dawn of the Dead, filmed, inevitably, at Monroeville Mall. These wistfully European, utopian fantasias helped empty our downtowns; they made the suburbs homogeneous and bland and too convenient for most to resist. They also underscored racial and class divides. Functioning as the commons, they offered materialism in lieu of civic religion.
Newton quotes cultural historian Norman M. Klein on the mythological labyrinth of mall design, calling it a happy imprisonment, “infinite choice, but seemingly no way out.” If you do find the right exit, pray that you memorized your parking spot, because you will be too dazed by the fluorescence, surging crowds, and echoey chatter to orient yourself. Malls are not the recreation Gruen had in mind. They are glitzy corridors devoid of any place to rest except a hard bench or a grungy public loo.
And now malls are gone, too. We have our own sofa and screen, and we shop alone, still hunting for, as Newton puts it, “a better version of ourselves.” The fantasy is even more intense, the hunt more rabid; we click in and away and across like mice darting around a rigged cage looking for the cheese. Social aspect? There is none. Sensory texture? Forget it. No more goldfish and tropical plants; no more trying on; no more catering to the needs of a whole human being.
I slog from one website to the next, unable to finger the fabric or test the size. Eyes burning, spirit drained, I make a forced choice, sure that when the garment arrives it will be shoddily made and garishly dyed. Shopping was never meant to be done in a state of sensory deprivation.
Maybe retail’s next iteration will get it right.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
