99% Invisible - 495- Meet Us by the Fountain

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

No teenager in America in the 1980s could avoid the gravitational pull of the mall, not even author Alexandra Lange. In her new book, Meet Me by the Fountain, Lange writes about how malls were conceptually born out of a lack of space for people to convene in American suburbs. Despite the fact indoor shopping malls are no longer in their heyday, malls have not gone away completely. Lange writes about the history of mall culture, and how the mall became a ubiquitous part of American life.Meet Us by the Fountain

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Like many teens in the 80s, my first job was at the mall. I was 14, I lied about my age, I was a bus boy in an Applebee style restaurant that no longer exists. On Saturdays, I often worked three shifts in row, so I witnessed the entire circadian rhythm of the mall. At 8 o'clock I'd clean windows as the senior citizens and tracksuits powered through the empty halls, passing by shops with the cage doors still rolled down. By midday the families took over, and my usual job of cleaning glasses and plates involved cleaning up piles of foods filled on the floor.

By evening, the teens arrived. They couldn't afford the restaurant, but I could see them in packs congregating by the fountain, always ready with an unkind word for some act of cruelty. The mall felt terrible, I hated it. But despite this, on days when I wasn't working, I had my mom drop me off at the mall. Kids in small towns and suburbs play the hand their dealt, and being able to walk around on your own, maybe buying a cassette tape of the Smith's live album at Sam Goodey is the best that life has to offer.

I was not a very cool teen. Larry, just say, I was a very nerdy teen. This is cool adult in front of the show, Alexander Lang. I feel like there are a lot of teenage mall scenarios that I did not participate in. Like I did not like meet my first bow at the mall. I did not like stroll around with shopping bags, showing off at the mall. None of that. But no teen in the 80s could completely avoid the gravitational pull of the mall. Alexandra is the author of a new book

called Meet Me by the Found. I think part of the whole argument of this book is really that people are social creatures and that the mall had to be created because the suburbs didn't really initially think about a space for people to come together. Even though we're past the heyday of the mall, Alexandra says we haven't seen the death

of the mall, even after two and a half years of a global pandemic. I think that people are people and they're going to want to go back out and get together again. I think we've seen that in like the tremendous use of parks during the pandemic. And when we can safely gather indoors, like people are gonna be excited to do that because who wants to go to a park in December.

We're gonna talk about how the mall became a ubiquitous part of American culture and what's happening today as malls across the country start to disappear. Okay, so let's get down to some basics. What is a mall? What makes something a mall versus other shopping centers that existed before or after? Well, a shopping center is outdoors and a mall is indoors. That's the most basic thing. A shopping center is a strip mall or a line of stores facing the parking lot

with some sort of like covering over the space in front of them. Whereas a mall is indoors. And the earliest malls were basically just like two shopping strips put together. So you had a department store at each end, and then two lines of shops facing each other, and a covered, you know, central aisle that usually had fountains and plants and benches

and other amenities. So they were really just that super simple, kind of eye-shaped plan. And this shape, the long hallway, is where the word mall comes from. That's right. Yeah. Basically, the name mall comes from Paul Mall in London, which is a narrow street where they used to play a kind of bowling game. So it was this long narrow outdoor space where people would come together to play. And so the mall from Paul Mall turned into a landscape term for that kind of long narrow green space.

So then when you enclose that long narrow space under a roof, it is another kind of mall. So the mall in Washington is also a mall from the same origin, even though we don't really think about a shopping mall and the mall in Washington and in the same mental place. Right. That place with the reflecting pool and the Lincoln on one side. That's the capital mall. Right. But we don't. Yeah. Lincoln is the anchor store of the National Mall. He's the Macy's, the capital mall. So Victor Groen is credited as the father of the national mom. He's the maize, the capital mom. So Victor Groen is credited as the father of the mall. What was he trying to do?

What was he trying to make? So Groen was an emigre from Austria fled the Nazis to the US in the late 1930s. And he had really strong memories of the kind of charming streets of Vienna, where there are cafes and people gathered, fountains, and there's this whole rich outdoor life. So he came to America, he initially designed these very glamorous stores in Manhattan, and then he was taken up by some department store executives who were like moved to California,

design our department stores. So he started designing these free standing department stores and he just felt kind of crushed by the landscape around those department stores because you could go to the store and you could park and you could go in, but then you couldn't do anything else. Like you couldn't leave and sit at a cafe. There was nowhere to meet your friends. There was none of the kind of fabric of the city that he found in European cities. So in the early 1940s,

Grewin was living in New York and flying back and forth across the country a lot, like major, major airplane miles. And he gets stuck in Detroit on a cross-country flight because of fog. And he thinks, oh, okay, like, I'm not gonna waste this time, I have on the ground in Detroit. You know, it's like he asked his friends,

where is life happening in Detroit? And they said, oh, it's all out in the suburbs. Okay. So he gets driven around the suburbs and he finds what he's been finding elsewhere in the US. That yes, there are all these new houses and yes, there are all these strip malls, but there's nowhere to go. And he thinks that he, you know, master salesman, he should be able to sell jailheds in

on the idea of building a branch department store and a shopping center in the suburbs. And over the next several years, he does this. He actually sells them on the idea of building four of them, Northland, Southland, Eastland, and Westland. Yeah, I've always wondered about that. Like, why do so many malls have cardinal directions in the name, no matter what city you're in, they're all like Westfield or Southport. Why is that? This is the origin story. And this is one way in which I know,

like the book can be slightly confusing because all the malls sound the same and it's like, yeah, that was on purpose. Because the, you know, if you're thinking about your city with the center point downtown, all of these malls wanted to establish where they were in relation to that center point. So if you were driving north on the kind of main highway out of town, you would encounter Northland or North Park or North Field or North Dale or one of these other things, you know, same with South Easter West. So all of them are like named out for their cardinal points so that people know kind of where to find them in relation to downtown.

And then the second part of the word is gate because it's an entry to the city, it's land because that was open land before, it's park because they're attaching it to a parkway. Like they have kind of, you know, vague geographical associations. The problem really comes that like, I grew up going to Northgate Mall in Durham, North Carolina,

but there's a much more famous Northgate Mall in Seattle that was one of the first malls. And it's like, so you always have to specify, you know, which city you're talking about. Yeah. And it feels like there's a certain point where the naming convention becomes just a meaningless convention like one of the fancier malls

in downtown San Francisco is called Westfield. I don't think it's West of anything or a field at all, but maybe that's just, I don't know, maybe you know. No, no, Westfield is actually a huge mall conglomerate that's now owned by Australians. But Westfield may be originally named after a Westfield that was in some town. So, Groen designed these malls in Michigan. And he saw the early mall as more of a mixed-use hub. There were shops and apartment stores, but also post offices, doctors offices. How long did that idea of a mall last?

Yeah. Groen definitely saw the malls as having a community function, and that's really explicit in a lot of his writings in the 1940s and 1950s. And he wasn't alone in that. There are other early mall developers, including James Rouse, who comes back into the story later, who also built malls, you know, circa 1955, 1956, that had community spaces. They might have church spaces. They definitely had doctors' offices. A lot of malls also had nurseries. So these early malls had a lot more community functions built in, and they were thought of as replacing downtown. And so having these mixed use functions.

But what happened was over time, by the mid-1960s, they're just start to be more and more malls, and they're not being designed and created by these original developers and the developers just want to make money. And they've also found that, you know, the mall has been kind of incorporated as an American pastime and it turns out you don't need to have a community space for your mall to operate like a community center. Like it's just doing that anyway. So, the mall is often blamed for killing downtowns, but is this completely fair? Like was the mall, you know, a reaction to filling a void that was already created by downtowns

in the Klein or did they contribute in some way? The early malls were really predicated on investment by the department stores, but the department store owners only made that investment after they were already seeing a loss of business downtown. And the families who owned these department stores were frequently like major urban philanthropists. Like they were the ones who paid for new shows at the museum.

They were really like power players in Minneapolis, Detroit, Philadelphia, and these other cities. But as the suburbs expanded because the houses were built first, they began to draw all of this energy away from downtowns. And initially, and now it seems foolishly in retrospect, people thought the women would drive back into downtowns to shop during the day, either drive or take public transportation. But once women and children were kind of ensconced in their houses and the suburbs, that was just

impossible. Like who would want to do that? And the shopping options were really limited because they were mostly these strip malls that had a supermarket in a drug store and maybe a kids shoe store. But they didn't have the kind of full service department store that they did downtown. So department store owners really wanted people to keep going downtown because that's where they had put all this time in investment. That was not an accurate read on human behavior. So very reluctantly department store owners began first to build

some small free-standing stores. They called them, you know, them junior stores. And then, Grooan kind of came up with this way by packaging the department store with other stores that they could keep their sense of dignity. They really wanted their stores to still be glamorous and still be special and not just another thing by the highway. So the Grooan idea of the indoor shopping mall allowed them to keep some of that glamor from downtown and also feed off other shopping, but move out to the suburbs.

So these early malls go up, and they get a lot of attention, especially as one large mall designed by Victor Gruein in a dinam Minnesota called Southdale Center. And it's a big media story. But how are these early malls received by the architecture and design world at large? Like how did they respond? The architecture press was totally wowed by the early malls. Southdale in particular was treated

as this kind of second coming. One of the amazing things is that Jane Jacobs went out to a diner to see Southdale and wrote this like very glowing right up of it in architectural forums. And if you think about our stereotype of Jane Jacobs, she was all about the city, she was all about like small business. But at that moment, it was really seen as an important new element or important new tool for creating, you know, urbanism in

the suburbs. The outside of shopping malls is really boring. They're just like the big gray boxes when you see them from the road. But all the design thinking goes into the inside of the mall with things like fountains and atramps. Why is that? I think that's where the community idea, this kind of utopian community idea from the gruin inception

of the mall really continues, because if you're in a space that just makes you want to shuffle along, like say, an airport terminal, you don't want to stay there. But if you're in a space where there's beautiful natural light, and maybe there's a fountain that your kids can throw pennies into, or maybe there's a bench so you can take a little break in between going from store to store,

you're going to stay there longer. And so even if mall owners stopped paying money for architectural features on the outside, they still spend a lot of time investing for architectural features on the outside. They still spend a lot of time investing in architectural features and the upkeep of those features on the inside. There's a whole dialogue around maintenance related to the mall.

And I think if you look at some pictures of dead and dying malls, like one of the first things you see is like the plants dying, or they've taken all of the plants out of the planters or you know there aren't enough trash cans anymore. And so part of the allure of the mall is of this like beautiful and beautifully maintained indoor space that you can go to at any time and the weather will always be perfect. And so like that's where the money goes and that's where I think some of the artistry

goes. And I mean, the title of my book is Meet Me by the Fountain because that's also how people orient themselves in malls, right? Like, Meet Me by the Blue Fountain, Meet Me by the Red Fountain. You know, the mall can be a confusing and kind of like, jangly place, but these perpetual architecture features help us orient ourselves. After the mall is introduced and it sort of like begins to replicate, then we hit the the building boom from malls in the 70s and 80s and and then they really began to change the landscape of America. Can you talk about that time and the sort of rise of the giant mall. The early malls a lot of times are really quite simple. It's just like that eye shape or a t-shape or a v-shape with like one or two or three department stores. And the reason you're going to the mall is to shop, to go to the

department store, to maybe get a snack and a snack bar. The food court doesn't actually become part of the mall until the mid 1970s. And then in the 1980s, you begin to get the first wave of boredom with the mall. Like people are kind of over the mall. And that's when John Jury comes in, this LA architect, and he's like, okay, how can we get people to want to go to the mall again? I know, we'll put an amusement park in the middle of the mall. And once you put an amusement park in the middle of the mall,

it gets exponentially bigger. And did every mall kind of react in this way? Like I know there's some key ones like Mall of America that has a roller coaster and a quarry and stuff like that. Did that effect kind of ripple out into other malls or was it really just confined to a few big ones? The entire amusement park in the mall is really confined to just a few large ones. But the entertainment idea does ripple out.

I mean, you get more and more ice skating rinks in malls. You get bigger and bigger food courts and they get more expressive architecture so that like going to the food court is kind of an event and there are more and more Different kinds of cuisines that you can sample you also get our Cades added to malls So the offerings of malls get broader and broader and just their square footage gets bigger and bigger Those malls also like are a bigger investment for their developers. So they're trying to pull from a larger and larger area. So where's the original malls were really just trying to serve the suburbs all around them and like their quadrant of the city. These new malls are generally referred

to as super regional malls. So there are malls that people would really travel to. When you had to get your prom dress, you and your friends would like get in the minivan and go to the mall that was like one or two hours away because it had the bigger, better department stores. And you'd spend the whole day there. And it's just a different mentality about shopping and it's a slightly different relationship to the mall itself.

This is the San Andy Miss Mall. And this is where people of the days world hang out. Get in, Lizard, we're going shopping. Let's go to the stage. I went to the mall with a couple of friends. I had a whole list of lousy spin. You know, in the 80s during this growth and heyday of the sort of cultural ascendancies of malls,

there's a real, you know, conflict about the mall as a public space versus a private space. Can you talk about, you know, why that's important and what is happening inside of a mall that's different than what would happen if this was a shopping district in a city. As you can tell from the whole mall history, like there's been this desire to cast the mall as a community space and hence as a public space, to pretend at least for a minute

that it's welcoming to everybody that anyone can go there at any time. But as the malls become bigger and actually start to serve as those de facto public spaces, you run up against the fact that store owners, mall owners don't really want all the things that can happen in a public space to happen in their mall. And the principal, one of those is protests. So there start to be this whole series of court cases basically arguing over whether you can protest in a mall. And the protests that end up serving as the basis for these cases in both like the state and federal Supreme Court are over a whole range of issues like some of them are anti-war protests, some of them are anti-war protests, some of them are anti-fur protests, some of them are union protests.

But in each case, the mall owner asserts that they have the right to eject the protesters from their property because they are not property, they don't have to follow free speech rules. And then you get attorneys arguing that if malls are going to be replaced downtowns, shouldn't they also have to operate like downtowns and let whoever wants to have free speech, have free speech and these properties.

One of the earliest cases in 1968, their good Marshall goes before the US Supreme Court and argues for the majority. And there's this great passage where he basically talks about how the mall has replaced downtown. And I was so fascinated to find that A, it was their good Marshall and B, that he had really articulated the way the malls had taken on this public role as early as 1968 in a Supreme Court opinion. After that decision, the court gets more and more conservative, and the assertion of free speech rights in malls actually gets eaten away until it becomes a state issue. And now, you know, that's something that's actually decided state by state. One of the most recent protests in malls that became a court case was a Black

Lives Matter protest at the Mall of America right before Christmas. During one of the busiest shopping weeks of the year, the Mall of America has caught up in a legal battle with protesters. Four leaders of Black Lives Matter say they

receive letters on Friday. Threatening arrests of Wednesday's rally takes place as planned inside the mall. They're trying to force us to say something that, you know, they don't really have the authority to do so. This is definitely not only an attack on Black Lives Matter, but on everybody's

first amendment rights and the right to speak out. The protesters like marched in chanting and all of the screens that were installed in the mall around all of these Christmas trees lit up with messages that the protesters had to look at. and all of the screens that were installed in the mall around all of these Christmas trees lit up with messages

that the protesters had to leave. So it was kind of like your ruining or like commercial display for Christmas with your protest. You have to think about like, why did the Black Lives Matter protesters choose the mall of the America? They chose it because there would be people there. Like there's no point in a protest if you're not going to have people see you,

enjoying you, and have media coverage. So in a place like Minneapolis, in the winter, the concentration of people were going to be at the mall, and that's why they wanted to protest there. And I think that's really the rub of all of these court cases. Like if you've evacuated your city and put all of your commercial development in the suburbs, you have to leave space in the suburbs for things to happen that aren't only commercially motivated, like aren't okay with store owners that everybody doesn't agree with. everybody doesn't agree with. You might have noticed that we're past the heyday of the mall, and with malls across America closing, what are we going to do with all that empty space?

The future of the mall now? How many malls have closed and are malls actually dying off? Like what are the numbers like? At their peak, they were approximately like 2,000 enclosed malls in the US. I think that number went down to about 1500, over the past 10 years. And people are expecting us to end up like after the pandemic, probably around like 800

and closed malls. In the 1990s, which was basically peak mall, there were 140 new malls being built per year. But in 2007, there were zero new malls that were built. People aren't wrong that the mall is dying. Like there is going to be this huge die off. But I don't think the mall is going away. I mean, 800 is still like a lot of malls.

And many of those are really the big marquee malls in their towns, like in the New York area, it's things like King of Prussia, outside Philadelphia or the mall at Short Hills and New Jersey or the Westchester up in Yonkers. So the richest malls are surviving. It's really what are typically referred to as class B and C malls that might have had Sears and other department stores that have now gone out of business that are

dying. And so those are the ones that people film like depressing glamour shots at. And also the ones that are potential sites for adaptive reuse. Why, what do you cite is the reason for malls closing? It's a whole bunch of things. We've had this kind of panicky story for years that online retail was going to destroy bricks and mortar retail. It's actually only 21% of retail sales even now. And the pandemic has accelerated that because more people were doing more internet shopping and found out that that can be great for a lot of things. But there are still many

kinds of shopping that are really better done in person. And even before the pandemic, internet shopping hadn't killed off bricks and mortar retail at the rate that initial dire predictions said it would. So that's part of it. There are also just like larger changes in the way we shop. Department stores are no longer the arbiters of taste that they used to be. And more people want to shop in smaller stores, even if those aren't necessarily independently owned. And then there's also just a greater income disparity. During the rise of the malls, the American middle class was doing well and growing. And now there is this great disparity between like the upper middle class that's still doing

great and the lower middle and working class who have less and less money. And people in those families are much more likely to shop in big box stores and discount stores because they don't really have the income for kind of the middle range stores that used to be the bread and butter of the mall. It's funny because today there are lots of malls that are now home to employment offices and DMVs.

And in a way, that's super cool because that's the mixed-use idea that was closer to groom's original design of the mall. But you write that it's usually a bad sign for the mall when this happens because they probably give the DMV cheap rent because they're desperate to draw people in. So I mean, it's just kind of ironic. Yeah, I mean, that should be a good thing. I think having a DMV and other public services inside a mall would be great.

Like, think how convenient that would be if you have limited time on a weekend, you can get all of these things taken care of. And in fact, in the conclusion of my book, I talk about the malls in some other countries, including the Philippines, where many of the malls have a lot of public services, you know, just folded into them as a matter of course. My mother volunteers for the Friends of the Durham Public Library and they run

a used bookstore and it was one of the businesses in an empty storefront in Northgate Mall in Durham before it closed. So again, city services come in where commercial businesses don't want to pay rent anymore. It's hard for malls to recover from one of their anchor department stores clothing unless something else big comes in. Is there a way for struggling malls to recover? Is there a formula that that actually works? Some malls have been saved or at least stabilized by things like trampoline parks coming in. Again, like that's the entertainment venue. One of the ways that I think malls can survive in the future is through smarter and perhaps more distinct curation of the mall stores. I mean, you know, I know that curation is kind of an overused term, but I think for a long time malls are getting by on essentially all having the same mix of stores

and restaurants, just a different price point. So you'd kind of, you know, decide how much money you wanted to spend that day and go to that mall. But going forward, it's easy enough to get, you know, inexpensive chain store clothing online. So, malls could really distinguish themselves by stocking themselves with things that are all for families. Or I have a couple examples in the book where malls have turned themselves essentially into like ethnic food and business centers, depending on like the changing nature of their suburb. So you have like a Latino mall outside Atlanta

or a lot of Asian malls in Northern California that have businesses that are familiar to people from other places, but also that they can't get somewhere else, and which sell things that they can't get online. When malls do fail and they do close, there's like thousands and thousands of square feet going unused. But there aren't a lot of mall shaped things that you can put in there after one is gone. What happens with these dead malls? Well, a lot of times they just sit there for quite some time because not only do they have these many thousands of square feet that not a lot of entities can deal with,

but often they're owned by multiple entities. And so it's not as easy as just like one person selling the mall to one other person. There have been some cases of adaptive reuse where a new business or something is taken over a dead mall. What is the most interesting example of that that you've seen? Highland mall outside Austin, Texas has been turned over the past decade plus into the leadership campus for Austin Community College. And they turned one of the former department stores into like this huge like room full of computers, like workshops face. And they have turned one of the other department stores

into the headquarters for Austin Public TV with a lot of internal studio and recording space and an auditorium. And the parking lot around the mall, some of it they've actually made green open spaces sort of like a regular college campus. And around the perimeter they're building housing, some of like a regular college campus, and around the perimeter they're building housing, some of which can be student housing, but other of which can just be, you

know, affordable rental apartments. It's great if we could reuse these dead malls in some way. Like people always say that the green is building as a building that's already built. How do you feel about it when it comes to reusing malls? I love to see these examples of adaptive reuse. Like, when people talk about adaptive reuse, they're often thinking about older buildings in cities, but at this point, malls are older buildings.

I mean, like, many of the malls that we're talking about that are failing are 50 years old. And I was actually talking to the chancellor of Austin Community College. And he was saying that lots of people have very poignant family memories of things that happened in the food court at that mall. These buildings aren't just buildings in their communities.

They're a, they're very conveniently located, b, like everyone knows where Highland Mall is because it's been a reference point. And we shouldn't just kind of throw away those memories and throw away that kind of name recognition along with like getting rid of the tremendous like environmental sync of the building materials. So I really see the malls as an opportunity and I would love for people to get more creative about what to do with them. There's a lot of like dead mall photography,

which I think can be very beautiful, but it also kind of fixes them in people's minds as these dead entities. And I think kind of like them in people's minds as these dead entities. And I think kind of like stops the mental process that it takes to then think of, okay, what are we going to do with it next? And I mean, I guess coming from a design background, I just see them as an opportunity and a problem and something that could be really fun to think about. And you know, something that shouldn't be depressing, but it's like,

oh, actually, there's all this new free land in cities. Like, what can we do with it? Well, this has been so great. I've really enjoyed the book, too. It was just so much fun to both learn a lot of stuff and also have all this information slot into my own sort of lived experience of a mall, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Alexander Leng's book is called Meet Me by the Found and Inside History of the Mall. And if you buy the book, which I highly recommend and you flip it over and you look at the back cover, you will find that someone is written. It's an architectural page-turner. This insightful, witty and smart book captures everything compelling and confounding about the American Mall. Roman Mars, co-author of the 99% of this book,

I wrote that for the back of this book. That's how much I believe in this book. You should get it. 99% of this book was produced this week by Chris Barube, music by a director of sound Swan Rio, mixed in tech production by Martin Gonzales, fact checking by Liz Boyd. Our executive producer is Delaney Hall, Kurt Colstad is our digital director, our intern is Sarah Beak. The rest of the team includes Vivian Leigh, Jason Delion, Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald,

Lashemadon, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a part of the Stitcher and Serious XM Podcast family. Now head towards six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars

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