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Whither the American Mall?
The weary, wobbling American mall is a piece of today’s weary American story that’s hard to ignore. This story is about just one — which is still wobbling a bit, but working to emerge from its lingering depression.
In the Before Days — before pandemic, before economic woes, before Amazon — were the malls. Like Chicago’s Water Tower Place, Atlanta’s Phipps Plaza, Seattle’s Pacific Place or the ultimate mega-consumer destination Mall of America in Bloomington, MN. And thousands of others from the large like these to the small, ubiquitous strips.
Teenagers by the millions hung out in malls. Senior citizens speed-walked and exercised in malls. Shoppers even shopped in malls — enough of them to keep retailers happy, from the giant-store anchors to the boutique in-betweens to the aromatic food courts. But after getting clobbered by economic downturns and online shopping, the pandemic delivered what was a final blow to the Mall Era. A few survive, others are struggling or reinventing themselves and others make you want to weep for the desolation — and sometimes environmental disaster — their abandoned parking lots suggest. This is just one tiny glimpse backward and forward into one survivor: my city’s brave and…
