When I Saw the Firebird I Fell in Love My parents found the Firebird in the Pennysaver. I remember the night we drove out to the country to pick it up. I was still dressed in my Catholic school uniform, khaki pants and an Oxford shirt, which was wrinkled from a long day sitting in class. We drove until we reached what felt like the middle of nowhere, an open landscape of winding roads and endless guardrails, until we finally arrived. When I saw the Firebird I fell in love. Its Kelly green pai...| Shopping Mall
The Wonderfall at Palm Beach Mall For a fleeting moment in postwar America, shopping malls were more than retail emporiums—they were fantasy worlds where people sought to escape the pressures of daily life. Not always with consumerism in mind either, but with the desire to commune in an architectural wonderland, to experience an environment unlike any other. At Palm Beach Mall in West Palm Beach, Florida, which opened in 1967, the “Wonderfall” (pictured just beyond the bridge) embodied ...| Shopping Mall
The ‘Fish Music’ of Woodfield Mall “From Muzak to Hot Topic, the musical history of American shopping malls is not, by and large, a proud tale. But if the pioneering electronic musician Suzanne Ciani had been given more say, things might have turned out very different. Predating her commercial work for companies like AT&T and Coca-Cola, “Fish Music,” recently unearthed from her archive by Andy Votel’s Finders Keepers label, was composed in 1971 for the opening of the Woodfiel...| Shopping Mall
“Teens at the mall are almost preternaturally skilled in the semiotics of fashion.” - Bruce Dobler| Shopping Mall