An in-depth look at the peak mall year of 1982, with Oak Park Mall in Overland Park, Kansas the focal point.| Shopping Mall
A gathering of sales clerks at the Gimbels in Eastland Mall, ca. 1970s.| Shopping Mall
From Littlewhitehead’s Pink Fountains series.| Shopping Mall
A view of the BEST Products Inside/Outside Showroom in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1984. This Inside/Outside display of store merchandise, designed by architect James Wines, shows the transition from real objects to ghosted counterparts as they pass through the glass wall.| Shopping Mall
Ghost Malls “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” —Wendell Berry When demolition crews arrived at Greengate Mall in May 2003, it marked the end of a decade-long financial collapse that had left the shopping mall in a state of obsolescence. Shuttered two years earlier, the vacant mall—a community fixture in and around the town of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, for nearly 40 years—was being razed to make way for a Walmart Supercenter. News of...| Shopping Mall
Shopping Mall in good company at Octavia Books in New Orleans.| Shopping Mall
The Legend of the Gun-Shaped Mall In Erie, Pennsylvania, there is a shopping mall shaped like a gun. This architectural flourish, however, is not readily apparent from inside the mall. To visualize Millcreek Mall’s weaponized consumerism, one must rely on aerial views via Google Maps. According to urban legend, the mall, built in 1975, achieved its unique shape thanks to a rather dubious backstory. In his essay “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” James M. Russell brings that backstory to...| Shopping Mall
The Malls of My Dreams The countdown clock had less than a minute remaining. My legs were all pins and needles, like they had fallen asleep. Moving myself forward, let alone the cart, seemed impossible. I could see the finish line. There was a black-and-white checkerboard strip on the ground and a red ribbon with the word “Winner” emblazoned in white letters. I imagined breaking through the ribbon with my cart. How wonderful it would feel to be hoisted on the shoulders of the crowd, celeb...| Shopping Mall
AT&T encourages the public to embrace its inner voyeur.| Shopping Mall
Here’s a photograph of filmmaker George Kuchar standing in the parking lot of a Kmart.| Shopping Mall
Life is Ridiculously Awesome Vinson Cunningham on Shana Novak’s photograph of Kmart’s recently redesigned plastic bag, and its callback to the halcyon days of retail: “The hope was to convince [millennial shoppers] (or, I guess, remind them) that consumption, retail-style, could, in the corporation’s words, be ‘fun,’ even ‘awesome.’ 2016 was the hundredth anniversary of Kmart’s incorporation; the hint of self-consciously campy nostalgia in its new ‘look and feel’ seems c...| Shopping Mall
Mall Dad never lets his daughter and her friend roam the promenade without a cellular phone to stay in touch.| Shopping Mall
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
When Richard Simmons Danced for Us On October 8, 1994, fitness guru Richard Simmons arrived at Century III Mall in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, determined to entertain. Dressed in a hot pink tank top adorned with music notes, his signature short-shorts, and gleaming white tennis shoes, he embodied his larger-than-life persona that had been seen on infomercials and VHS workout tapes throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Apparently part of an event sponsored by B-94 FM, Simmons danced for a crowd of h...| 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
“It’s the mall with it all!”| Shopping Mall
