Secret Mall Apartment

Summary

99% Invisible – Episode: Secret Mall Apartment

Introduction

In the March 25, 2025 episode of 99% Invisible, host Roman Mars delves into the intriguing story of a group of artists who transformed a neglected space within the Providence Place Mall into a secret apartment. This episode not only uncovers the creative endeavor behind the apartment but also explores the broader history and evolution of American shopping malls through an insightful interview with author Alexandra Lang.

The Secret Mall Apartment Story

Background on Providence Place Mall

Providence Place Mall, inaugurated in 1999 with a significant investment of $500 million, was envisioned as a super-regional, all-encompassing shopping destination. Roman Mars sets the scene by highlighting the mall's extensive size—spanning 13 acres with 1.4 million square feet of retail space—and its dominant presence along the Woonasquatucket River in downtown Providence, Rhode Island.

Discovery of the Secret Room

Michael Townsend, an artist and the ringleader of the apartment project, recounts his early observations of the mall during its construction in the 1990s. Initially optimistic about the mall’s addition to the neighborhood, Townsend noticed an odd, unused space within the mall's architecture. “Providence Place was going to be a big, boxy stack of shops without much in the way of architectural niceties,” Townsend explains ([02:56]).

As construction progressed, the peculiar room remained unexplained, sparking Townsend’s curiosity. This space, surrounded by unnecessary walls, was inadvertently segregated from the main functional areas of the mall.

Creation of the Apartment

Driven by a blend of artistic expression and a response to personal loss—after losing their home at Fort Thunder to mall expansion—Townsend and his friends devised a plan to repurpose this forgotten room. Their initial idea was to live in the mall for seven days, adhering to a strict rule of not leaving the premises.

“They couldn't leave,” Townsend states ([06:37]), emphasizing the commitment and seriousness behind their project.

Living in the Mall

The group meticulously prepared the space, transforming it from a debris-filled chamber into a livable apartment. They removed construction remnants and brought in essential supplies, such as water, lighting, and kitchen essentials. Vanessa Lowe, a member of the group, describes the process: “We were literally filling up our backpacks with just dirt and grime and then carrying it out of the mall...” ([10:16]).

Their efforts culminated in a functional living space, complete with a television, PlayStation, and even personal touches like shadow boxes and a waffle iron. The apartment became their sanctuary, allowing them to experience the mall not as consumers but as residents.

The Break-In and Fallout

Four years into their clandestine living arrangement, the group's secret was compromised when two mall security guards discovered the apartment following a mysterious break-in. Personal items, including a PlayStation and artwork, were stolen, signaling that someone had become aware of their presence.

“This is a very odd burglary. Like, they didn't take the things of value. They only took the things that were, like, super personal,” Lowe remarks ([13:56]).

Confronted by the authorities, Townsend faced legal repercussions. Although he was ultimately charged with a misdemeanor for trespassing and released, the incident resulted in a permanent ban from the mall, symbolized by a map with a red line they were forbidden to cross.

The Mall's Changing Fortunes

Years later, the Providence Place Mall struggled financially, falling behind on significant debt and entering receivership. In an unexpected turn, the mall's management sought to rehabilitate its image by engaging Townsend once again, commissioning him to install art pieces and hosting the premiere of the Secret Mall Apartment documentary. Innovative ideas, such as converting parts of the mall into residential apartments, were considered as strategies to revitalize the struggling retail hub.

Interview with Alexandra Lang

To provide a comprehensive understanding of malls’ rise and decline, Roman Mars interviews Alexandra Lang, author of Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. Lang offers an in-depth exploration of the mall's origins, design philosophy, and its role in American culture.

History and Definition of a Mall

Lang clarifies the distinction between malls and other shopping centers: “A shopping center is outdoors and a mall is indoors. The earliest malls were basically just two shopping strips put together...” ([24:47]). She traces the etymology of the term “mall” to London’s Pall Mall, a long, narrow street used for public gatherings.

Victor Gruen and the Original Mall Concept

Victor Gruen, often hailed as the father of the modern mall, envisioned malls as community hubs that mirrored the vibrant streets of European cities. Gruen’s designs incorporated amenities like fountains, benches, and communal spaces to foster social interactions. Lang explains, “Gruen definitely saw the malls as having a community function... [they] were thought of as replacing downtown” ([26:29]).

Rise of Super Regional Malls

As the 1970s and 1980s progressed, malls evolved into super regional centers with extensive retail options and entertainment facilities. Lang notes, “In the 1980s, you begin to get the first wave of boredom with the mall... putting an amusement park in the middle of the mall. Once you put it, it gets exponentially bigger” ([37:59]). Iconic examples like the Mall of America exemplify this trend, incorporating attractions such as roller coasters and aquariums to draw larger crowds.

Public vs. Private Space in Malls

The dual nature of malls as both public and private spaces has led to legal challenges, particularly concerning free speech and the right to protest within mall premises. Lang discusses landmark court cases spearheaded by figures like Thurgood Marshall, highlighting the tension between mall owners' desire to control their property and individuals' rights to express dissent. “Malls are replacing downtowns, should they also have to operate like downtowns and let whoever wants to have free speech have free speech on these properties?” ([41:13]).

Current State of Malls and Future Prospects

Lang provides a sobering assessment of the current mall landscape. From a peak of approximately 2,000 enclosed malls in the U.S., the number has dwindled to around 1,500, with projections suggesting a continuation toward 800. Factors contributing to this decline include the rise of online retail, changing consumer preferences, and economic disparities affecting shopping behaviors.

However, Lang remains optimistic about adaptive reuse opportunities. She cites examples like Highland Mall in Austin, Texas, which has been repurposed into a leadership campus for Austin Community College and other innovative uses. “These buildings aren't just buildings in their communities. They’re very conveniently located... I see the malls as an opportunity, and I would love for people to get more creative about what to do with them” ([53:12]).

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

The Secret Mall Apartment episode of 99% Invisible masterfully intertwines a unique human story with a broader analysis of the American mall's lifecycle. Through Michael Townsend's audacious project and Alexandra Lang's historical insights, listeners gain a multifaceted perspective on the intersection of design, community, and commerce. As malls continue to evolve or fade, the episode underscores the enduring impact these vast consumer spaces have on our social and urban landscapes.

Notable Quotes

• Michael Townsend ([02:56]): “Providence Place was going to be a big, boxy stack of shops without much in the way of architectural niceties.”

• Vanessa Lowe ([10:16]): “We were literally filling up our backpacks with just dirt and grime and then carrying it out of the mall...”

• Vanessa Lowe ([13:56]): “They didn’t take the things of value. They only took the things that were, like, super personal.”

• Alexandra Lang ([24:47]): “A shopping center is outdoors and a mall is indoors. The earliest malls were basically just two shopping strips put together...”

• Alexandra Lang ([26:29]): “Gruen definitely saw the malls as having a community function... [they] were thought of as replacing downtown.”

• Alexandra Lang ([37:59]): “In the 1980s, you begin to get the first wave of boredom with the mall... putting an amusement park in the middle of the mall. Once you put it, it gets exponentially bigger.”

• Alexandra Lang ([41:13]): “Malls are replacing downtowns, should they also have to operate like downtowns and let whoever wants to have free speech have free speech on these properties?”

• Alexandra Lang ([53:12]): “These buildings aren't just buildings in their communities. They’re very conveniently located... I see the malls as an opportunity, and I would love for people to get more creative about what to do with them.”

---

This summary incorporates key discussions, insights, and notable quotes with appropriate timestamps, providing a comprehensive overview for those who haven't listened to the episode.

Transcript

[Roman Mars]

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There is so much to do at the mall. You can get your ears pierced. You can build a bear. You can go get an Orange Julius. Late at night, when the game stops and the Hot Topics are all locked up and the food court's taken out the last of the trash, it is usually time to go home. But what if the mall was your home? This ad came on for the Providence Place Mall. It was this woman about how it.

[Michael Townsend]

Was going to be so convenient for.

[Roman Mars]

Her to get everything that she needed.

[Michael Townsend]

For her kids for herself, if only.

[Roman Mars]

She could live there. I just had this idea. Oh, we should live in the mall. The new documentary, Secret Mall Apartment, is about a group of artists who built, you guessed it, a secret apartment inside of the mall. We interviewed the group's ringleader, Michael Townsend, a few years back, and after the story, we'll have an update about what's happened since then. In downtown Providence, Rhode island, there's a large plot of land that sits on the bank of the Woonasquaducket River. In 1838, it was the home of the Rhode Island State Prison, which was notorious for its horrid smell, dreary outward appearance, and reputation for solitary confinement. Later, the land housed the continuing education campus for the University of Rhode island, and after that, a dirt parking lot called Ray's park and lock.

[Michael Townsend]

Then, in 1999, in a grand effort to revitalize the city, and with much fanfare, the Providence Place Mall was opened.

[Roman Mars]

That's Vanessa Lowe, producer of the podcast Nocturne.

[Michael Townsend]

The mall, costing $500 million, was what was known as a super regional a one stop shopping destination housing everything consumers could possibly want or need in a totally enclosed space. Partially funded by taxpayer money, it spanned 13 acres, offered 1.4 million square feet of retail space, and dominated the riverfront.

[Vanessa Lowe]

It was the largest construction project in Providence's history, this one building, and we sort of stood in awe watching it get built.

[Michael Townsend]

Michael Townsend is an artist who lived nearby when the mall was still under construction in the 1990s. His daily running route took him past the construction site, and Michael says that as he watched it go up, he had an open mind about the project. He was cautiously optimistic that it would be a welcome addition to the neighborhood.

[Roman Mars]

But, yeah, that didn't last long.

[Vanessa Lowe]

It's funny, the revulsion to a building like that doesn't really kick in until the skin gets put on. When something is in its erector set mode where you're just seeing the skeleton, you're like, oh, that's a pretty cool skeleton. But as soon as the flesh is there, you're like, ooh, not pretty.

[Michael Townsend]

Providence place was going to be a big, boxy stack of shops without much in the way of architectural niceties. And on his runs, Michael watched as that big box was slowly filled with the things that make a mall a mall.

[Vanessa Lowe]

As it's being built, I start to sort of do mental maps of spaces. You know, that's gonna be a store, that's gonna be a storage space, that's gonna be parking.

[Roman Mars]

But amidst all the construction, there was one part of the building that kept catching Michael's eye. A weird space in the guts of the architecture that didn't make sense.

[Vanessa Lowe]

I thought that was really odd. It didn't seem to meet the profile of either a storage space or a parking space or a store space.

[Michael Townsend]

Michael wasn't sure what the space was for. It seemed to exist only by virtue of the walls intended for the more legitimate spaces around it. But the result was this room.

[Roman Mars]

It was an accidental room, A remainder left over by the long division of the mall's architecture.

[Vanessa Lowe]

I had never seen anything like it, and every time I ran by was something I would think about.

[Michael Townsend]

Michael eventually put the strange room out of his mind. He probably would have forgotten about it entirely, except that four years later, a second group of developers, encouraged by the success of providence place, set their sights even closer to Michael. This time, they wanted to build right on top of the historic mill district where Michael and a dozen or so other art artists lived and worked in an old industrial building they called fort thunder.

[Roman Mars]

The developers had used a computer algorithm to figure out where to place a new supermarket so that it wouldn't compete with other supermarkets in the area.

[Vanessa Lowe]

And I got to see this computer print out, and it's sort of like a nuclear explosion map. You can sort of see the radius from each supermarket and their theoretical reach. And in the blank spot that was our neighborhood, they put an x directly on the building we were living.

[Michael Townsend]

And that was just the start. The developers wanted to tear down all of the old mill buildings and replace them with yet more retail with little to no pedestrian access.

[Vanessa Lowe]

And it appears that the only mantra they have is if you see a space that's underdeveloped, you have a God given responsibility to develop it. And it was basically like having a complete stranger be like, we've been thinking about it, and we think we want to knock your house down and make it a parking lot if it's cool with you.

[Roman Mars]

Now, normally, this Would be the part of the story where we tell you that Michael and the other residents of Fort Thunder banded together to save their home in the face of the relentless march of capital. But no, it's not that kind of story. Granted, they did save some buildings, but as for Fort Thunder.

[Vanessa Lowe]

Oh, our actual home. Oh yeah, they leveled that. They came in with bulldozers and cranes and knocked that sucker flat.

[Roman Mars]

Fort Thunder was gone. The reason we're telling you this story is because of what happened next.

[Vanessa Lowe]

Because when I see something like that, I'm like, ho ho, ho, really? Game on.

[Michael Townsend]

Michael and his friends had lost their home. And in their mind, it had all started with that first mall. That was the original seeded development that had led to everything else. And so talk began of a mall related action. Call it art, call it a stunt. But a plan started to take shape.

[Roman Mars]

Michael and his friends decided that they would find a way to live in the mall for seven days. Yeah, live in the mall. And they set a rule for themselves. They couldn't leave.

[Vanessa Lowe]

And without a second thought of thinking of how unfeasible that is, we, for our own well being, we really felt that we had to do it.

[Michael Townsend]

And if this sounds like a lark, well, yeah, it kind of was, but a secretly serious lark. The four friends, they would eventually number eight, wanted to assert that spaces like the mall could belong just as much to them as to the developers.

[Roman Mars]

To really do this right, they would need to find a space in the mall where they could hide themselves away. And Michael had the perfect place in mind. He began to search for that mysterious room that he'd noticed when the mall was under construction all those years before. He remembered seeing that the room was connected to a kind of crevice, A narrow gap in the building structure that eventually led out to an exterior wall. So one night, Michael went to see if the entrance to that crevice had ever been sealed off.

[Michael Townsend]

Amazingly, it hadn't. It was small and sort of hidden, but there was still a crack in the exterior of the mall. And so he and his then wife Adrianna turned themselves sideways and slipped inside.

[Vanessa Lowe]

And then once you're, once you're in at that point you are exploring a system of caverns, long, weird vertical caverns. And there are places where it just falls down into the lower levels of the mall. So you've got about a foot and a half of cliff, but you're looking into a black abyss. And then this series of chambers ultimately give you access to this space.

[Roman Mars]

The room was tall and wide, filled with the byproducts of the mall's construction from years before. Broken two by fours and screws and plastic zip ties that hadn't even been worth removing. The space had literally been forgotten.

[Vanessa Lowe]

And it was big. It was a big space that served no other purpose. It wasn't a storefront and it wasn't a stairwell. It was just big. And it was a thrill to physically find it and be like, this is it. This is what I remember.

[Michael Townsend]

The room was in the guts of the building, the part that no one was ever supposed to use or even really see. But Michael and Adriana saw that it could still be accessed by multiple hidden entry points, including from inside the shopping center itself. If you knew how to get there, you could walk there from the Macy's. But as far as they could tell, they were the only people who knew this room existed.

[Roman Mars]

It was at that moment that the friend's scheme started changing. The initial plan had been to spend a week in the mall, but the way they saw it, they were sitting on 750 square feet of underground, underutilized space. Then they ask themselves, what would a developer do? Because after all, if you see a.

[Vanessa Lowe]

Space that's underdeveloped, you have a God given responsibility to develop it. So we decided that perhaps the absolute best thing we could do is just build a condo. Like that is. That is always the. That's always the answer. If you're not sure what to do with the space, just make it a condo.

[Roman Mars]

The new plan was no longer to live in the mall for a week. It was now simply to live in the mall for days at a time, using the room as an apartment. And while that may sound like a nightmare to everyone but a few weird artists from Providence, Michael and his friends got to work on this little project with the excitement of new homeowners.

[Michael Townsend]

Step one, of course, was cleaning. They had to get rid of all that debris.

[Vanessa Lowe]

It's sort of like, you know, like in a prison break movie. We were literally filling up our backpacks with just dirt and grime and then carrying it out of the mall and getting rid of it.

[Roman Mars]

And for every backpack full of debris they took out, they'd bring a pack full of something in.

[Michael Townsend]

Gallon jugs of water for drinking and cleaning, Clamp lights and extension cords for illumination, which they plugged into the mall's internal power system, parts for an ad hoc kitchen. They even built a cinder block wall to hide the space from anyone else who might venture into the cavern complex from its various other entrances.

[Vanessa Lowe]

We went and got a door that was an exact mirror of the doors they use in the mall. So if you were to find it, unless you're looking really closely, at first glance, it just looks exactly like it had been built originally.

[Roman Mars]

Finally, it was time to decorate.

[Vanessa Lowe]

Anything we could buy at the mall, we would. A low table came in on top of that, Proudly perched with a television and our PlayStation. But if we couldn't buy it at the mall, we'd have to bring it into the mall. And that's for the large pieces like the china hutch or the four piece sectional couch.

[Michael Townsend]

Nobody looked twice. So that you brought pieces of a couch through the mall. How did you get that in there in broad daylight?

[Vanessa Lowe]

We avoided the night and sort of worked with the ebb and flow of the mall. We were just part of the, you know, the living organism of its daily activities.

[Roman Mars]

It may seem risky trying to furnish a secret apartment with a nested coffee table, but to anyone watching, it was just a person walking through a mall with the nested coffee table that they just bought at the mall. There's simply no such thing as a suspicious consumer item In a building that is dedicated to consumerism.

[Michael Townsend]

The friends would sometimes stay in the secret apartment for several weeks in a row, Just living, watching television, making collages with shadow boxes they bought at Pottery barn, Even cooking in the ad hoc kitchen. Michael remembers burning some waffles with a waffle iron and wondering if the smoke would give them away.

[Roman Mars]

And when the eight friends weren't enjoying their secret apartment, they were enjoying the mall, not as shoppers, but as residents. Thanks to its late night movie theater, the mall almost never closed. So sometimes they would just roam the building with no goal in mind, observing its many moods.

[Vanessa Lowe]

There are times when that entire building probably had maybe 10 people in it. Like in the middle of the night, There'd be security officers, there'd be cleaning staff. And it's a really wonderful time because it's like having a public park four levels deep, all to yourself. And in those moments, there's a sense of ownership, and I just feel really good.

[Michael Townsend]

Weeks turned to months and eventually, years out of the emotional rubble of Fort Thunder, they'd finally found their refuge. And all thanks to the mall's developers, who had accidentally provided a sanctuary from the world they were busy developing.

[Roman Mars]

But as the old saying goes, there comes a time in every man's life when he must stop living at the mall.

[Vanessa Lowe]

Unfortunately, the seed got planted that this whole thing was going to unravel, and that's because we had a break in one day.

[Michael Townsend]

They came back to the apartment only to discover that someone had kicked open the door and stolen the PlayStation, along with several other small items, including the art they had made and a photo album.

[Vanessa Lowe]

But they left the silverware. They left the tv. We're like, this is a very odd burglary. Like, they didn't take the things of value. They only took the things that were, like, super personal.

[Michael Townsend]

Michael and his friends were spooked. They had managed to hide the apartment for four years, but now someone knew about the room. Someone who could come back at any time and who seemed to be interested in them. So they changed things up. They decided from now on, they'd only stay there at night when the chances of being caught were low. Never during the day.

[Roman Mars]

And crucially, they would double down on another rule they'd had since almost the very beginning.

[Vanessa Lowe]

Don't share it with anyone. Don't physically bring anyone here who wasn't involved in the making of it. So a lot of my very, very good and best friends never saw the space. And I'm the one who took that rule and broke it.

[Michael Townsend]

Michael was hosting a visiting artist from Hong Kong. Her name was Jaffa. He was driving her to the bus station on her way out of town.

[Vanessa Lowe]

And we're driving past the mall, and I say to myself, what can it hurt? How could this possibly backfire on me? So I brought her into the space. Her mind was absolutely blown. You gotta remember that this is at the peak of its buildout.

[Michael Townsend]

Michael showed Jaffa everything. The couch, the lights, the. The television. They were just days away from installing a water tank and a wood floor. In spite of the break in, after four years of work, the apartment was on the verge of feeling like a real home.

[Vanessa Lowe]

But when we're leaving, I hear walkie talkie on the other side of the door within two feet of us. And when the door opens, it's three dudes in ties and sports jackets. And I realize in that moment, I internalize that it's over.

[Roman Mars]

It turned out that the earlier break in had been the work of two of the mall's newest security guards. Instead of removing everything, they had taken the personal items in hopes of figuring out who Michael and his friends were. Now that Michael had been foolish enough to come back during the day, they had their man.

[Michael Townsend]

General Growth Properties, the company that owned them all, did not take kindly to the secret apartment in its walls.

[Roman Mars]

You don't say.

[Michael Townsend]

After being handed over to the police and interrogated, Jaffa was eventually let go. But Michael soon found himself standing in front of a judge in criminal court charged with breaking and entering and felony trespass.

[Vanessa Lowe]

By the time I get to court, the mall has hired a lawyer and they launch into all these details about the illegal things that I have done. And I keep my mouth shut. But after they've gone through this laundry list of illegal activities, they use the phrase, this gave Mr. Townsend access to an apartment that they had built over several years that had the following things in it. And goes on to list in detail what the apartment looked like, including the.

[Roman Mars]

Coffee table, the television, a copy of the game Grand Theft Auto, an eight foot china hutch, a four piece sectional couch, silverware for eight with matching glassware, a six foot.

[Vanessa Lowe]

And the more details this lawyer gives, the more the judge just looks around and he's like, what's happening here? And the judge hustles advisers close to him, and I hear him whispering, and then he looks up, looks me dead in the eyes, and he goes, this is not a criminal act. We're not sure exactly what it was, but this is not a crime.

[Roman Mars]

Whether the judge was perceiving a deep legal truth at the heart of this case, or Michael was just the beneficiary of an incredible amount of white privilege, Michael may never know.

[Michael Townsend]

In the end, he was slapped with a misdemeanor for trespassing and released. He had lived on and off in the secret apartment for nearly four years, and it was going to cost him almost nothing. But that doesn't mean he got away entirely scot free.

[Roman Mars]

Just before Michael left the mall, the mall security team handed him a piece of paper. The same piece of paper they hand to brawlers, shoplifters, and anyone else who has overstayed their welcome in this most private of public spaces.

[Vanessa Lowe]

It's this standardized manila piece of paper which has a map of the mall, and it has this red line around the whole thing, and you have to sign it and it says you can't cross that red line. So to make it clear, you're never coming back.

[Michael Townsend]

Now, over a decade later, Michael still lives right near the mall, but his days of running anywhere near its 13 acres are over.

[Vanessa Lowe]

And the biggest bummer for me is that if I want to go to downtown, the path that you bring your bike through is through the center of of the mall where it bridges over the river. And now that I'm banned from the mall, I have to bike around it. And I've biked around it for 10 years.

[Alexandra Lang]

Are you serious?

[Vanessa Lowe]

Diligently. I have never broken this rule, so.

[Michael Townsend]

You really can never go back.

[Vanessa Lowe]

I can never go back.

[Roman Mars]

Since we aired that story. Michael did honor the band up until very recently. At the climax of the new documentary, he sneaks back in to see what's left of the apartment, but all he finds is a door and a couple of cinder blocks. Meanwhile, things are not going well for the mall. By the fall of 2024, its management company had fallen behind on their $259 million of debt and a judge ordered the mall into receivership. Attorneys John Dorsey and Mark Russo were appointed to turn around the mall's finances and lure shoppers back. As part of their publicity push, they have effectively granted Townsend a pardon. They commissioned him to install art pieces in empty storefronts, and the malls movie theater hosted a premiere of the documentary. Dorsey even went into the mall's catacombs for a photo op where the apartment had been. And one of the ideas that Dorsey and Russo have floated to save the mall is converting some parts of it into residential apartments. Legal, non secret apartments. That episode was reported by Vanessa Lowe, Edited by Joe Rosenberg Tech production by Sharif Youssef A different version originally aired on the podcast Nocturne. Secret Mall Apartment is playing now in select cities. Michael and his friends filmed almost everything they did at the time and the footage is delightful to watch. We'll have a link in the show notes after the break. Where did moles come from? And where are they going in the credits of the Secret Mall Apartment documentary? There's one name in the special thanks section that will jump out at you if you're a longtime 99 PI listener, and that's the name Alexandra Lang. We've had her on the show as an expert eight times, which I think might be a record. Anyway, back in 2022 she came on the show to tell us about the rise and fall of the mall, how the COVID 19 pandemic accelerated the shift towards online shopping and what we should do with all that empty space. Like many teens in the 80s, my first job was at the mall. I was 14. I lied about my age. I was a busboy in an Applebee's style restaurant that no longer exists. On Saturdays I often worked three shifts in a row, so I witnessed the entire circadian and rhythm of the mall. At 8 o'clock I'd cleaned windows as the senior citizens in tracksuits powered through the empty halls, passing by shops with their cage doors still rolled down by midday. The families took over, and my usual job of clearing glasses and plates involved cleaning up piles of food spilled 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 or 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 they're dealt. And being able to walk around on your own, maybe buying a cassette tape of the Smith's live album at Sam Goody is the best that life has to offer.

[Alexandra Lang]

I was not a very cool teen. Let me just say, I was a very nerdy teen.

[Roman Mars]

This is cool adult and friend of the show, Alexander Language.

[Alexandra 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 beau at the mall. I did not, like, stroll around with shopping bags showing off at the mall. None of that.

[Roman Mars]

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 Fountain.

[Alexandra Lang]

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, like, think about a space for people to come together.

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Alexandra Lang]

I think that people are people and they're going to want to, like, 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 going to be excited to do that, because who wants to go to a park in December?

[Roman Mars]

We're going to 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?

[Alexandra Lang]

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 central aisle that usually had fountains and plants and benches and other amenities. So they were really just that super simple kind of I shaped plan.

[Roman Mars]

And this shape, the long hallway is where the word mall comes from.

[Alexandra Lang]

That's right, yeah. Basically the name mall comes from Pall 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 Pall 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 in the same mental place.

[Roman Mars]

That place with the reflecting pool and the Lincoln on one side, that's the Capitol Mall. But we don't.

[Alexandra Lang]

Yeah, Lincoln is the anchor store of the National Mall.

[Roman Mars]

He's the Macy's of the Capitol Mall. So Victor Gruen is credited as the father of the Mall. What was he trying to do? What was he trying to make?

[Alexandra Lang]

So Gruen 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 gather at 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, move to California, design our department stores. So he started designing these freestanding 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, 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, Gruen 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, I'm not gonna waste this time. I have on the ground in Detroit. It's like he asks his friends, where is life happening in Detroit? And they said, oh, it's all out in the suburbs.

[Roman Mars]

Okay.

[Alexandra Lang]

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 J.L. hudson 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.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, I've always wondered about that. Like, why do so many malls have cardinal directions in the name? Like no matter what city you're in, they're all like Westfield or Southport. Why is that?

[Alexandra Lang]

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, east or West. So all of them are like named after the cardinal point 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. They have kind of vague geographical associations. The problem really comes that 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 which city you're talking about.

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Alexandra Lang]

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.

[Roman Mars]

So Gruen designed these malls in Michigan and he saw the early mall as more of a mixed use hub. There were shops and department stores, but also post offices, doctor's offices. How long did that idea of a mall last?

[Alexandra Lang]

Yeah, Gruen 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 circa 1955, 1956 that had community spaces. They might have church spaces. They definitely had doctor's 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, like, by the mid-1960s, there 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.

[Roman Mars]

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 decline, or did they contribute in some way?

[Alexandra Lang]

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 that 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 in 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 and a drugstore and maybe a kid's 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 of this time and investment. That was not an accurate read on human behavior. So, very reluctantly, department store owners began first to build some small freestanding stores. They called them junior stores. And Then Gruen 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. So the Gruen idea of the indoor shopping mall allowed them to keep some of that glamour from downtown and also feed off other shopping, but move out to the suburbs.

[Roman Mars]

So these early malls go up and they get a lot of attention, especially this one large mall designed by Victor Gruen in Edina, 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?

[Alexandra Lang]

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 Edina to see Southdale and wrote this very glowing write up of it in Architectural Forum. And if you think about our stereotype of Jane Jacobs, she was all about the city, she was all about small business. But at that moment, it was really seen as an important new element or important new tool for creating urbanism in the suburbs.

[Roman Mars]

The outside of shopping malls is really boring. They're just like these 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 atriums. Why is that?

[Alexandra Lang]

I think that's where the community idea, this kind of utopian community idea from the Gruen 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, like take a little break in between going from store to store. You're going to stay there long. And so even if mall owners stopped paying money for architectural features on the outside, they still spent 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, 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 there aren't enough trash cans anymore. So part of the allure of the mall is of this beautiful and beautifully maintained indoor space that you can go to at any time, and the weather will always be perfect. And so 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. The mall can be a confusing and kind of, like, jangly place. But these perpetual architectural features help us orient ourselves.

[Roman Mars]

After the mall is introduced and it sort of, like, begins to replicate. Then we hit the building boom for malls in the 70s and 80s and. And then they really begin to change the landscape of America. Could you talk about that time and the sort of rise of the giant mall?

[Alexandra Lang]

The early malls, a lot of times are really quite simple. It's just like that I 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, you know, maybe get a snack in 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 Jerdy 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 it, an amusement park in the middle of a mall, it gets exponentially bigger.

[Roman Mars]

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, an aquarium, 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?

[Alexandra Lang]

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 arcades 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 whereas 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 they 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 a whole day there. And it's just a different mentality about shopping, and it's a slightly different relationship to the mall itself.

[Vanessa Lowe]

This is the San Dimas mall, and.

[Roman Mars]

This is where people of today's world hang out.

[Alexandra Lang]

Get in, loser. We're going shopping.

[Roman Mars]

Let's go to the mall.

[Alexandra Lang]

Today I went to the mall with a couple of friends.

[Vanessa Lowe]

I had a whole week's allowance to spend.

[Roman Mars]

I. 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?

[Alexandra Lang]

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 principle, 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 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 public 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 in These properties. One of the earliest cases in 1968, Thurgood Marshall goes before the U.S. 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 Thurgood Marshall, and B, that he had really articulated the way that 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 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.

[Vanessa Lowe]

During one of the busiest shopping weeks of the year, the Mall of America has caught up in a legal battle with protesters.

[Alexandra Lang]

Four leaders of Black Lives Matter say.

[Michael Townsend]

They received letters on Friday threatening arrests if Wednesday's rally takes place as planned inside the mall.

[Alexandra Lang]

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 leave. So it was kind of like, you're ruining our commercial display for Christmas with your protests. You have to think about, 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 know you're not going to have people see you and join you and have media coverage. So in a place like Minneapolis in the winter, the concentration of people were gonna 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.

[Roman Mars]

We're past the heyday of the mall now. How many malls have closed and are malls actually dying off? Or, like, what are the numbers? Like.

[Alexandra Lang]

Like, at their peak, there were approximately, like, 2000 enclosed malls in the U.S. i think that number went down to about 1500, you know, over the past 10 years. And people are expecting us to end up like after the pandemic, probably around like 800 enclosed 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. You know, like in the New York area, it's things like King of Prussia outside Philadelphia or the mall at Short Hills in 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 depressing glamour shots at and also the ones that are potential sites for adaptive reuse.

[Roman Mars]

What do you cite as the reason for malls closing?

[Alexandra Lang]

It's a whole bunch of things. You know, 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. 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 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, 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.

[Roman Mars]

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 Gruen's original design of the mall. But you write that it's usually a bad sign for the mall when this happens because they've probably given the DMV cheap rent because they're desperate to draw people in. So, I mean, this is kind of ironic.

[Alexandra Lang]

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 will 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 and 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.

[Roman Mars]

Is there a way for struggling malls to recover? Is there a formula that actually works?

[Alexandra Lang]

Some malls have been saved or at least stabilized by things like trampoline parks coming in. Again, 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 were getting by on essentially all having the same mix of stores and restaurants, just at different price points. So you'd kind of 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 of 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 suburbs. So you have 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, which sell things that they can't get. Online.

[Roman Mars]

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?

[Alexandra Lang]

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.

[Roman Mars]

There have been some cases of adaptive reuse where a new business or something has taken over a dead mall. What is the most interesting example of that that you've seen?

[Alexandra Lang]

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 room full of computers, like workshop space. 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 which can be student housing, but other of which can just be, you know, affordable rental apartments.

[Roman Mars]

It's great if we could reuse these dead malls in some way. Like, people always say that the greenest building is a building that's already built. How do you feel about it when it comes to reusing malls?

[Alexandra Lang]

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, like, very poignant family memories of things that happened in the food court at that mall. Mall. These buildings aren't just buildings in their communities. 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 stops the mental process that it takes to then think of, okay, like, 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 like, 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?

[Roman Mars]

Well, this has been so great. I've really enjoyed the book too. It was just so much fun to both, like, learn a lot of stuff and also, like, have all this information slot into my own sort of like, lived experience of a mall. I appreciate it.

[Alexandra Lang]

Thanks for having me.

[Roman Mars]

Alexandra Leng's book is called Meet Me by the An 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 has 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% Invisible City I wrote that for the back of this book. That's how much I believe in this book. So you should get it. That episode was produced by Chris Barube and fact checked by by Liz Boyd. Music for both stories by Swan Rial. This whole episode was produced and remixed by Martin Gonzalez, who actually grew up in Providence. He was scooping ice cream at the Ben and Jerry's in the mall's food court in 2003, all while this was happening, yet somehow was completely unaware of it until he heard the original 99pi story. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kolstead is the digital director. Delaney hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lesh, Madonna, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on Blue sky as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of Night 99 [e-mail].