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Meet Me by the Fountain
00:46:10
Alexandra Lange joins Slate Money to talk about the history of malls.
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- [00:01]
A
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- [01:10]
B
Hello. Welcome to the Meet Me by the Fountain episode of Slate Money, your guide to what is normally the business and finance news of the week. But this week is the the business and finance news of shopping malls. We are devoting this entire episode to shopping malls, which are the best subject. It's not just me. Felix Hammond of Axios. And Emily Peck of Axios.
- [01:35]
A
Hello.
- [01:35]
B
Hello. And Elizabeth Spires. Hello. But we actually have an expert on. Alexandra Lang. Welcome. Tell us about yourself. Who are you and what is this book that you have written?
- [01:47]
C
I am an architecture and design critic, and I have written a book about the history and the future of the shopping mall.
- [01:55]
B
It's a great book, and we are gonna talk about that on this show. We're gonna talk about the Gruen Transfer. We're gonna talk about entertainment. We're gonna talk about whether malls are dead, whether online shopping has killed things. We're gonna talk about the human need for proximity.
- [02:10]
A
And Felix will share a very special mall memory.
- [02:13]
B
Oh, yeah. You get. After I do my standard, like, blase Manhattanite, I live in a bubble eye rolling thing about, like, I hate all the malls, I will actually, at the very end of this show, get dragged out of me the one lovely moment of shopping mall joy that I remember very fondly. It's all coming up on Slate Money.
- [02:39]
A
Maybe you could start off by telling us sort of why you thought we needed to have a book about shopping malls, because I know for a long time they were kind of looked down at by the architectural community.
- [02:49]
C
Yeah. Well, the first thing is the last big book on shopping Malls was published in the 80s. It's called the Malling of America and it was actually pretty popular at the time. And it's a fun read. So I think anytime you're looking for a nonfiction book subject and you realize the last book was written 30 years ago, that's generally like a good place to be. But more than that, I just felt like after about 30 years things become historic and that's when they become interesting. And a lot of the last great wave of mall building is about 30 years old now. And it seemed like it was time to take a closer look at this architecture, this experience, this place that was so meaningful to me as a child of the 80s and I thought was meaningful to a lot of other people too.
- [03:41]
B
So one of the things I really love about this is that you are an architecture critic, you think a lot about the architecture. And when most of us, myself included, think about architecture, the first thing we think about nearly always is what does a building look like from the outside and the crenellations and the windows and the, you know, the way it sits on the street and all of this stuff that just doesn't apply to shopping malls. The vast majority of which basically just look like a massive beige box from the outside.
- [04:19]
C
Yes. And the answer to why, which I'm sure was your follow up question, is that the developers of mall quickly found out that making the outsides of their boxes interesting did not pay. There was absolutely no financial reason to do an interesting outside. So they just slapped a big department store logo on the outside and they put all their money inside to the beautiful fountains and atriums and glass roofs and the rest of it that, that we know and love.
- [04:49]
B
That was actually one question that I had in the back of my head was, wasn't there a famous book by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown where they talk about decorated sheds and how like a bunch of like quite cheap but bright and pretty decoration on the outside of a beige box is like this deeply American thing that drives people in. Does that is, does that not apply to shopping malls?
- [05:14]
C
Somehow that does not apply to shopping malls. I mean, Vinturi and Scott Brow designed a bunch of really amazing decorated sheds for Best Products company which was basically the target of its era. One of my favorites had a big wallpaper pattern all across the outside and indeed like you can decorate a box on the cheap. But that did not apply to malls in the sense that like, it just was not necessary and nobody was really asking for it either. If you look at photographs of malls, what you Actually see in the foreground is a lot of cars and the boxes really recede. So there isn't really so much of a moment where you're just looking at a mall in isolation without the cars as this purely architectural object. And if you are having that moment, you're quickly hustling inside and then you're seeing the good part. So it's, it's just a really different architectural experience than something that's on the street of a city or something that has to attract attention on a roadside. You know, like the original McDonald's or like Whataburgers, which are in those great a frame shacks. The mall, you know, you're going to the mall, it has already attracted you. Maybe there is a large sign slightly closer to the highway, but it really doesn't need that curbside appeal.
- [06:39]
B
And weirdly what you get is sort of faux architecture on the inside. Like I can kind of imagine a whataburger, not an actual whataburger, but some kind of a franchise on the inside or you know, a restaurant with its own like roof, which doesn't protect you from anything because the mall itself has a roof. But they recreate smaller scale architecture within the larger scale architecture to sort of make you feel like a point of something you're familiar with, I guess.
- [07:11]
C
Yeah, well, the best design malls are really a container for all of these brands. So the mall architecture itself, even on the inside, tends to assert itself in the atrium and maybe a little bit in the food court. But the rest of it is meant to be a pretty bland container that then different brands can pop in and out of because, yeah, they're going to have their own mini architecture. And that's because, you know, the mall in essence is recreating a downtown street or a main street, which again has a kind of recessive basic architecture with glass show windows that you don't really pay attention to when there's something much brighter and more attractive in the windows or in the signage on the storefronts.
- [07:56]
A
One part of your book, you sort of go into detail on how the mall owners have a lot of say over each of those individual brand spaces, like selling stores, what kind of flooring they can use and how their spaces can be designed and all that. Can you talk about how much control the mall owners have over like the look and feel of the stores in the mall?
- [08:18]
C
That part was a tour that I got with Nancy Nasher, the longtime family owner of north park in Dallas. And that is a very high end mall. And they have especially strict Standards like they don't allow you to put a sandwich board outside your store. They don't allow your signage to overlap the architecture of the kind of entablature around the entrance to the boutique at all. But a lot of other malls are a little bit more laissez faire about it. But indeed, the owner of a mall can say, you can't have plastic decorations outside your store. You can't put up Christmas decorations until one week after Thanksgiving. You can't have a sandwich board. You can't have half naked models standing outside and spraying people with perfume. All of this is within the purview of the lease agreement with the mall owner. And so different brands know going in kind of what they can get away with and what they cannot get away with.
- [09:19]
B
So that that kind of implies that you don't have perfectly aligned incentives between the store owners and the mall owners. The, you know, left to their own devices, the store owners who are presumably trying to maximize profits would do one thing and the mall owners who are also trying to maximize profits would do another thing. So where does that disconnect come from, given that the mall owners ultimately make money when the store owners make money?
- [09:49]
C
Well, I think it's really ultimately about cacophony. And if you have every brand in your mall that has 200 stores doing the most, it's really going to be too much. Nobody's going to be able to see anything. So I think what the mall owners are trying to do is give each brand the space to showcase itself, but then not compete so much either visually, orally, in terms of sense, even with the stores that are adjacent to it. So it's really trying to achieve this balance where everyone can establish their own identity but not be yelling over each other.
- [10:33]
D
In the beginning of the book, you talk a lot about these early malls where they're all very innovative and there's a lot of design considerations that go into them. And the owners seem to, and Northpark is a good example of it. They seem to conceive of the mall as a kind of grand social experiment. So each of them are designed in very unique ways. The owners think a lot about how the mall approximates the public square and so on. My impression, as also a child of the 80s, is that at some point malls just became very cookie cutter. You know, they all kind of look the same. They had similarly designed food court. What was the inflection point there?
- [11:09]
C
The inflection point is really in the 1990s where malls start to be bundled together into these real Estate investment trusts. And you start having a lot fewer, you know, kind of owners of 10 malls in a geographical area, owners of 20 malls across the Midwest. And you start to get a company like Simon, which now owns 100 malls all across the US and they have a certain amount of regularity that they want across their malls. They don't have the kind of fine grained understanding of exactly what that community is and what it might want that those family oriented mall companies used to have.
- [11:53]
A
When you're talking about family oriented, it reminded me that I wanted to have you tell listeners a bit more about kind of the origins of the mall, how it sort of the mall kind of grew hand in hand out of the suburbs in the United States and is really in the early days, I think developers were thinking of it as a place mostly for white housewives with children. Right. I mean, can you talk more about that for listeners? Because I thought that was just really hadn't thought about it quite like that before.
- [12:23]
C
Yeah. And that was actually something that was kind of a revelation to me when I was doing my research. Like I knew the history of the American suburbs, but I hadn't really thought about what role the mall played in the development of those suburbs. And so, you know, in the post war era, it's 1945, the soldiers are coming home from the war. The government is investing in a lot of big projects and the two things they're mainly investing in is the building of the interstate highway system and then they're also subsidizing mortgages. So a lot of the soldiers coming home, though primarily the white soldiers, could get low interest mortgages and buy new houses in the suburbs. So the government is paying for the roads and the houses, but they aren't paying for a space in between those two things. They aren't paying for a communal space for people who, well, women and children who are at home during the day to come out of those houses and gather. And so that's where the mall comes in. And I think that's really the brilliance of Victor Gruen, the father of the shopping mall, who designed the first indoor shopping mall in Edina, Minnesota, Southdale, which opened in 1956. And he really saw it as this community space where mothers would come during the day with their children and eat at the so called sidewalk cafe and play on the carousel and kind of, you know, be together.
- [13:47]
B
So we've mentioned Victor Gruen. We need to talk about the Gruen transfer, which is this, which is like the most American thing in the world. There's Nothing more American than the Gruen transfer. And not being an American, I'm not sure I entirely understand it, but explain it to me. Is it basically the idea that shopping stops becoming something you need to do and starts becoming like an entertainment thing?
- [14:13]
C
It's less about entertainment, though. That comes in later actually, with John jerdy and the 80s mall and putting a roller coaster in the middle. It's more about shopping changing from being a task into a pleasure. Or you're at the mall and you have your list of errands, but you find that you've kind of forgotten about the list and you're just browsing. So it's that moment where you're mind kind of takes leave of your rational, economic self and you're just wandering around the mall for the pleasure of it.
- [14:46]
A
Yeah, it's, you know, you go shopping for shoes, but you come home and you have a new shirt, a new hat, you've bought lunch and an ice cream or a big present.
- [14:55]
B
You're looking at me like I'm meant.
- [14:57]
A
To relate to this, you know, you know, this Felix. But then you're like, wait, I forgot the shoes.
- [15:02]
C
And it's even nicer when you're with a friend. I just think that's a really important part of this whole story is our human need for things to do with our friends and a place to do them in. The combination of kind of wandering and yes, getting some things done, but also chatting. That's just something we all want to do. And that's part of the reason I think, that we will go back to the mall. Because I don't see humanity changing that much even.
- [15:29]
B
And it's not just friends. I think this is one of the things that really struck me in your book. It's also strangers or neighbors that you don't necessarily know their names, but you might recognize their face if you've seen them often enough. That in thousands of years of humanity, if you look at the way that cities develop, there was always some kind of Zocalo. There was some kind of public square in the middle. And there was always a natural inclination of the inhabitants of those cities to gather in those squares, in those parks, in those public spaces, to see and be seen and to, you know, engage in the social animalness that we are. And that natural inclination had no natural outlet in the suburbs. There were no such squares in the suburbs. And the mall just perfectly filled that need. Or maybe it didn't perfectly fill that need, but it was the capitalist answer to filling that need. It was a way to make money out of filling that need.
- [16:31]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I have to say that a lot of the other mall history books that I read, in the first chapter, they would talk about the agora in ancient Athens as being the template for the mall. And honestly, that just kind of made me roll my eyes. Like, why do we always have to have this Greek example to make ourselves feel better? So I didn't put that in my book, but what you just described is basically that. So maybe I should have. But it's also important that Victor Gruen was a Viennese immigrant. He was Jewish. He fled the Nazis and came to New York in 1938. So his model was the charming sidewalk cafes of Vienna that he had grown up with. So this sort of more ancient model of the European small scale city that has a lot of street life.
- [17:22]
B
If only he'd brought the Sachertorte with him at the same time, America would be so much better.
- [17:28]
D
We were all talking about the book before we went on the podcast, and Felix mentioned that when he's heard you talk about the book before, people just invariably launch into their own memories of malls when they were teenagers. And we're all Gen Xers. And so I think the mall was a very formative experience for us. And you have this really fun chapter in your book where you talk a lot about the pop culture significance of the mall and where the idea of the mall fits into the experiences of Gen Xers growing up. Because it was a place you went when you were a teenager.
- [18:01]
B
Yeah. And this is one of the great themes running through the book is the mall as a place for teens. Again, the teens had nowhere else to go, so they kind of adopted it as their own. And the mall owners have this fascinating relationship with the teens where they kind of want them to come in and spend, but they don't want them to be teens.
- [18:22]
C
Yeah, it was really fascinating to go back through a lot of those kind of movies that embody teen culture in the 90s and 2000s, Clueless being my favorite. And just take a closer look at the mall scenes and where in the mall those scenes are set and how the mall is being used. In the chapter on teens, I talk a lot about the atrium because that really is the place to see and be seen. And in fact, if you then look at the history of teen stars who did these mall tours, they were all doing their tours in the atrium. So it was kind of amping up what was already a teen pattern of clustering around the Edges and watching people going up and down on the escalators and commenting on their outfits and that whole thing. And you see that played out in the teen movies. I think it's really interesting. I really like the more recent teen movie to all the boys I've loved before. And that movie has no mall scene. And I just. It's sort of like, why doesn't it have a mall scene? It's very. I feel like it's very Pinterest because all the design emphasis is on Lara Jean's bedroom. So it's definitely a sign of the times. But I feel like that movie is a little bit calling out for a mall scene.
- [19:39]
B
Yeah.
- [19:40]
A
Well, then you wonder. I mean, malls don't seem as relevant now as they did when we were growing up. Partly because you don't need to go anywhere now, Right? You can just go on TikTok or Instagram. You can text or FaceTime your friend all day. You don't need to actually meet up at the mall.
- [19:53]
D
Yeah, the town square is online now if you're a teenager.
- [19:57]
B
I don't agree, but I want to know what Alexandra says.
- [20:00]
C
I've written a lot about teens and their online behavior, and I've talked to people who study it, and they say that teens are online, but often they're online and together at the same time. Like, they'll go to the mall and be sitting in the food court and be looking at TikToks together, or they'll be texting their friend that couldn't come out with them so that they're kind of part of the conversation so that it's not necessarily a one or the other thing. I would also say that, you know, my niece and nephew are growing up in Durham, North Carolina, which is where I grew up. And my niece is 15 and pre pandemic. She would go with her friends to the shops at South Pointe, which is the kind of fancy new mall that did not exist when I was a kid, and wander around in just the same way that I used to wander around South Square Mall, which it kind of cannibalized and replaced. So I think that there are definitely differences now, but I think that teens are still seeking, you know, in person, hanging out.
- [21:02]
B
So I want to know, when you. When you talk about the fancy new mall cannibalizing the old one, what is it about the new mall that makes it fancier than the old one or more desirable or why would people go to that one rather than the one you grew up in?
- [21:17]
C
Well, it has a Nordstrom and it has a Williams Sonoma. So first of all, it just has higher end stores. And the other thing was it was built, I think in 2000 and it is what's called a lifestyle center, which is actually partially indoor, partially outdoor mall. But basically it has an uncovered quote unquote street running down the center of it. And many of the stores open off that outdoor sort of pedestrian street rather than being under cover. And that's partially made possible by the fact that Durham is a pretty temperate location. There have always been a lot more of those types of outdoor malls in California and Arizona, for example, but that was definitely a mini trend in the early 2000s to replace what we're seeing as the kind of old elephantine enclosed malls with these indoor outdoor spaces.
- [22:14]
A
And they don't call them malls, right?
- [22:16]
C
You have no. They call them lifestyle centers. Yeah, they're always trying to. I mean the powers that be of Maldom are always trying to change the language. So it seems like they're providing something new. But I really think that the lifestyle centers are just an indoor mall with the roof taken off and sometimes some kind of architectural nods to wherever it is. So, you know, in Connecticut some of the outdoor stores will have a white painted pediment like it was the town hall in some colonial town. And I mean these just kind of very silly vestigial architectural features that kind of tell you where you are.
- [22:59]
B
I have this feeling that outlet malls are nearly always outdoors. Is that right?
- [23:02]
C
That is correct. And I actually decided not to talk about outlets malls in the book because they are quite a different business model and have a different story.
- [23:13]
B
Is there a reason they're all outdoors?
- [23:15]
C
It's less expensive. And I believe the individual brands own their individual outlet locations.
- [23:22]
B
Oh, fantastic. Business mall. No one owns them all.
- [23:28]
C
Yeah, I mean, I would want to check that because as I said, I'm not an outlet mall expert, but that is why I didn't include those. Another thing that someone else brought up is airport malls, which are actually organized by many of the same entities as off airport malls. But again, I felt like to talk about the rise of airport malls involved talking about a bunch of airport history. And that was just going to take me too far off the path.
- [23:56]
B
People like airports when they bring in a bunch of new shiny retail, you know, like people are like, oh my God, have you been to the new LaGuardia? It's got like shops and there's a water feature in the middle of it. And doesn't that like in and of itself make it a better airport? Like it does. Somehow there's the. The shopping improves the experience, even if you don't go into any of the shops.
- [24:19]
D
So the airports are now basically malls with a side business and air travel.
- [24:23]
C
Yeah. I think that is, again, the grue and transfer at work that suddenly you're not hating your layover in that airport as much because you have things to look at.
- [24:33]
B
And so we should. Since we've mentioned the Gruen transfer, you should mention as well what the Gendi transfer is. Sorry, the Jordy transfer.
- [24:43]
C
The journey transfer. So John Giudi was a California architect who comes in the 80s and is like, okay, this Gruen model of shopping is kind of getting old and tired. We need to take it up about 25 notches. Now, the mall is not about shopping, but it's about entertainment. And I'm gonna put an entire theme park in the middle of my mall. And that mall is the Mall of America.
- [25:11]
B
And that was then copied across. He then rebuilt that in various different forms in various different states with various different, like, very explicit entertainment options in it where people would go. The ostensible reason for going stopped being the shopping and started being the fun.
- [25:30]
C
Yeah, just the fun. And those what I call very big malls became tourist destinations in themselves. Like, you could fly to the Minneapolis airport and stay at a hotel next to the Mall of America and spend your whole weekend at the Mall of America with your kids. Like, that was considered a completely, you know, reasonable vacation in the 1990s and an exciting vacation because you were getting, you know, some of the thrills of Disney. Plus, the different wings of the malls were themed to different other tourist destinations. So there was kind of a New Orleans wing, and there was sort of a European wing. So you were getting that also under one roof. So it was a whole thing. And actually, you know, I wrote this book mostly during the pandemic, and I had a spring break trip to the Mall of America with my family planned for April 2020 that I had to cancel because I wanted to have that experience, even though I was a little bit nervous about the whole thing.
- [26:32]
A
I remember covering malls a little bit, like, back after the financial crisis, and all the stories that got all the most page views online at the Wall Street Journal were like, malls are dying. Malls are dead. Look at this slideshow of dead malls. But.
- [26:48]
C
But I don't think.
- [26:50]
A
But malls aren't dead.
- [26:51]
C
But, like, that's.
- [26:52]
A
That's what everyone thinks.
- [26:55]
B
But you do have a wonderful chapter on slideshows of dead malls.
- [26:59]
C
Yeah, I had to grapple with that because that is what people still think. But you were writing those stories in 2008 and now we're in 2022, so that's actually a long time. So, I mean, the number one thing I would say is that visuals are incredibly powerful. I'm a visual person. I write about visual and spatial things. All the. So those dead mall photographs went viral and people just assumed that that meant all malls were dead from now, forever going forward. Because the photos are in fact, very beautiful. And as I write in the book, they are part of this long tradition of ruined porn and our kind of attraction to these slightly scary, slightly spooky places. So they fit into this established visual pattern. Many of them went viral. A lot of the dead mall photographers are very famous now, and so on and so forth. But the truth is that, yes, many malls are dying for a variety of reasons. But there are also many malls that are still very popular and are minting money. Those tend to be the high end malls, like basically malls with the Nordstrom or Neiman Marcus, which are among the few department store chains that are still doing well, and malls that have really kept up a good tenant mix that includes higher end destination stores and a lot of the designer brands.
- [28:28]
B
So what then happens to the need for a town square among lower income suburbanites?
- [28:36]
C
Well, in some cases, and I write about these, the dead malls have been taken over by the population of newly diverse suburbs and have been turned into ethnocentric marketplaces that have become that town square. I talk about this one, Plaza Fiesta outside Atlanta, that is basically a Latin American mall. It has a huge playground in the center. It has travel agents that help people fly to Latin and Central America. It has everything you would need for your quinceanera. It has great food. So like, it's become that town square for the population that now occupies the suburbs around it, which are so far from the population that Victor Gruen was originally designing for. The suburbs have changed so much since the 1950s. And another branch of the mall tree that's very successful are malls that have kind of grown with their suburb and change with the times.
- [29:35]
A
I was thinking about that chapter a lot recently because we've been talking a lot about office space now and how companies don't need as much office space as they used to. And it kind of feels like maybe that offices will go through a similar kind of transition where like the high quality spaces will remain and companies will still want those, but then the lower end office spaces will kind of become lower priced and maybe they'll be felix Was saying, you know, other companies will move into these office buildings or something. And I guess you don't have to worry so much about commercial real estate staying empty for long in the United States, something comes along to fill it up.
- [30:14]
B
It depends where it is. In the suburbs, you need to worry. In New York City, in Manhattan, you don't need to worry.
- [30:19]
A
Okay, but I mean, it sounds like what Alexandra is saying, you don't need to worry because the suburbs evolved to become more diverse and the malls evolved along with them. Some died, but not all of them.
- [30:30]
C
Yeah. Well, it's interesting. There's definitely a parallel between dead suburban malls and dead suburban office parks. And I don't know if you all read Emily Badger's story in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. Which is really good. And actually Emily and I are friends and while she was working on this, and I've written about corporate office space also in the past, so she sent me this really interesting piece of legislation that is in front of the New Jersey assembly right now, which is basically lifting the single use zoning rules for dead malls and dead office parks and suburbs so that they can more easily be redeveloped as mixed use places. And I thought it was. It's really interesting to read because it talks explicitly about how these things become these kind of black holes that drag the community around them down. And it starts to undo all of these decades of single use suburban zoning that's been really difficult and is part of why so many suburbs are still very hostile to pedestrians. Why they don't, you know, have enough retail outside the mall in some cases. So I think it's really smart legislation and it explicitly connects those two kinds of suburban architecture as a problem and a problem with a similar solution.
- [31:54]
B
And the solution, just to be clear, is to just jumble everything up and get not only the retail and the offices in the same place, but even have residential in there as well.
- [32:07]
C
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, as part of the diversification of the suburbs, one of the things that's part of that diversity is different types of family structures and also just increasing density. You know, these suburbs were built at a time when the idea was, you know, heterosexual couple and their two kids, but that's not how most people are living now. And so more different types of residential architecture is really important for the future of suburbs. And those mall parking lots are just crying out for new housing to be built on the blacktop, you know, closer to the edges. So that there's actually a sense of quasi urban pedestrian fabric, you know, the whole nine yards. There's so much that you can do with the amount of square footage that is embodied by a dead mall in its parking lots.
- [32:56]
A
I'm also thinking as you're talking like because of the pandemic, these formerly bedroom communities aren't that anymore. Like people live in the suburbs in a way they didn't used to.
- [33:06]
B
Right.
- [33:07]
A
There's fewer people commuting into the city every day. So. And there's more need for sort of mixed use real estate. If more people are working from home, they're going to want to, you know, go into town and get a coffee and maybe sit somewhere with their laptop or meet up with co workers and stuff like that. So there's even greater maybe demand for mixed use kind of buildings and stuff. And also when you're working from home all day, you don't want to go to a mall that like takes a big chunk of time. It's a time investment to go to the mall. You can't just like zip in and out of the mall.
- [33:39]
C
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely true. And even before the pandemic, some of the malls that were contending with the demise of the department store, which I think is a true death, were thinking about putting co working spaces in some of the boxes that formerly held department stores. And I actually think that could be a good idea. I think that even if people are working from home a sometimes they have to go out, they want to have coffee with someone, they want to have a business lunch in their suburb. But a lot of people don't have homes that are really sized for long term work. And so they might want a desk somewhere that is walkable or is not that far from their house. And so they might want an office park. But it's really like a lot of people co working in an office park.
- [34:34]
D
Yeah, you talk a little bit in the book about the difference between malls in other countries and malls here. And then the evolution, how sometimes the evolution of the malls has diverged depending on where you are. What are some of the more high end evolutions that you've seen that are very different from what we have here?
- [34:52]
C
Well, the malls that people kept saying to me, why aren't you writing about X? Were the malls in Asia, which I have only experienced a little bit most recently I went to Seoul in 2019. But malls in Asia tend to be much more vertical. They are usually embedded in the city, they are usually served by public transportation. And that I think that kind of hyper dense but also hyper networked mall is much more where they need to go in the future as we try to kind of move the country away from the automob or quite so much automobile dependence. And you know, one thing that someone said to me, who's lived in China for a long time, is that the streets outside in China can be really cacophonous and really trafficky. So the mall is like an easier version of the street. And people do use it to walk around and have better air quality and have that kind of ease, which is, I think, something that always called people to the mall and is something that mall walkers, for example, always talk about being part of the mall. Like it's just easier than walking on the street.
- [36:04]
B
One of the things I remember from Stefan Al's book about super tall skyscrapers is that that kind of vertical mall where you have a subway station at the basement and then you have a bunch of levels of retail, and then it becomes offices and then a hotel and then residential at the very top. That kind of super big building like that is an amazing way, at least in Hong Kong and I think in a few other cities, of subsidizing the public transport system. The Hong Kong metro makes a profit because it actually gets a bunch of that revenue from all of that subterranean space that used to be just like dirt and is now super valuable retail.
- [36:52]
C
Yeah. And basically transit oriented malls and adjacent development is also the business model for mall development in Chile and in the Philippines, which actually has some of the largest malls in the world. So that's definitely something that people are very successfully doing elsewhere. And I think one of the things I say in the book about Seoul is it felt like everywhere was on top of a mall. Like, anytime I exited the subway system, there was at least a single story of really cool bookstores and coffee shops before I went upstairs and I was in an office building or I was in a museum or something else. And it was just very natural. And I mean, there are a few places in New York that have those kind of underground concourses, but they tend not to be the nicest stores. Or I guess there was that one bar that people used to like in.
- [37:42]
B
The subways on 50th Street.
- [37:45]
C
Yeah, exactly, exactly. I never went there, but I felt like in Seoul it was just a matter of course. And the options there were, you know, very cool and very up to date, and I wanted to check them out. And so it was just this very natural layering of a different kind of retail into the city that then was very convenient when you went up top and Went about your business. I mean, I think you can see that a little bit in the popularity, the ongoing popularity of the Winter Garden and then the sort of food court at Brookfield Place that a lot of magazine editors have their offices upstairs go to for lunch.
- [38:25]
B
And I, when Conde Nest moves in next door, you know, it's going to be cool.
- [38:29]
C
Yeah, right.
- [38:29]
A
Is that near the Winter Garden?
- [38:30]
B
Yeah, the way next door.
- [38:31]
C
It's right off of it. But you see how that is so much more popular than the mall that's in the Oculus, which is a terribly designed mall and just like has none of the good mallies and has no food and all the bad mall qualities. Yeah.
- [38:45]
B
Because people, if there's no food, no one's interested. So I just want to finish by asking like, if this is the case, and the vertical mall with the subway station in the ground and the retail above that, and then the hotels and the residential and everything in the same place. If this is the vision of the future, then how is it that absolutely everyone, yourself included, hates Hudson Yard so much?
- [39:15]
A
Should you tell listeners what Hudson Yard is?
- [39:17]
B
Yeah, tell us what Hudson Yards is and let's tell us how terrible it is.
- [39:19]
C
So Hudson Yard is the mall and mixed use high end retail development that opened in 2018 on the west side of Manhattan. And today it's often best known for the terrible Thomas Heatherwick sculpture the Vessel that is now closed because it turns out to be a suicide magnet. So the problem with Hudson Yards is it is terribly designed. I mean, it's terribly designed. The most fun part of it is Mercado Little Spain, which is the high end food court developed by Jose Andres, which is stuck underneath the mall so that you have to go to it through a completely different entrance. And you can also completely avoid the rest of the mall. So none of the kind of design and conviviality of that space bleeds into the mall. And then when you go into Hudson Yards, there is no central atrium, there is no fountain, there's nowhere to meet. There's just this stacked vertical space that's designed in a very kind of mundane luxury way that is confusing to navigate. And you never feel like there's a there there. You never feel like you've gotten to the good part.
- [40:39]
B
I think you mentioned in the book that you'd been there like half a dozen times and you got lost every time.
- [40:44]
C
Yes. And I'm, I mean, so many people have said, oh, I find moths so confusing. And I'm like, really? I don't find moths confusing at all. But I find Hudson Yards confusing. And, you know, I got a tour with one of the related execs and he explained it all to me and I was just like, I don't believe you. Like you're telling me something that I am personally just not experiencing at all.
- [41:08]
D
What was his logic?
- [41:09]
C
He says that each floor is kind of for a different demographic income level, and you just kind of keep wrapping around on the escalators and. Yes.
- [41:22]
A
Wait, what?
- [41:24]
B
It's like the J.G. ballard book high rise, where depending on how much money you have, you're on a different floor.
- [41:29]
A
Yeah, like that apocalyptic train where each car is like Tilda Swinton.
- [41:32]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [41:33]
C
I mean, that is actually true about other malls, like at North Park. North park is kind of a square donut. And Neiman Marcus is in one corner of that square. And all of the luxury brand stores are right outside Neiman Barncas. So if you're a really rich person, you only need to go to Neiman Marcus and Luxury Row. I mean, you know, they have like Dolce and Gabbana and Tiffany. They're like the highest end brands. Vuitton and at Hudson Yards. That's all on the first floor. Sorry, I haven't been there in a while. That's all on the first floor. So if you're a luxury shopper, you only have to go to the first floor. And then it's like one level up you get like the Zaras and the Aritzias and things like that. And then one level up from that, there are cheaper things. And then one level up from that, there's actually food, but you can't see the food from the bottom. And there's no sort of communal eating space up there. And that's also where they stuck their Neiman Marcus, which didn't do very well because again, it had no presence. So there were a lot of like, highly paid retail experts who put their two cents into that mall. But I just do not personally feel it makes a lick of sense.
- [42:46]
B
Well, it's not just you personally. It's like literally everyone agrees with you.
- [42:49]
C
They just did a very bad job.
- [42:51]
B
But this is kind of reassuring to me in a weird way that, you know, we still don't know so much about malls and shopping and human behavior that it is possible to spend $40 billion on something as enormous as Hudson Yards or whatever the total budget was and just get it completely wrong. Like, there is. There is an ability to. This is not settled science. Like there is this idea, I think, sort of running through the book the, you know, Victor Gruen kind of like found the formula and then people, you know, expanded on the formula, but the formula is known. And I think this is proof that the formula is not. Is not quite as deeply understood as you might think, given that it's possible to fuck it up so spectacularly.
- [43:42]
C
Right. I think there's economics and science and studies of human behavior, but with all retail and all brands, like, there is some kind of ineffable cultural quality, like, does this feel good that you have to make happen? And sometimes it does not happen, but.
- [44:02]
B
If it does happen, it happens in North Dallas. Right. That's the spiritual home of the great shopping mall. Yeah.
- [44:07]
C
I really love north park and. And now I've studied it a lot, but I remember the first time someone told me, oh, you have to see this mall. And I walked in and I was like, oh, my God, what is this place? I just had a completely authentic joy reaction. And everyone I know who's been there has had the same reaction. So it is legitimately a beautiful place and a beautiful shopping experience.
- [44:32]
B
Elizabeth, have you ever felt authentic joy into walking into a shopping mall that wasn't one you drew? I mean, how about you, Emily?
- [44:40]
A
Yeah, when I was growing up, we would go to different malls, and it would be exciting because one mall we'd go to would be really nice somehow. It'd have a fancier department store or something. And you'd be like, well, this is a nice mall. And I don't kind of remember the design elements that made me feel.
- [44:53]
B
That happened to me once when I moved to Palo Alto as a teenager and we walked into the Stamford Shopping center for the first time. And that was amazing. I didn't realize how old that was. That was very, very early on, right?
- [45:08]
C
Yes. Stanford Shopping center is a great example. That's kind of the template for those lifestyle centers that I was talking about earlier. And it is really beautiful. I also love the Stanford Shopping Center.
- [45:20]
B
So there you have it.
- [45:20]
C
There you go.
- [45:21]
A
Felix, you have a mall memory you shared with us.
- [45:23]
B
Oh, my God. We used to go to Gaylord's Indian Restaurant in the Stanford Shopping Centre. And it was. It was my favorite thing in the world.
- [45:30]
C
I got you in the end.
- [45:33]
B
Alexandra. Thank you for getting me in the. I have come around to your way of thinking. Thanks for writing this book, which is fantastic. Meet me by the fountain and. Yeah, thanks for coming on Sleep Money.
- [45:44]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [46:01]
B
Sam.