Slow Burn presents: Decoder Ring - The Mall is Dead (Long Live the Mall)

Summary

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Slow Burn Presents: Decoder Ring – "The Mall is Dead (Long Live the Mall)"

Date: July 26, 2022
Host: Willa Paskin (Decoder Ring), with Susan Matthews (Slow Burn)
Featured Guest: Alexandra Lange, author of Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

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Episode Overview

This episode of Slow Burn presents an edition of Decoder Ring, delving into the cultural history, evolving identity, and contradictory fate of the American shopping mall. With architecture critic Alexandra Lange as the expert guide, the episode follows the mall from its utopian origins, through its status as a social nexus, to its supposed decline—and questions reports of its “death.” Through personal anecdotes, expert analysis, and reflections on how malls shaped, divided, and continue to adapt to American society, the show examines what’s lost—and what just might survive—if malls disappear.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Decoder Ring’s Approach and Season Preview

• Host Willa Paskin describes Decoder Ring as:
  "A narrative podcast that is kind of fun. I mean, we're serious too, but we're also fun. We look at culture and pop culture... from the 20th century and just try to answer questions about it." (Willa Paskin, 01:30)
• Preview of episodes on Mae West, a forgotten 1970s poet, and, today, on the fate of the shopping mall.

The Mall in American Life: Stories from Mall-Goers

• Multiple guests share formative mall memories: adolescent rebellions, style experiments, and the food court as a news source or a stage for social antics.
  • "I remember going to Mrs. Field's Cookies. Actually. That's where I learned that Tupac Shakur had died while I was, like, waiting in line for chocolate chip cookies." (Sabrina Depest, 05:16)

The Birth of the Mall: Victor Gruen’s Vision

• Victor Gruen, Viennese architect and socialist cabaret member, escapes the Nazis, lands in America, and transforms retail and suburban planning.
  • "Architect as a creative expression will die if it cannot create conditions within which it can be meaningful." (Victor Gruen, archival, 08:47)
• Gruen’s insight: Suburban sprawl and car culture demanded a new central commercial space—a “third place” between home and work.
• The first malls (Northland, Southdale) were conceived as community hubs, echoing the European plaza and “cafe culture” even inside harsh weather climates.

Invention, Expansion, and the Mall’s Social Fabric

• Northland (1954): Outdoor, art-adorned, amenity-rich, designed for single parking and promenading.
• Southdale (1956): The first indoor, temperature- and environment-controlled mall—a “Garden Court of Perpetual Spring.”
  • "It was just kind of thrilling as a kid, and especially in the middle of winter in Minnesota. It was just a really needed respite of just seeing people." (Heather, 19:53)

Expanding Appeal: From Women and Families to Teens

• Boom Years (1960-1980): Indoor malls proliferate, later adding the innovation of the food court—key to making the mall a teen social hub.
  • On food courts:
    "The food court was first introduced in New Jersey in the early 1970s as a way to keep people at the mall for longer." (Willa Paskin, 21:32)
• Films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless cement the mall as a site of adolescent autonomy and suburban culture.
  • "The big thing was sort of to walk around and pretend like we could buy things, you know, when obviously we can't. We're so, like, wasting the salesperson's life." (Katie Shepherd, 25:04)

Critique, Decline, and the “Mall is Dead” Narrative

• Cultural Backlash: By the 1970s, malls’ blandness and commercialism become objects of architectural and cultural sneers.
  • "The mall was where women and their kids went shopping in increasingly bland buildings." (Willa Paskin, 26:05)
  • "I compare them to shopping bags... a big plain brown or tan box with a giant department store logo on one end." (Alexandra Lange, 26:34)
• Unintended Consequences: Instead of counteracting sprawl, malls fueled it, contributing to downtown decline and segregation (white flight).
• The Gruen Transfer:
  A psychological shift from task-based shopping to wandering, facilitated by the mall’s environment and design.
  • "The Gruen Transfer is the moment when you're at your mall with the shopping list and suddenly you don't care about the shopping list anymore and you're just browsing..." (Alexandra Lange, 28:01)
• Pop Culture Critique:
  • Dawn of the Dead (1979) uses the mall to illustrate "the mindless excesses of a society gone mad." (Willa Paskin, 29:29)

Competitive Saturation and Real Decline

• Overmalling: By the 1980s, malls proliferate beyond sustainable demand, leading to cannibalization and the emergence of racially and economically stratified ("white mall / Black mall") spaces.
• Mall of America: The apotheosis of the mall as theme park and tourist destination. Some critics dub the resulting phenomenon the "Journey Transfer," where entertainment, not just shopping, becomes the focus.

Economic & Technological Shifts

• The 2000s Onward: Department stores—crucial anchor tenants—struggle, as discounters (Walmart, Target) and e-commerce take market share.
  • "When they fail, fewer customers visit, which leads to other store closures, which leads to fewer customers, and on and on…” (Willa Paskin, 33:07)
• Many malls are emptied, photographed and filmed in states of lingering decay—images imbued with unexpected poignancy.
  • "You won't find lots of people using the word elegiac about a mall unless it's dying. It's like, only when it's dying, can the mall get any respect?" (Willa Paskin, 36:27)

Is the Mall Really Dead?

• Survivors & Reinventions:
  • Alexandra Lange pushes back:
    "Even with the predicted number of malls dying over the next five years, there will still be seven or 800 malls in the US. That is still a lot of malls." (Alexandra Lange, 37:08)
  • Transformations:
    Malls today increasingly reflect the demographic and cultural diversity of their suburbs—Korean, Vietnamese, Central American “ethno-burbs” with thriving shopping, dining, and gathering spaces, or are redeveloped as mixed-use “mini-cities.”
• A Humanist Argument:
  • "Sure it would be great if the public realm was providing this... But that is not the reality. And in that breach, we have them all. So let's respect it." (Alexandra Lange, 39:42)

Epilogue: The Legacy of Victor Gruen

• Gruen, dismayed by what malls became, is the subject of a new musical; in its climactic number, he comes to accept the accidental, but real, beauty of these spaces as stages for ordinary moments and young love.
  • "Maybe, like, I did create something that, you know, no matter what the ideal is, there is human life going on here, and that's something beautiful in itself." (Ethan Blake, 41:51)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Quote & Attribution | |-----------|------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:30 | “Decoder Ring is a narrative podcast that is kind of fun. I mean, we're serious too, but we're also fun.” — Willa Paskin | | 05:16 | "That's where I learned that Tupac Shakur had died while I was, like, waiting in line for chocolate chip cookies." — Sabrina Depest | | 08:47 | "Architecture as a creative expression will die if it cannot create conditions within which it can be meaningful." — Victor Gruen (archive) | | 10:29 | “He decided that you needed a big sign. Basically the architecture of the building didn't matter so much... you needed neon lights and color...” — Alexandra Lange | | 13:07 | “The old department stores... were where people went to look at the latest fashions... They actually pioneered the use of escalators and elevators and air conditioning.” — Alexandra Lange | | 21:32 | “The food court was first introduced in New Jersey in the early 1970s as a way to keep people at the mall for longer.” — Willa Paskin | | 25:04 | "The big thing was sort of to walk around and pretend like we could buy things, you know, when obviously we can't." — Katie Shepherd | | 28:01 | "The Gruen Transfer is the moment when you're at your mall with the shopping list and suddenly you don't care about the shopping list anymore..." — Alexandra Lange | | 36:27 | "You won't find lots of people using the word elegiac about a mall unless it's dying. It's like, only when it's dying, can the mall get any respect?” — Willa Paskin | | 39:42 | “Sure it would be great if the public realm was providing this, and sure it would be great if main streets... were still filled with shops that people wanted to go to. But that is not the reality. And in that breach, we have them all. So let's respect it.” — Alexandra Lange | | 41:51 | "Maybe... I did create something that... there is human life going on here, and that's something beautiful in itself." — Ethan Blake (Victor Gruen musical, epilogue) |

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Noteworthy Segments & Timestamps

• [04:34] — Introduction of personal mall stories, setting the emotional context
• [06:10 - 08:58] — The story of Victor Gruen, his dreams, and the architecture of community
• [13:00 - 17:25] — Evolution from department stores to planned suburban “third places”
• [21:08 - 23:48] — Emergence of the food court and the mall as a youth space
• [26:05 - 30:45] — The sociopolitical consequences; critique of the mall, the Gruen Transfer, and Dawn of the Dead
• [32:46 - 34:52] — The impact of economic and retail changes on mall viability and memory
• [36:27 - 39:42] — The “elegiac” cultural narrative of the dying mall and arguments against writing malls off for dead
• [41:26 - 42:59] — Meeting Ethan Blake and hearing about the Victor Gruen musical; the symbolic acceptance of the mall’s real, human legacy

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Tone & Style

• The episode is thoughtful, richly nostalgic, occasionally humorous, and emphasizes storytelling from multiple viewpoints; it moves fluidly between expert analysis, cultural critique, and lived experience.
• Even at its most critical, the tone remains empathetic toward the mall as both a failed utopia and a persistently needed third place in American life.

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Conclusion

"The Mall is Dead (Long Live the Mall)" presents the shopping mall as both an architectural and social experiment—one that failed to fully live up to its utopian roots but nonetheless succeeded in creating a stage for American life. The episode challenges the death-of-the-mall narrative, highlighting adaptation, reinvention, and the enduring need for communal gathering spaces. As Willa Paskin and Alexandra Lange urge, perhaps now is the moment to recognize not just what was lost, but what—despite everything—survives.

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Transcript

[Willa Paskin]

Picture this. Me, Reese Witherspoon in London ordering fish and chips so often they might start wrapping me in paper. I'm traveling with my Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card, so I earn rewards wherever I book. Travel five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants and other travel, and one point on other purchases. Imagine getting rewarded for eating a toad in the hole. Wait, what is a toad in a hole? Visit Wells Fargo.com autographjourney Terms apply.

[Susan Matthews]

Hi listeners, I'm Susan Matthews, host of Slow Burn, Roe v. Wade. Thanks to everyone who listened to our four part series on what life was like before Roe v. Wade. If you haven't listened to it yet, it's an in depth look at a period of time that is obviously incredibly relevant now, but I think that it was also kind of forgotten and misunderstood. We're already hard at work on the next season of Slow Burn, but in the meantime, we're going to use this space to showcase some of our other great narrative podcasts. And today, today I'm so excited to introduce Willa Paskin, host of one of my favorite shows, Decoder Ring. They've got a new batch of episodes that we'll be featuring here over the next few weeks.

[Alexandra Lange]

Hi, Willa.

[Willa Paskin]

Hi, Susan.

[Susan Matthews]

I'm so happy to have you here. I think that Decoder Ring has a lot in common with Slow Burn, particularly in its sound, rich design and its narrative style. But it's gonna be like a little bit lighter. I assume you take on slightly different subjects. Can you tell me how you describe the show to people?

[Willa Paskin]

Decoder Ring is a narrative podcast that is kind of fun. I mean, we're serious too, but we're also fun. We look at, we look at culture and pop culture sort of from the 20th century and just try to answer questions about it. Some of those questions you may have been wondering about, like why everyone's so obsessed with drinking water all the time these days. And some of those questions you maybe haven't been thinking about but hopefully are.

[Susan Matthews]

Really interesting, like the proliferation of throw pillows. That was one where, like, I have not been thinking about it, but listening to that episode and was like, oh, God, this is me. What have been some of your favorite episodes, Willa?

[Willa Paskin]

We did an episode about the Jane Fonda workout that ended up being a sort of deep dive into the relationship between Jane Fonda and the woman who actually created the workout. And then we have another one we did about this series of extremely successful joke books called Truly Tasteless Jokes that are truly tasteless. And you Might use some worse words to describe them. And we use that episode sort of to think about the history of obscenity and tastelessness and bigotry. And we also talked to the woman who wrote them.

[Susan Matthews]

Yeah, totally. It kind of reminds me of this season of Slow Burn, the second episode of our series we did about Jack and Barbara Wilkie. But, like, the way that we got to them was because I had found this book, the Handbook on Abortion, really early in my research on. On the history of abortion generally. And that felt to me like kind of like this artifact in time that has influenced so much of the pro life side and the pro life movement, which I thought really fascinating. But it's like all these little things where this is something that I think Dakota Ring does really well, where it's like you can listen to basically any episode. And, like, as a listener like you, there's one thing that you will have known about or thought about. Like, I thought about this about the storytelling episode, and I also recently went back and listened to the How Poop Got Cute.

[Willa Paskin]

That one gets more germane every day. Yeah.

[Susan Matthews]

So, Willa, what are some of the episodes or what are some of the things that you're most excited about in this season?

[Willa Paskin]

Yeah, so we're doing. It's a little bit of a shorty of a season. So we've got four episodes, and they're good. One is about Mae west and basically sort of the legal trial and Broadway scandal and tabloid brouhaha that made her Mae west, which happened way before she was in Hollywood. We're doing another episode about the most famous, most ubiquitous, most successful poet of the 1970s, who I almost guarantee, if you're under the age of 45, you have never heard of, and sort of why you've never heard of him and why he was so successful. And then we're also doing an episode which you're about to hear about malls and whether or not they're dying or, you know, if their death is a little bit premature.

[Susan Matthews]

I am so excited about that episode. You can subscribe to Decoder Ring wherever you get your podcasts, or you can enjoy it right here, right now.

[Willa Paskin]

It's reductive to say there are two kinds of people in the world, but I'm gonna go ahead and say it. There are two kinds of Americans in the world. The ones who've had a mall in their life and the ones who haven't. I'm in the second category, but hearing people talk about their mall almost makes me wish I weren't.

[Katie Shepherd]

I once In a, like, fit of rage as a tween, was like, I'm going to the mall and walked there. And that was like the wildest thing I'd ever done.

[Ethan Blake]

I remember buying my first and last.

[Ira Rigaud]

I think, actually white leather belt because I felt like I had to have that to go with, like, black jeans or something. I would not do that.

[Sabrina Depest]

Now I remember going to Mrs. Field's Cookies. Actually. That's where I learned that Tupac Shakur had died while I was, like, waiting in line for chocolate chip cookies.

[Ethan Blake]

There's a store called KB Toys. There was one time I was going out of business, and they had all these canes and wooden swords, all these random fake weapons. And we're like, let's buy a ton of them, get a group of 20 friends together and have a duel. And we did that.

[Alexandra Lange]

So my mall was Northgate mall in Durham, North Carolina, which is no more. That is the mall where I shopped for my chore coat at Sears, which was kind of an important moment for me because I bought it in the boys department. And there was a time in my life where I was definitely a tomboy. And I. It was important to me to kind of create my personal style by shopping in the boys department.

[Willa Paskin]

The woman you just heard is the writer Alexandra Lange. As an adult, Alexandra became an architecture critic. And her childhood experiences with the mall didn't have much bearing on her career until 2018. That's when she heard about a new outdoor shopping complex opening in the greater Bay Area called City Center Bishop Ranch, designed by the famous Italian architect Renzo Piano.

[Alexandra Lange]

He was interviewed in all these places, calling it a piazza and talking about how beautiful it was in his Italian accent. Well, I don't want to be nasty to shopping mall.

[Ira Rigaud]

Nothing against. I'm just saying that this is not to shopping mall.

[Willa Paskin]

Bishop Ranch is organized around a central piazza with fountains and trees, but it's also a suburban shopping center anchored by a 10 screen movie theater and an equinox. It boasts a Pottery Barn, a Gap, a West Elm, a sunglasses hut, and a place to buy boba tea. Customers can wander through these stores and scores of others after parking in huge lots located right off a major highway. So with all due respect to Renzo.

[Alexandra Lange]

Piano, that's a mall. And everyone's saying malls are dead. But one of the most famous architects in the world is designing a mall. So what's up with that?

[Willa Paskin]

This is decoder ring. I'm Willa Paskin. You've probably heard the mall is dying, but for a supposedly dying Place the mall keeps hanging around, just one of its many contradictions. In this episode, Alexandra Lang, the author of the new book Meet Me at the An Inside History of the Mall, is going to walk us through the mall and the atriums, escalators and food courts that have brought it to its present day predicament. We'll also be hearing from mall goers whose personal experiences will help us make sense of this wasteful yet useful, disdained, yet beloved, disappearing, yet surviving space. So today on decoder ring, what do we lose if we lose them all? There's one man more responsible for the existence of the mall than any other. An architect named Victor Gruen.

[Ira Rigaud]

Architecture as a creative expression will die if it cannot create conditions within which it can be meaningful.

[Willa Paskin]

Born and raised in Vienna, Gruen had a big life when he wasn't designing modernist boutiques. He was part of a satirical socialist cabaret troupe. After the Nazis annexed Austria, Gruen, who was Jewish, had a friend dress as an SS officer to drive him and his wife safely to the airport. He arrived in New York in 1938 with, in his words, an architect's degree, $8 and no English. But he had ambition and verve and he quickly found work.

[Alexandra Lange]

His first work in the US was a series of Manhattan boutiques.

[Willa Paskin]

Like very glamorous, these chic shops, including a candy store and a jewelry boutique on Fifth Avenue, soon earned Gruen a very different kind of commission, designing stores for a nationwide women's wear chain based in car crazy Californ Cars. Federally subsidized highways and federally subsidized single family homes were all coming together to create the suburbs, which in turn were creating a whole new kind of shopper. The driver, not the pedestrian.

[Ira Rigaud]

So nobody walks to work or to the corner for a loaf of bread anymore. The housewife does her walking in the parking lots. She's out from in front of the stove and in behind the wheel.

[Alexandra Lange]

So Gruen started to have to think about what would car centric architecture look like? How do we get people's attention from the highway so that they'll pull in and go to this store?

[Willa Paskin]

What did he decide?

[Alexandra Lange]

He decided that you needed a big sign. Basically the architecture of the building didn't matter so much. Like it was basically a box, but you needed the name really big and you needed neon lights and color, you know, big, scripty handwriting.

[Willa Paskin]

These techniques worked, but they were a bold choice for a guy who hated the lights and signs and parking lots of suburban commercial corridors so much that he called them avenues of horror. Vienna, an impeccably planned, elegant city was where Gruen had had his formative encounters with architecture. He valued design, density, beauty, communal excitement. Experience is an energy, and to his eyes, the sprawling suburbs had none of that.

[Alexandra Lange]

He hated the idea of stores just strung along the highway with no relation to each other. And the idea that you would have to pull your car into one shopping plaza and park, and then pull your car out and then immediately go into the next shopping plaza and park.

[Willa Paskin]

In the late 1940s, Gruen would come up with what seemed like a solution to this problem and the larger failings of the suburbs. A planned central communal commercial space where you only had to park just the once.

[Ira Rigaud]

I hate being in a car, right? The worst thing is, like, the disconnected parking lots. You have to go from, like, big box store to big box store. Okay, I'm getting back in my car to, like, make a U turn, to, like, cross this light to go, you know, 300ft to the next parking lot. I'm Ira Rigaud, and I love the Oakbrook Mall in Oakbrook, Illinois. So it's like I could just like, park my car once and just, like, walk around. I get more steps at the mall than anywhere else. There's like different shops and there's lots of people, and there's fountains there too, and they're just objectively fun. Like, we went there with a friend. We wanted to go downtown. Like, no, let's go to a mall. It's easier. It's closer. Went to one of the burger restaurants in the food court, went to the movie theater, like, did a little bit of shopping before the movie theater. It's like everything you want in one location. It's like what a perfect neighborhood would be.

[Willa Paskin]

In 1948, Victor Gruen found himself in Detroit after a flight he was on landed there unexpectedly due to bad weather.

[Alexandra Lange]

So he's stuck in Detroit for a few days, and he's like, okay, let me check out the competition. So he goes downtown to look at J.L. hudson's.

[Willa Paskin]

J.L. hudson's was Detroit's premier department store. And like, department stores across America and Europe, it had been a downtown destination since the late 19th century.

[Alexandra Lange]

The old department stores, you know, would have fountains in the middle of their top lit court. They would have plants, they would have a ladies retiring room, and they sold everything. They were where people went to look at the latest fashions. They were huge buildings. They hired the best architects. They actually pioneered the use of escalators and elevators and air conditioning.

[Willa Paskin]

Hudson's was this kind of department store, a Full square block with some 49 acres of floor space. It had over 10,000 employees, five restaurants and cafeterias, and a circulating library. Gruen was impressed.

[Alexandra Lange]

But the neighborhood around it is dead. Like downtown is dead. The next day, he gets a friend of a friend to drive him around, and the friend of the friend is driving him around to all of the suburbs of Detroit. And the friend is saying, like, here's where the money is. This is where all the car execs live. Look at these beautiful neighborhoods. But Gruen, of course, is focused on the commercial corridors. And that's where he's seeing all of these chopped up shopping plazas, you know, stores in the middle of a parking lot. And it's just ugly to him. So when he finally makes it out to California, he writes to the head of Hudson's and is like, you can do better.

[Willa Paskin]

At the time, the city of Detroit was still growing. It would hit its population peak in 1953, but so were its surroundings. White flight, in which white families left diversities for segregated suburbs, was just beginning. And department store owners were already noticing that these newly minted suburbanites, specifically the white mothers who were their core customers, were not coming back into the city to shop. The department store owners were hesitant to follow these customers. Though they were proud of their downtown flagships, they didn't want to undermine those stores or the city centers they were so much a part of. And the ugly, ticky tack suburban commercial strips seemed beneath them.

[Alexandra Lange]

Gruen wrote at a very opportune time. And he was basically selling the idea that you could have your beautiful store in the suburbs, that you weren't giving up that kind of control, that design presence, that civic presence.

[Willa Paskin]

Gruen proposed an outdoor shopping complex that could give Hudson's grandeur and centrality in the burbs. It could take a step out of the city without taking a step down. In fact, Gruen convinced Hudson's it could take more than one step. It could take four.

[Alexandra Lange]

So he said, what if you create a new, smaller Hudson's at all four points of the compass? What if you create Northland, Southland, Eastland and Westland?

[Willa Paskin]

Northland would be the first of two outdoor shopping complexes that Gruen would build for Hudson's. It birthed, among other things, the common and confusing naming convention for malls in which they are titled based on their orientation to a city's downtown. Northland opened in 1954.

[Alexandra Lange]

It has the nicest modern art in the world. It has very advanced modern design with these very simple, modernized covered pathways and arcades. The most Famous piece of art was this totem pole by a sculptor called Gwen Lux, which was a wooden carved totem pole. And people actually would say, meet me by the totem pole.

[Willa Paskin]

Northland was covered widely in the national press and praised to the skies because despite having 10,000 parking spaces, it seemed to free suburbanites from their cars.

[Alexandra Lange]

That was actually semi revolutionary parking.

[Willa Paskin]

Once, in short order, it was attracting more than 40,000 people a day.

[Alexandra Lange]

The US government heavily subsidized the building of highways and they heavily subsidized the building of single family homes in planned suburbs. But it completely failed to think about what people would kind of do in between those two places that people need a third place. And so Gruen and the department store owners were essentially providing a place that the government forgot about.

[Willa Paskin]

Soon after Northland's opening, Gruen began working on a project for Dayton's, Minneapolis's premier department store. Some four and a half decades later, Dayton's would take on the name of its very successful discount operation and become Target. But at the time, Dayton's wanted a grand suburban outpost too. Gruen gave them more than that. He drew up a plan for a 463 acre mixed use development that included not only shopping, but apartment buildings, schools, a park, a lake, basically a whole planned pocket city. But only the shopping center and its parking lot were ever built. They differed from Northland in one key way. A change made in deference to Minnesota's winters.

[Alexandra Lange]

So this was part of his sales pitch. Like people don't shop in XYZ months because it's too unpleasant to be outside. But that's not a problem if you create an air conditioned indoor mall.

[Willa Paskin]

Southdale opened in 1956 in the suburb of Edina, Minnesota. It was the first ever indoor shopping mall. A temperature controlled paradise, whereas the ads put it, every day is a perfect shopping day. With Southdale, Gruen created the model mall. Southdale had an unassuming exterior, two levels of shopping joined by escalators and two department store anchors, all housed in an interior where light, sound, temperature and security were completely controlled. It was, to be fair, a little nicer than many of the malls that followed. Consider its posh atrium, which was grandly.

[Alexandra Lange]

Called the Garden Court of perpetual Spring. They were really selling the kind of year round beautiful weather in Minnesota, which totally makes sense. It doesn't have a glass roof, but it has like a big glass clear story. So you would have gotten natural light into the center. And it had an aviary, it had a carousel, it had a cafe with umbrellas as if you were outside.

[Willa Paskin]

It's kind of hard to imagine now, given how familiar the mall's aesthetic has become. But Gruen was going for something in particular.

[Alexandra Lange]

He talks a lot about the cafe culture of Vienna. That was the ultimate to him. And I think we can all agree that it is very nice. And that was actually what Victor Gruen was trying to provide. But in Edina, Minnesota.

[Heather]

My name's Heather, and I was born in Minnesota. Like, I knew Southdale Mall was the first mall in America because my dad's always very proud of, like, any sort of Minnesota trivia. Southdale in particular had this wonderful atrium, and they, for a period, had, like, birds flying around and, like, very large cages. Now I kind of. I feel sorry for the birds. I'm sure they weren't well cared for. It was just kind of thrilling as a kid, and especially in the middle of winter in Minnesota. It was just a really needed respite of just seeing people. I would just go to the mall. I'm like, oh, there's something different. There's weird people. There's totally normal people. I do love being alone in a public space with strangers. And I think maybe that seed was planted there. And the mall was, like, the closest thing to something exciting.

[Willa Paskin]

We'll be right back. In the years after Southdale, more and more malls were built slowly and then quickly.

[Alexandra Lange]

It's like there were less than 50 indoor malls built before 1960. But between 1960 and 1970, there are, like, 200 built.

[Willa Paskin]

All those malls were missing something, though. This is the other thing happening in the 70s. This blew my mind. Food courts.

[Alexandra Lange]

Yes, I know. That also blew my mind. There were 15 years of malls without food courts.

[Willa Paskin]

The food court was first introduced in New Jersey in the early 1970s as a way to keep people at the mall for longer. And it spread from there.

[Alexandra Lange]

The early malls often had a Woolworths with a lunch counter. It's not like they didn't have food, but they didn't have food in that grab and go casual way. And they didn't have a collective of small food businesses.

[Willa Paskin]

The introduction of this cheaper, more casual way of eating did get people to spend more time at the mall, including an unforeseen demographic in the 1982 movie Fast Times. At Ridgemont High, a group of Southern California teenagers work, play, and grow up against the backdrop of the local mall. Because that's where real teens were hanging out, too.

[Heather]

What's the matter?

[Ira Rigaud]

You look depressed.

[Willa Paskin]

I hate working the theater. All the action's on the other side.

[Susan Matthews]

Of the mall.

[Willa Paskin]

Fast Times was one of the earliest films in what would become a long tradition of teen mall movies, including Ballygirl, Clueless and Mallrats, which in particular is about a bunch of verbose college kids who spend pretty much every minute there.

[Ethan Blake]

Cookie stand is not part of the food court.

[Willa Paskin]

Of course it is. The food court is downstairs. The cookie stand is upstairs.

[Ethan Blake]

It's not like we're talking quantum physics here.

[Willa Paskin]

The cookie stand counts as an eatery.

[Alexandra Lange]

The eateries are part of the food court.

[Ethan Blake]

Eateries that operate within the designated square downstairs qualify as food court. Anything outside of said designated square is considered an autonomous unit for mid mall snacking.

[Willa Paskin]

The mall had been designed specifically to appeal to white suburban mothers, the kind of people who would eat lunch at Woolworths. But while these women and adults more generally remained the mall's core customers, in terms of dollars spent, the food court gave teens an affordable hangout hub, one both they and the mall could live with.

[Alexandra Lange]

There's this very ambivalent relationship of mall management to teens because they didn't spend that much money. They could be rowdy. They could turn off other customers. The food court and the arcade were a little bit of containment zones for the teens because the moms would have still been going to the department stores and, you know, the other boutiques, but the teens could kind of be in their own zone.

[Willa Paskin]

These zones provided more than just snacks. They were also nostalgia factories, churning out the kind of early encounters with independence that adults look back on lovingly. Adolescence tends to be the time when people form a lasting attachment to a mall. It's a time when all the mall's flaws don't really register because you and your friends have the run of the place just for the price of an Orange Julius.

[Katie Shepherd]

I'm Katie Shepherd. Holly Hill mall was my childhood mall. That was a four minute drive from my house as a kid.

[Willa Paskin]

Katie, who would hang out at the Holly Hill mall in North Carolina, is also the new producer of Dakota Ray. And like, how big is Holly Hill Mall?

[Katie Shepherd]

Tiny, but huge. To me at that time, maybe 50 stores. Maybe. It was the only thing that I was allowed to do other than go to church. You got dropped off at the mall for an hour. It was sort of that weird thing that you could do when you can't drive, but your parents need you to be in a contained space. The big thing was sort of to walk around and pretend like we could buy things, you know, when obviously we can't. We're so, like, wasting the salesperson's life. But Arcade was always the first thing, always. And then get, you get a pretzel. That was like the move. And I loved bath and body works, even went on to work there because as a little girl it was like, oh, everything reeks and I love it, right? And then another big thing that I really loved was I loved trying on shoes. Like you would just go and try on all these shoes that you're like, actually, these don't even fit me. My allowance will never allow me to get this. That was what I really loved to do.

[Willa Paskin]

So the mall's everywhere, all over the country, all over pop culture. They're making money, teens love them, families use them. The suburbs, when be themselves without them, and yet their reputation is not great. When does like the worm start to turn? Which is not to say that malls stop being built. But like, people get snobby about them.

[Alexandra Lange]

The worm starts to turn. In the early 1970s, you start to see critique of the mall, where people will review architects works and say, oh, but the central atrium has escalators. That's kind of like a mall. And you can kind of hear them sneering because a mall is commercial and embarrassing.

[Willa Paskin]

The mall was where women and their kids went shopping in increasingly bland buildings.

[Alexandra Lange]

I compare them to shopping bags. It's like the shopping bag equivalent of architecture. Like a big plain brown or tan box with like a giant department store logo on one end.

[Willa Paskin]

These tan boxes were also not functioning as architects like Victor Gruen had hoped. He believed that the mall could counteract sprawl, make the suburbs more centralized and sophisticated. Instead, they were islands in a sea of parking that enabled sprawl, exacerbated white flight and further hollowed out cities.

[Alexandra Lange]

Downtown leaders anticipated this. They were very worried about this. This was one reason it took them so long to build satellite stores in the suburbs. They were like, but isn't that going to ruin our downtown business? And it did. Like it all happened. It was all as foretold.

[Willa Paskin]

Just for example, Northland, which you'll remember was started and anchored by Detroit's Hudson's department store, would help drive the downtown Hudson's out of business. By the mid-1970s, cities were desperate enough to start developing downtown malls and pedestrian malls to draw people back to the core. Victor Gruen himself designed some of these new city based pedestrian malls, even as he became increasingly disillusioned with the suburban shopping mall. But shoppers didn't feel the same way. They kept pouring in. And one thing they liked about the mall in particular was named for Victor Gruen.

[Alexandra Lange]

The Gruen Transfer is the moment when you're at your mall with the shopping list and suddenly you don't care about the shopping list anymore and you're just browsing and looking and experiencing the mall as a place rather than as a list of errands.

[Willa Paskin]

The Gruen transfer puts customers into a kind of shopping fugue state, one that turns a chore into a pleasure. It's the thing that makes a mall work because it's the thing that makes the mall fun. But this blissed out mode of shopping is also mindless. And in 1979, a movie shouted that out. What the hell is it? Looks like a shopping center.

[Ira Rigaud]

One of those big indoor malls.

[Willa Paskin]

George Romero's dawn of the Dead is about a small band of humans who take shelter from the zombie apocalypse inside of a shopping mall, even as the zombie horde is also trying to get inside.

[Alexandra Lange]

What are they doing?

[Willa Paskin]

Why did they come here?

[Ira Rigaud]

Some kind of instinct, Memory, what they used to do.

[Willa Paskin]

This was an important place in their lives. Having found safety in the in the mall, most of the human characters, like the zombies before them, can't bear to leave, even if it costs them their lives.

[Ira Rigaud]

It is a horrible, hauntingly accurate vision.

[Willa Paskin]

Of the mindless excesses of a society gone mad.

[Alexandra Lange]

It's a critique of the Gruen Transfer that we don't even know what we're doing anymore. But we are kind of irresistibly drawn, even at the end of the world, to shop at the mall.

[Willa Paskin]

Dawn of the Dead didn't slow malls down. But a few years after the film's release, they did begin chomping on each other. It started in 1982.

[Alexandra Lange]

That's when the US tops out at the number of malls like it should have to serve people. And so after that, if people are building malls, they are cannibalizing the business of the earlier. Malls get carried away.

[Ira Rigaud]

This Wednesday, the Wausau Center Mall opens.

[Willa Paskin]

With a burst of excitement.

[Ira Rigaud]

It's a new shopping center with colorful sensational stores.

[Willa Paskin]

Malls were growing at twice the rate of the population. But at first the country being over malled didn't seem like a big deal. So what if a few of the weakest and oldest were being culled? The mall was a fact of life and all the competition made room for different kinds of people to have a mall.

[Heather]

Every town got two malls.

[Susan Matthews]

Sorry, they got the white mall.

[Willa Paskin]

And the mall white people used to go to. That Chris Rock joke is from a set in which he laments the quality of so called black malls. But the existence of These malls at all was a knock on effect of over malling. New mall owners were still chasing white customers, but there just weren't enough of them to keep all the malls in business. And so they started to inadvertently diversify. Meanwhile, other malls were trying to be the newest and splashiest, including the biggest mall of all. There's a place for fun in your life. More of America. America's largest mall opened outside of the Twin Cities just down the road from Southdale in 1992. It was designed by an architect named John Jeude, who believed the mall should be a theatrical experience about entertainment, not just shopping. And so he put an amusement park right at the Mall of America's center.

[Alexandra Lange]

There are some later critics who have kind of posited a journey transfer, which is the moment where you stop thinking about shopping and you start thinking about going on a roller coaster.

[Willa Paskin]

Basically, the Mall of America enjoyed tremendous success and it continues to Pre pandemic. It's four floors and 500 plus stores. Roller coaster and Paul Bunyan themed log ride drew about 40 million visitors a year. That includes international tourists and locals who can walk the mile plus loop inside on cold Minnesota mornings when the mall opens early to let them exercise. But the Mall of America is part of a cadre of elite malls. And as the 1990s wore on, with some 140 malls going up a year, these malls were putting immense pressure on older malls, which by the 2000s were also dealing with the problems plaguing their department store anchors. Some of that had to do with online shopping, but not all of it.

[Alexandra Lange]

So if you look at the department stores that are still working and making money today, it tends to be the high end department stores like Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom. But the middle department stores like The Macy's, the JCPenney's, the Sears have been hollowed out because the shoppers who used to shop at those are shopping instead at Walmart or Target.

[Willa Paskin]

Malls and department stores had been intertwined and codependent from the very start. But it was the department store with its inventory and size that had long been the mall's major draw. When they fail, fewer customers visit, which leads to other store closures, which leads to fewer customers, and on and on until the mall is a ghost town, not even a zombie standing at the pretzel kiosk.

[Sabrina Depest]

My name is Sabrina Depest and Owings Mills mall means and holds a lot of memories for me. Owings Mills mall is located in Owings Mills, which is in Baltimore county. It's about 25 miles west of Baltimore City. I would go to the mall with my cousin, my family, and we would just, like, walk around. Like, it would be packed, the food court would be packed, the people down the escalators. There's just, like, constant people around. So as an adult between the ages of 17 and 27, I didn't frequent Owings Mills Mall. But when I did come back to visit family and my parents, it was kind of sad because I would go in and just sing. Like, the columns and like that still being there, but the store actually itself not being there. So it was just like a. It was different. Like, I probably was the only person outside of the people that were working at the mall. So, yeah, there's one day where I was driving in the area and they knocked the mall down. Just saw a bunch of mounds of rock where the mall used to be.

[Willa Paskin]

We're going to take another break. 2007, the year of the financial crisis, was the first year since the invention of the indoor mall that there were no indoor malls built in the United.

[Alexandra Lange]

States through the 90s and 2000s. Like, there are headwinds and there's consolidation and there's cannibalization, and some malls are dying, but, like, the business is still churning. And then 2007, it's like, oh, you know, like, this is not a good business anymore.

[Willa Paskin]

This is when the dominant narrative about the mall becomes one of death.

[Ethan Blake]

These are the ruins of a dying culture, the American shopping mall.

[Willa Paskin]

Of the 1500 or so malls built before 2007, only a thousand or so are left, with a quarter more projected to close in the coming years. Malls seem like a victim of their own excess and of our own excesses with shopping and convenience and cars. And these dead and dying malls have been widely chronicled in eerie videos of abandoned interiors and in elegiac still photographs of vast, empty corridors and defunct fountains. When you see videos and photographs like this, you're seeing what's there and what's not there at the same time. They're pictures of beached resources and infrastructure, concrete and glass and steel that has been reduced to a fire hazard, a blight, a waste. But they're also pictures of an absence, the missing life and hubbub and people that used to gather there. There's something else about these images, though. In them, the mall gets to be something it's otherwise not. Romantic, grand, bittersweet. You won't find lots of people using the word elegiac about a mall unless it's dying. It's like, only when it's Dying, can the mall get any respect? And Alexander Lang finds that pretty exasperating.

[Alexandra Lange]

Some malls died. I mean, people love to make these like grants. So the mall is dead. Even with the predicted number of malls dying over the next five years, there will still be seven or 800 malls in the US that is still a lot of malls.

[Willa Paskin]

Don't get her wrong. She knows malls have fallen on hard times, but that's different than them being dead.

[Alexandra Lange]

People see those photos and they think that means all the malls are dead.

[Willa Paskin]

Malls are contracting. But you could look at what's happening to them and emphasize something a little different than just their dramatic downfall. You could emphasize that the hundreds that are surviving, some even thriving, are the ones that are doing something the mall has always been trying to do. Maybe the one thing it's hard to fault them for, they're providing a space for people to be together. Some of the malls doing that are really fancy, expensive, high end malls in places like Miami, Orange County, Honolulu, mainline Philadelphia and Dallas, where marble interiors lead to Gucci and Chanel stores. But others are well run malls effectively serving their communities, communities that can be much more diverse than the ones the mall was originally designed for.

[Alexandra Lange]

Over, especially the past 30 years, the diversity of the suburbs has exploded. Like who lives in the suburbs has completely changed from the 1950s and 60s version. And so some of the malls that have remained successful reflect the changing demographics of their suburbs.

[Willa Paskin]

Korean suburbs, Vietnamese suburbs, Central American suburbs, and ethno burbs as they're called more largely often have thriving malls, community hubs that sell lots of goods and services and food. Eating as much as shopping has become one of the mall's anchoring activities. What's an upscale food hall after all, but a mall for eating? Malls, in other words, are adapting to their customer bases, to contemporary tastes, and also to our changing ideas about how to address sprawl. Northland, Victor Gruen's first outdoor mall is currently being redeveloped as a mixed use site. There'll be an apartment building in the parking lot and a food hall in the former Hudson's. The whole site taking another shot at bringing density to the suburbs. Malls successfully making a go of it may not be as dramatic as the ones rotting and being raised, but they're the ones that are still giving us something that we need.

[Alexandra Lange]

I feel like I came around to a humanist position about the mall, where the mall is serving something that's very deep in human nature. And sure it would be great if the public realm was providing this, and sure it would be great if main streets in Midwestern towns were still filled with shops that people wanted to go to. But that is not the reality. And in that breach, we have them all. So let's respect it.

[Willa Paskin]

Before we go, I want to play you a song. It came to us in an extremely serendipitous way. A couple of weeks ago, I brought a biography of Victor Gruen into a coffee shop. Gruen, as I mentioned, came to regret creating the mall. When he returned to Vienna late in life, he discovered to his horror that a mall was going up nearby, destroying the idealized, cosmopolitan, urban fabric he'd once hoped the mall could emulate. Anyway, at the coffee shop, there was a young man with a mop of curly blonde hair sitting at the bar.

[Ethan Blake]

My name is Ethan Blake.

[Willa Paskin]

While I was waiting in line, Ethan, though I didn't know his name yet, pointed at my book and said, hey, can I look at that? He pored over it for a couple of minutes, long enough for me to wonder if he'd be finished by the time my coffee was done.

[Sabrina Depest]

And.

[Willa Paskin]

And then, instead of handing the book back to me, he handed me a sheaf of papers from a pile right in front of him. About 6 pages, typed and stapled. I looked down to read them, only to find they were about Victor Gruen. It turns out Ethan is writing a musical about him.

[Ethan Blake]

Total serendipity.

[Willa Paskin]

In the musical, the ghost of Victor Gruen is haunting the mall at Short Hills, an extremely high end mall in New Jersey, not too far from where Ethan grew up. Over the course of the musical, Gruen relays his life story, his early optimism giving way to disillusionment and cynicism. Until the provisional ending, which Ethan gave us permission to spoil.

[Ethan Blake]

But right now, the ending is that he sees these two preteens, these tweens who go to the mall and he's like, oh, they're drinking, like, Starbucks Frappuccinos and they're in like, Lululemon. And then he stops and he's like, oh, like they're on a first date. Oh, they're like, falling in puppy love. Oh, he just, like, spilled his drink on her and she just laughed. And this is a moment for them. And when they're older, they look back and they'll say, this happened at the mall. Okay, maybe there's something here. Maybe, like, I did create something that, you know, no matter what the ideal is, there is human life going on here, and that something beautiful in itself.

[Willa Paskin]

That's the thing about the mall, for all its flaws, sins, challenges and reported death. For now, life goes on there. So we're gonna end on that idea and this in progress version of one of Ethan's songs, tentatively titled the Professional Dreamer.

[Ethan Blake]

I'm a victor, I'm a failure I'm a genius, I'm a traitor I'm an exile on a memphire I'm a sellout rundown theater I'm a cog ghost a jukebox glitch and blip on MacBook screens I'm an architect who set a stock in airtight fantasies But I do believe I can be free from this terrazzo prison. Every great creation bears the blood of a million public servants and lion is fine is soaked between false idols and true prophets and art's the golden door out this coffin.

[Willa Paskin]

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. You can find me on Twitter illapaskin. And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email [e-mail] I want to really encourage you to go out and buy Alexandra Lange's book Meet Me at the An Inside History of the Mall, which contains much more insight into and details about malls, their history and their future than we could cover here. Another book that was instrumental to this piece and was the one I had in the coffee shop is Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream by M. Jeffrey Hardwick. You also heard a clip from the documentary the Great Love Affair about American car culture. Decoder Ring is written by Willa Paskin and produced by Willa Paskin and Katie Shepard. Derek John is senior supervising producer of narrative podcasts. Merritt Jacob is our technical director. I'd also like to thank two of the people you heard at the top of this episode, uncredited Lauren Banz and Brian Louder. Thank you also to Jennifer Zymon, Eric Craig, Katie Crummock, Rosie Mahorter, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback. If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed and Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Wasn't that delicious? So good.

[Ira Rigaud]

Your bill, ladies.

[Willa Paskin]

I got it. No, I got it. Seriously, I insist. I insisted first.

[Susan Matthews]

Oh, don't be silly.

[Willa Paskin]

You don't be silly.

[Ira Rigaud]

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[Willa Paskin]

Okay. Rock, paper, scissors for it. Rock, paper, scissors. Shoot.

[Alexandra Lange]

No.

[Ira Rigaud]

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