Chronicling the Rise and Fall of the American Shopping Mall

In her new book, architecture critic Alexandra Lange explores the history of this quintessential symbol of the American dream.

By: Jaxson Leilah Stone

For many who grew up in American suburbs, the concept of a “dead mall” is familiar. Dead or ghost malls are those sprawling structures that developments such as e-commerce, high tenant vacancies, and socioeconomic decline have left completely abandoned or underutilized—mere shells of a recent consumer-driven past. 

“Malls have been dying for the past 40 years,” New York–based architecture critic Alexandra Lange writes in her new book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. “Every decade rewrites the obituary in its own terms, but the apocalyptic scale, the language and imagery of civilizational collapse, keep reappearing.… And yet, people keep shopping.” 

The book chronicles the rise, fall, and reinvention of the shopping mall, from its emergence after the federal highway acts of 1944 and 1956 to its transformation into a public gathering place in the 1970s and ’80s, to its so-called demise (Lange will be the first to challenge this narrative) in the late 1990s. Arranged in seven chapters and illustrated throughout, the pages offer tales of postwar innovation and optimism, highlighting the architects, planners, and merchants who brought the “climate-controlled monuments”—to borrow words from Joan Didion—to life as well as the critical thinkers, such as Didion, who helped establish them as quintessential symbols of the American dream.