Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
By Alexandra Lange
New York: Bloomsbury Publishing,, 2022, 2022
Hardcover, 310 pages, $28.00
Reviewed by Harold Aurand, Jr.
Before World War II, most Americans shopped downtown or along the commercial strips that had grown up along the major access roads into cities. When places like Levittown started to appear, further out than the traditional suburbs, few thought this would change. Instead, the suburbs gave birth to shopping centers and malls. These were islands of retail development, surrounded by parking lots and cut off from residential and industrial areas. For years, they dominated the commercial landscape. Now, they seem to be going away. In 2017, Credit Suisse predicted that a quarter of American malls would close in the next five years, and that was before COVID-19.
In the introduction to her book Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, architectural historian Alexandra Lange admits that these closures made her nervous. Who would want to publish a book on an institution that seemed to be dying? The truth was, everywhere she went, people were enthusiastic. They wanted her book and also wanted a chance to talk with her about “their” malls. If you’re the right age, you probably know what this means. Close your eyes and imagine you are a teenager again. Can you walk through your old hometown mall? Do you remember where the pizza place, the arcade, or the Waldenbooks were located? They might be gone now, but we remember. Malls were once significant. Maybe you had your first job there, went there on your first date, or were first allowed to spend money without adult supervision. Malls were where we practiced being adults, and going to malls shaped people’s lives.
The fact that malls had a social meaning doubtless helped Lange get her book published, but it also made the writing more challenging. There are just too many topics to look at. Not surprisingly, as an architectural historian, Lange is at her best with the physical aspects of the malls. Lange drew on retail industry publications to look at typical business concerns, like what shapes malls should have to optimize foot traffic and the selection of stores. A lot of the latter was based on the market. Malls serving local communities needed grocery and drug stores. Those malls that wanted to be shopping destinations and draw from a larger area required a collection of more unique places. Department stores usually served as anchors. Malls wanted one aimed at the upper range of the customers’ income, and another aimed more at the discount trade. There is an excellent discussion of the change from in-store lunch counters and stand-alone restaurants to food courts and mall music.
The book’s second, even stronger part looks at individual architects and malls. Victor Gruen who built the first mall, Southdale, in Minnesota, is probably the best known. He gave his name to the “Gruen Transfer,” or the idea that retailers would sell more by making the pleasure of shopping exceed the satisfaction customers got by buying the products they needed. James Rouse was instrumental in developing festival marketplaces, where cities would convert older downtown buildings into rustic pedestrian shopping and dining areas. They aimed to bring suburbanites and their money back to the urban core. Important malls included NorthPark Center in Houston, with its emphasis on providing an upscale and consistent aesthetic atmosphere; Horton Plaza in San Diego, which imagined the mall as more of a recreational destination than retail space; and the Commons in Columbus, Indiana, which combined a mall with a public playground and civic buildings. There are many others in both categories.
All these malls and architects are described using extensive quotations from published sources and the author’s interviews. Illustrations, primarily black-and-white but with eight pages in color, do a good job of letting the reader see these transformative buildings.
Lange also discusses what I suppose we could call special populations. Teenagers, for example, always played an ambivalent role in the malls. On the one hand, they were valued customers, patronizing certain clothing and music shops, the arcade, and the food court. They also grew up to be regular customers. However, when they gathered in large numbers, they could be rowdy and disruptive, chasing everyone else away. This problem was made worse by parents who wanted cheap babysitting and would drop their kids off for mall security to handle.
The second group is elderly mall walkers. The mall was a perfect environment for them, with flat surfaces, wide doors, climate control, and ample public seating and restrooms. Most importantly, older people could exercise but still interact with people of different ages. That is much better, and probably healthier, than isolating older adults in senior centers.
Finally, there is the question of whether malls are public or private spaces, or in some ways, both. Can malls be used for public protest, picketing, or just simple loitering? Do you have to spend money to be there, or can they be used for free air conditioning on hot days?
Lange covers the mall’s role in popular culture, particularly teen movies, teen literature, and horror films. Since the mall was viewed as the teenager’s natural habitat, almost any teen movie would have some action set there. For horror, the mall was often used as the site of zombie movies. Movie makers insinuated that shopping and materialism have turned us into a nation of mindless undead. This fear of leisure and consumption has been a constant in American life, particularly among intellectuals. From the Puritan fear of luxury to H.L. Mencken mocking small-town strivers to the book The Affluent Society, which argued Americans should pay more in taxes and accept a lower standard of living just because it would be good for them, production has always been favored overconsumption, especially for the lower classes. There are plenty of quotations in the book denigrating malls to that effect.
Finally, there is the recent decline of malls. Lange stresses several things. The decline of department stores with their bland, middle-of-the-road product selection in our more diverse country hasn’t helped. One of the only places malls are thriving in America is in what Lange calls the ethnoburbs, communities which are majority-minority, and need stores that cater to the ethnic market. Indeed, Americans have overbuilt. We have much more retail space per person than any other country. Online shopping and COVID have not helped. One thing that needs more space is the rise of the dual-earner household. Malls were initially designed to get suburban housewives to come and shop recreationally and enjoy being consumers. Having a clean, pleasant environment was necessary, and that took money. If women are at work, they will have little time for shopping, particularly during the week. If there is less time, buying things becomes a chore again, and modern power strips, where a few big box stores are grouped around a parking lot, can compete both on shopping time and price since they don’t have to bother with having that pleasing atmosphere.
One might wonder if anything was left out in such an all-encompassing book. The answer is yes. As just mentioned, and as Lange rightly notes, one of the main goals of the mall builders was to attract the suburban housewife. Surprisingly, they are the one group not given much of a voice. The writings of average women or articles from women’s magazines aren’t used that much to give their first-hand perspective. That might be an interesting project for someone else to try. A second problem, I think, is that throughout the book, Lange states malls would do better if, instead of being isolated in purely retail areas, they were mixed in with housing, both individual homes and lowcost apartments and manufacturing, all linked by public transportation. In other words, the malls should be more urban. It’s OK to state this, and many others have done so, but it would be nice to have some data to back it up, whether it be survey data or something else. These flaws don’t take away from what is a good book overall. A few others have been written on shopping malls recently, but this may be the best at covering a wide variety of topics in a small space.
Harold Aurand, Jr. is a professor of history at the Penn State-Schuylkill Campus and really misses the now-closed Schuylkill Mall in Frackville, PA.
This book review originally appeared in the SCA Journal, Spring 2024, Vol. 42, No. 1. The SCA Journal is a semi-annual publication and a member benefit of the Society for Commercial Archeology.
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