It's like doing a core sample of a tree. If you see the rings, you can see
what life was like in the 1980s or 2005 by what these malls look like.
We've seen Ajo, Arizona, Winters, California, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
The story of the mall in America is a story about nostalgia. Nearly 70 years after their big debut
they're all but dead. What does that say about American values?
Flying over the country as we've done at low altitude you can really see how the geography
has been shaped by different patterns of commerce and settlement.
Meet the Fallows. They've spent the last six years touring small American towns in their Cessna
plane to report on how communities are changing.
After World War Two there was
this misguided ideal of the suburban goal for American life of people moving
away from cities. Malls have been representations of what a new way of
living would be.
This new way of living centered around shopping pleasure palaces.
They came from the mind of an Austrian named Victor Gruen.
He's been called the most influential architect of the 20th century because he invented
the mall. Consumers began to abandon Main Street in favor of Gruen's creation:
a collection of inward-facing shops centered around an anchor store.
For people who lived fairly near the
mall, it was a great addition to their lives. Everybody would have something to do.
Malls expanded across the country and their design evolved as architects tested
different ways to entice consumers. Terrazzo tiles were introduced in the
80s because developers thought carpet with slow shoppers down and gradually
increased lighting created the illusion of longer afternoons.
In 1992 the Mall of
America opened and featured a historic 5.6 million square feet of retail.
By the mid-90s malls were being constructed at a rate of a hundred and forty a year
They were seen as a safe place where you could take your family or even let your
kids roam a bit and not worry about them.
I remember being dropped off there as a
kid, playing in the arcade, going to the food court. It was a communal space.
Pop culture of every decade solidified these hulking institutions as a symbol of
American promise
But that was then and this is now.
After the Great Recession hit in 2008, malls
were seen as a sign of rampant consumerism gone awry.
The whole culture of the mall changed after a while.
And that's where the pressures that had been
on malls for a long time suddenly became unsustainable and you saw clearance
sales, everything must go, you saw vacant malls.
The dream of modern
life is not a mall-centric, car-centric dream anymore.
Seph Lawless has obsessively photographed dead malls for more than a decade.
I could actually smell an abandoned mall before I'm even inside it, I just know know that smell.
It's like walking into a time capsule.
It's emotional being in these places sometimes.
Do we still need our malls?
By 2020 there's expected to be
over two billion digital buyers around the world.
The logistics business which supports Walmart which supports online stores
Amazon and others it's taking over some former malls because those malls have
a lot of space. They're near freeways so the same force that was the malls undoing is
now in some places reoccupying some of the territory.
Other abandoned spaces are also getting a new life.
One of the country's first shopping malls will soon become an NHL training center, and disaster relief
agencies regularly use empty stores and malls to provide assistance after
natural disasters.
We have a lot of space but America is really good at creating
things in different spaces.
America has always swung the needle towards commerce,
whatever is economically most efficient. And if you have problems leave them behind and find
some other place and build something new there.
This era of America we're
reconsidering both of those impulses. Efficiency obviously matters but there
are other parts of the entire social package that matter too and you can't
just keep moving to the frontier.
Amen.
I've never heard that from you.
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