The first enclosed shopping mall in the United States opened in Edina, Minnesota in 1956. But the mall as a cultural form — the mall as a place where Americans went not just to shop but to be in public, to see and be seen, to spend time — that was a Florida invention.
Florida's climate made the enclosed mall necessary in a way it was not in Minnesota. The heat, the humidity, the afternoon thunderstorms — all of these made outdoor retail difficult for much of the year. The air-conditioned mall was not a luxury in Florida. It was a practical response to the environment.
The Mall as Public Space
At its peak, the American shopping mall was the closest thing to a town square that most suburban Americans had. It was where teenagers went after school. It was where elderly residents walked for exercise. It was where families went on rainy Saturdays. It was, in the absence of any other genuinely public space, the de facto public realm of suburban America.
The mall was not a great piece of urbanism. But it was filling a need that nothing else was filling.
This is not a defense of the mall as architecture. Most malls were badly designed: windowless, disorienting, hostile to the street, dependent on the car. But they were filling a need that nothing else was filling. When the mall dies, what replaces it is not a better public space. It is usually nothing at all.
What Comes Next
The dead mall is now a familiar American landscape. The anchor stores gone, the parking lot half-empty, the remaining tenants increasingly marginal. Some dead malls have been redeveloped as mixed-use districts, medical campuses, or distribution centers. Most have simply been demolished.
Florida has more dead and dying malls than almost any other state. The reasons are partly demographic — the state's population has shifted, leaving some malls stranded in declining markets — and partly economic, as online retail has accelerated the decline of the department store anchors that once drove mall traffic.
What the death of the mall reveals is the poverty of American public space. We built a suburban landscape that had no genuine public realm, substituted private commercial space for it, and are now discovering that the substitute was fragile. The question of what comes next is not primarily an architectural question. It is a question about what kind of public life Americans want, and whether they are willing to pay for it.