AHR Forum
All the World's a Mall: Reflections on the Social and
Economic Consequences of the American Shopping Center
KENNETH T. JACKSON
THE EGYPTIANS HAVE PYRAMIDS, the Chinese have a great wall, the British have
immaculate lawns, the Germans have castles, the Dutch have canals, the Italians
have grand churches. And Americans have shopping centers. They are the common
denominator of our national life, the best symbols of our abundance. By 1992, there
were 38,966 operating shopping centers in the United States, 1,835 of them large,
regional malls, and increasingly they were featuring the same products, the same
stores, and the same antiseptic environment. They have been called "the perfect
fusion of the profit motive and the egalitarian ideal," and one wag has remarked,
only partially in jest, that either America is a shopping center or the one shopping
center in existence is moving about the country at the speed of light.l
To be sure, the shopping center and even the shopping mall are not entirely
American innovations. Merchandising outside city walls began in the Middle Ages,
when traders often established markets or "fairs" beyond the gates to avoid the
taxes and congestion of the urban core. For this privilege, they typically paid a fee
to the lord or feudal authority who commanded the walls above the field. Similarly,
enclosed shopping spaces have also existed for centuries, from the agora of ancient
Greece to the Palais Royal of prerevolutionary Paris. The Jerusalem bazaar has
been providing a covered shopping experience for 2,000 years, while Istanbul's
Grand Bazaar was doing the same when sultans ruled the Ottoman Empire from
the nearby Topkapi Palace. In England, Chester has been famous for centuries for
interconnected second-story shops, protected wonderfully from the wind and the
rain, which stretch for blocks at the center of town. London's Burlington Arcade,
completed in 1819, was one of the world's earliest retail shopping arcades, while the
Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, which featured a nineteen-acre building that
was entirely walled and roofed in panels of dazzling "crystal" glass, had many
characteristics of the modern mall. Its designers brought the outdoors inside and
1 On the number of shopping centers, see Witold Rybczynski, "The New Downtowns," Atlantic
Monthly 271 (May 1993): 98. See also William Severini Kowinski, The Mailing of America: An Inside
Look at the Great Consumer Paradise (New York, 1985); Howard Gillette, Jr., "The Evolution of the
Planned Shopping Center in Suburb and City," Journal of the American Planning Association 51
(Autumn 1985): 449-60; George Sternlieb and James W. Hughes, eds., Shopping Centers, USA
(Piscataway, N.J., 1981); William H. Whyte, The City: Rediscovering the Center (New York, 1988); and
William Glaberson, "The Heart of the City Now Beats in the Mall," New York Times (March 27, 1992):
AI, B4.
1111
1112
Kenneth T. Jackson
made the "palace" into a giant garden, complete with an elaborate fountain and
several full-grown trees. Within the mammoth structure, crowds from many nations
and social classes jostled through long aisles, entertained as much by the passing
parade and the spectacle as by the official displays.
The most famous pre-twentieth-century enclosed retail space is the Galleria
Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, which was built to commemorate the 1859 victory
of the French and Sardinians (led by King Victor Emmanuel) over Austria at the
Battle of Magenta. Located near the Duomo and opened to the public in 1867, it
is really a prolongation of the public street. It houses scores of separate merchants,
with a glass vault on top rather than a single, enclosed building (there are no doors).
Cruciform in shape, it has a four-story interior fa<;;ade that stretches 645 feet in one
direction and 345 feet in the other, bordered by shops, cafes, and restaurants at the
ground level and mezzanine. Despite its age, the Galleria looks and feels like a
modern mall, and it remains at the center of political and commercial life in Milan. 2
At the end of the twentieth century, the shopping mall has become a global
phenomenon. Hong Kong has as many modern malls as any metropolitan region in
the United States, and tourists in Kowloon might easily imagine that they are in
Orlando or Spokane. In France, the Parly II Center opened outside Paris and
near Versailles in 1968. It includes all-weather air-conditioning, fountains, marble
floors, sculptured plaster ceilings, and scores of shops on two floors. Singapore,
Taipei, Sydney, Melbourne, Hamburg, and a hundred other cities have similarly
elaborate edifices; the Kaisergalerie in Berlin and GUM in Moscow are particularly
notable. Even England, ever protective of its countryside, is falling victim to
regional malls and the acres of parking lots that surround them. For example,
seventeen miles east of central London, set among the rolling hills of Essex, is the
Lakeside Centre, a 1.35 million square-foot clone of suburban America, complete
with two McDonalds, a Sam Goody, and a Gap. Since the mid-1980s, a half-dozen
other regional malls, as well as 250 smaller regional clusters, have gone up among
the shires and sleepy hamlets of Shakespeare's scepter'd isle. By 1993, these new
shopping and exurb an centers were claiming more than 17 percent of the British
retail market, a three-fold increase in less than fifteen years.3
Below-ground shopping malls have also proliferated. Since 1962, for example,
Montrealers have been able to survive their harsh winters by working, shopping,
and living, often for months at a time, underground-or at least inside glass and
concrete. Large parts of the core city are now linked by miles of subterranean
walkways, all lined with shops, restaurants, snack bars, and theaters. In posh
Westmount Square, tenants in high-rise apartment buildings have only to take an
elevator to find a supermarket, a bookstore, a bank, a movie theater, a bar and
restaurant, or such expensive specialty shops as Givenchy and Pierre Cardin.4
Similarly, in Osaka, the buried-mall concept is now almost a third of a century old.
There, more than a million people per day file over the lighted signs in the floor or
2 A good overview of the early development of the arcade idea is Alexander Garvin, The American
City: What Works, What Doesn't (New York, 1996), 101-20. See also Johann Friedrich Geist, Arcades:
The History of a Building Type (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
3 New York Times (May 9, 1993): E16.
4 The Montreal complex was designed by Vincent Ponte, a native of Boston, as a way of reducing
congestion on downtown streets. New York Times, December 17, 1976.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
OCTOBER
1996
All the World's a Mall
1113
past the giant wall maps of the connecting Umeda and Hankyu malls to buy food,
clothes, toys, and even lizards and seaweed, or to pay for overseas trips. Hawkers
banging tambourines urge passers-by to sample their restaurants. Even pornography shops flourish.
But, as was the case with the automobile, which also was invented in Europe, it
is in the United States that the shopping center and the shopping mall have found
especially fertile ground. In the North American republic, large-scale retailing,
once associated almost exclusively with central business districts, began moving
away from the urban cores between the world wars. Baltimore's Roland Park
Shopping Center (1896) is often cited as the first of the modern genus, but Country
Club Plaza in Kansas City, begun in 1923, was more influential and was the first
automobile-oriented shopping center. Featuring extensive parking lots behind
ornamented, Old California-style brick walls, it was the effort of a single entrepreneur, Jesse Clyde Nichols, who put together a concentration of retail stores and
used leasing policy to determine the composition of stores in the concentration. By
doing that, Nichols created the idea of the planned regional shopping center. At the
same time, he understood, as no one had before him, that customers for the 100
shops would arrive by car. Free parking was not an afterthought; it was part of the
original conception. And as Country Club Plaza expanded over the decades to
encompass 978,000 square feet of retail space, the number of parking spaces multiplied as well, until by 1990 there were more than 5,000 spaces for the ubiquitous
motorcar.5
By the mid-1930s, the concept of the planned shopping center, as a collection of
businesses under one management and with convenient parking facilities, was well
known and was recognized as the best method of serving the growing market of
drive-in customers. But the Great Depression and World War II had a chilling
effect on private construction, and as late as 1946 there were only eight shopping
centers in the United States. They included Upper Darby Center in West
Philadelphia (1927), Suburban Square in Ardmore, Pennsylvania (1928), Highland
Park Shopping Village outside Dallas (1931), River Oaks in Houston (1937),
Hampton Village in St. Louis (1941), Colony in Toledo (1944), Shirlington in
Arlington, Virginia (1944), and Belleview Square in Seattle (1946).6
The first major planned retail shopping center in the world went up in Raleigh,
North Carolina, in 1949, the brainchild of Homer Hoyt, a well-known author and
demographer best remembered for his sector model of urban growth. Another early
prototype was Northgate, which opened on the outskirts of Seattle in 1950.
Designed by architect John Graham, Jr., it featured a long, open-air pedestrian way
lined with a number of small specialty shops and ending with a department store.
5 This paragraph summarizes material in Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbaniza·
tion of the United States (New York, 1985),257-61. See also William S. Worley, 1. C. Nichols and the
Shaping of Kansas City (Columbia, Mo., 1990), 10-28; Rybczynski, "New Downtowns," 98-100; S. R. De
Boer, Shopping Districts (Washington, D.C., 1937); and Yehoshua S. Cohen, Diffusion of an Innovation
in an Urban System: The Spread of Planned Regional Shopping Centers in the United States, 1949-1968
(Chicago, 1972).
6 John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1971),230. New York City
department stores began to decentralize rather early, beginning in the late 1920s. Regional Plan
Association, Suburban Branch Stores in the New York Metropolitan Region (New York, 1951).
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
OCTOBER 1996
1114
Kenneth T. Jackson
The idea was that the "anchor" facility would attract people, who would then shop
their way to their destination. Predictably, it went up next to a highway and
provided a free 4,000-space parking lot.
The enclosed, climate-controlled indoor mall was introduced by Victor Gruen, an
Austrian refugee from the Nazis, at the Southdale Shopping' Center in Edina,
Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, in 1956. From the beginning, the 679,000
square-foot complex (later expanded to 1.35 million square feet) included two
department stores, 139 shops, parking for 5,200 cars, and a two-story, sky-lit
pedestrian walkway. Gruen had been inspired by Milan's Galleria and also by
the markets of the Austrian and Swiss towns he had visited on bicycle as a young
man. In America, ironically, he wanted to stop suburban sprawl, and he thought
the shopping mall would do the trick. Because Minneapolis was so often cold,
Gruen advertised that "in Southdale Center every day will be a perfect shopping
day." The concept proved wildly popular, and it demonstrated that climatecontrolled shopping arcades were likely to be more profitable than open-air
shopping centers. Indoor malls proliferated, slowly at first but with increasing
frequency, and within fifteen years anything that was not enclosed came to be
considered second-rate. 7
A few of the indoor behemoths, such as Midtown Plaza in Rochester and Chapel
Square Mall in New Haven, were located downtown, but more typical were Paramus
Park and Bergen Mall in New Jersey, Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg outside
Chicago, King's Plaza outside Manhattan, Tyson's Corner outside Washington, and
Raleigh Mall in Memphis-all of which were located on outlying highways and all
of which attracted shoppers from trading areas of a hundred square miles and more.
Within a mere quarter-century, they transformed the way Americans lived and
worked. Indeed, reports were commonplace by the 1970s that the typical American
was spending more time at the mall than at any other place other than home or
work. And the shopping mall had become, along with the tract house, the freeway,
and the backyard barbecue, the most distinctive product of the American postwar
years.8
BECAUSE ACADEMIC JOURNALS often publish pieces so esoteric that only a small
proportion even of a specialized audience could be interested in them, the
American Historical Review merits praise for focusing attention on the ubiquitous
phenomenon of the modern shopping center. Thomas W. Hanchett's article, "U.S.
Tax Policy and the Shopping-Center Boom of the 1950s and 1960s," essentially asks
why and how such a profound retailing revolution could occur so quickly. By
contrast, Lizabeth Cohen's "From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America," essentially asks "so
what?" Why should anyone care where I buy my socks?
7 T. R. Reid, 'The Magic of Malls," Washington Post, September 16, 1985. Late in life, after thirty
years in the United States, Gruen argued that the shopping-center idea that he pioneered had been
subverted and that the country was mindlessly subsidizing suburban sprawl. He retired in frustration to
Vienna, Austria. Among his many writings on the subject, see especially Victor Gruen, The Heart of Our
Cities: Diagnosis and Cure (New York, 1964).
8 William Severini Kowinski, "The Mailing of America," New Times 10 (May 1, 1978): 31-55.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
OCTOBER
1996
All the World's a Mall
1115
Focusing on fast-growing Charlotte, North Carolina, slow-growing Cortland, New
York, and declining Scranton-Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania-all of which witnessed
a transformation of shopping patterns in the quarter-century after World War II,
Hanchett finds that neither rapid suburban growth nor racial strife adequately
explain the shift. Instead, he points to the Internal Revenue Code, especially to a
section of the 1954 law that allowed investors to depreciate real-estate investments
on an accelerated basis. In practice, this meant that a particular property that was
in fact performing well and even making money could be carried as a deduction or
a loss on an individual's tax return. Good investments became paper losses, thus
reducing tax liability and enhancing the desirability of commercial real estate as a
tax shelter. Equally important, accelerated depreciation led to frequent turnovers in
ownership, because as soon as one person exhausted the best tax benefits of a
property, the smart thing to do was to sell it and buy another one. A new investor
could utilize the favorable tax provisions all over again. The law encouraged new
construction rather than maintenance or renovation because the financial advantage was in short-term depreciation. Finally, Hanchett persuasively argues that
accelerated depreciation encouraged retail development in advance of residential
settlement, thus reversing centuries-old patterns of human experience. In essence,
the IRS created a pyramid scheme in which most of the players could not and did
not lose.
Hanchett's overall point is a strong one, and he performs an important service for
scholars by reminding us that government intervention, especially in the form of
forgiven taxes, often shapes the world in which we live. Unfortunately, he pushes an
excellent point further than the evidence will allow. For example, because tax
loopholes were available to almost every income-producing structure, accelerated
depreciation did not inevitably lead to investment in shopping centers. Entrepreneurs could have put their funds to dozens of alternative uses, such as drive-in
theaters (the number of which instead went down in these years), or speculative
office buildings (many of which went up in central cities), or livery stables (the
demand for which was obviously decreasing), or hundreds of other businesses.
That investors so often channeled their interests into shopping centers and
shopping malls in fact depended on other factors that Hanchett does not emphasize. First, land was often cheap on the peripheries of American cities, especially
when measured against central business district (CBD) costs or comparable
investment opportunities overseas. Second, American land-use controls and zoning
regulations have typically been much weaker than those of other advanced nations.
In Britain, for example, the government has long been determined to emphasize
traditional retail patterns and to support highly compact, densely settled urban
centers surrounded by mostly open green belts, where both commercial and
residential development has been cautiously restricted. If, for example, a person
were to purchase a farm in England and then announce an intention to develop the
property as a shopping mall, local residents would think that the newcomer had lost
his or her mind. They do not turn such decisions over to the investor who happens
to own a parcel at any given time. It is a community decision in the full sense of the
word. Similarly, Germany and France have tightened their planning regulations,
never favorable to mall development, to push developers toward town centers.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
OCTOBER
1996
1116
Kenneth T. Jackson
Third, the United States has for generations subsidized automobile travel while
asking public transit systems to operate without the substantial government handouts
that are typical of Europe and Asia. Such policies clearly channel development
toward the very shopping malls that offer easy and cheap access to automobiles.
Fourth, shopping centers offered a range of conveniences, including light, warmth,
longer hours, better security, improved store layouts, wider parking spaces, and
increased self-selection, all accented by waterfalls, sculptures, fountains, landscaping, mirrors, and neon signs that downtown areas could rarely match. Accelerated
depreciation helped make these innovations financially feasible, but it was only a
small part of a complicated story.
Finally, Hanchett's conclusion that shopping-center development does not
correlate with automobile ownership merits skepticism. It flies in the face both of
conventional wisdom and of observable fact, inasmuch as an expansive parking lot
not only defines the shopping center but is typically necessary to it. Perhaps the
explanation for this seeming incongruity is that highways and cheap gasoline, not
cars, are the crucial variables. For example, soon after a major oil crisis hit the
developed world in 1973, construction starts on American shopping centers
plummeted, falling 22 percent in 1974 and another 41 percent in 1975. Similarly,
without the huge public expenditures on road construction that have given the
United States more paved mileage per capita than any other country in the world,
shopping centers would never have dominated the nation's retailing. Nor would this
merchandising revolution likely have happened if the American taxpayer had not
subsidized the motorist. Essentially, the federal government is the only major
government in the world that fails to recapture most of the costs associated with
the automobile through high taxes on gasoline. In Germany, Britain, France, Italy,
and Japan, to take only the most obvious examples, the practice is to charge the
consumer at the pump for the costs of the infrastructure and public health services
on which the motorcar depends. Thus, in order to be convinced by Hanchett's
ambitious argument, we need to know more than he has provided about highway
mileage and conditions, zoning and building regulations, local shopping patterns,
public transportation alternatives, and per-capita income. More systematic comparisons with Canada and Australia would be useful because their gasoline taxes
are lower than Europe and Japan and higher than the United States. 9
These comments do not mean that Hanchett's point about tax incentives is
invalid, only that the decline of central business districts and the growth of regional
shopping centers have continued to reshape the American landscape even as the
IRS has rewritten the tax code and eliminated many earlier depreciation provisions.
Indeed, more retail space has been built in the United States since 1970 than in all
our national history before that time.
Lizabeth Cohen's "From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration
of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America," is really three separate articles-the first dealing with the impact of suburban retailing on older city centers,
the second with the question of free speech and the ability to hand out leaflets or
otherwise protest on private property functioning as public space, and the third with
9 Forbes, June 1, 1976. See also "Antitrust Action in the Shopping Malls," Business Week (December
8, 1975): 51.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
OCTOBER
1996
All the World's a Mall
1117
the feminization of shopping. The focus is on Paramus, New Jersey, a bedroom
suburb eight miles from Manhattan with no main street but with virtually every kind
of store known to civilization. Along the way, Cohen disagrees with Hanchett's
contention that racial discrimination had little to do with changing patterns of
retailing, arguing instead that developers defined their commercial palaces in
exclusionary racial and economic terms and that even the bus schedules favored
white shoppers. In Paramus, it seems, both race and cars were major factors in the
shopping-center revolution.
Cause and effect may never be determined, but as the malls mushroomed, older
central business districts faltered. Cohen is particularly adept at tracing the
changing fortunes of Paterson, a core shopping district on the traditional downtown model, as contrasted with the automobile-centered shopping centers that
eventually surrounded it. In 1950, she notes, Paterson was a thriving commercial
district while Paramus was, in a retail sense, only a wide place in the road. Two
decades later, their positions were reversed. Paterson was losing population and
sales, while Paramus was well on its way to becoming one of the most glitzy and
important shopping complexes on earth. Paterson's downtown merchants and
community leaders of course fought back hard, first with Sunday blue laws, which
are still on the books in Bergen County, and later with large-scale urban renewal
efforts. Ultimately, nothing worked. Indeed, the failure of the Paterson CBD is
instructive precisely because highly qualified planners and extensive subsidies failed
to reverse the downward trend. Moreover, the success of Paramus malls was even
more impressive because it took place within easy commuting distance of Manhattan, the dominant business center of the United States. It is thus easy to understand
how the same phenomenon happened to smaller metropolitan areas, where the
central business districts were even more easily overwhelmed by suburban competition.
These scenarios have been replayed with only slight variation across the length
and breadth of the nation. Until recently, central cities were almost defined by the
locally owned department stores, which dominated locallife-Hudson's in Detroit,
Rich's in Atlanta, Rike's in Dayton, Goldsmith's in Memphis, and Bamberger's in
Newark prominent among them. All are now closed, as are dozens of other stores
in similar situations. In 1993, for example, G. Fox and Company, Hartford's last
downtown department store and the symbol of Connecticut's capital city, closed its
flagship emporium after 145 years of service. For generations, the store had etched
its own distinctive profile by its policy of free deliveries, elaborate Christmas
displays, and Art Deco interior extravagance. When you thought about Hartford,
you thought about G. Fox. Its empty hulk is now an eyesore.lO
Even the Chicago Loop, the square-mile downtown business core where the rich
once shopped, Frank Sinatra sang, New Year's crowds gathered, and screeching
elevated trains rocked along overhead, has fallen victim to fear, changing social
patterns, and the shopping-mall revolution. By the 1960s and 1970s, State Street
decay was evident. Affluent shoppers soon took their business elsewhere, some10 On the impact of malls on department stores in urban cores, see Zenia Kotval, John R. Mullin, and
Edward Murray, "The Mall Comes to Town," Economic Development 15 (Summer 1991): 15-21. See
also Kirk Johnson, "G. Fox to Close, Ending Retail Era," New York Times, September 12, 1992.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
OCTOBER
1996
1118
Kenneth T Jackson
times to the so-called Magnificent Mile just north of the Chicago River, but more
often to the burgeoning suburbs on the metropolitan fringe. Downtown's formerly
first-run movie palaces turned to second-run horror films and low-budget, triple
X-rated features. Electronic gadget shops proliferated, as did fast-food outlets.
Sears closed its famed State Street store. The last burlesque house shut down in
1977. Even sin was moving elsewhere.
Only a generation ago, Petula Clark could sing that the lights were brighter "Downtown." No longer. Yet these changes in the physical location of retail consumption
are only part of the story. Equally important has been ruthless cost-cutting
competition and the accompanying consumer desire, which has grown in recent
decades, to choose low prices and chain stores over locally owned, independent
businesses. Every city, every town, and every neighborhood in the nation has
witnessed this shift from "Mom and Pop" operations to "big box" retailers.
Many contemporary observers are not unhappy with this turn of events. They
regard the modern shopping mall-clean, safe, convenient, and cheerful-as
superior to any downtown alternative, as in fact the re-creation of the city within a
suburban setting. The mall has become the place where senior citizens walk in
comfort and security, where parents lead their young to Santa Claus, where singles
court, where teenagers socialize, and where everybody consumes. Indeed, a new
term, "mall rats," has been coined to describe the legions of young people who
spend their free time cruising indoor corridors. It is something to do when there is
nothing else to do. And there is nothing else to do, according to many young people.
This proliferation of uses and of customers has led to the frequent observation that
regional malls are the new downtowns, the centers of informal social interaction,
the successors to the traditional marketplace. Of course, this would give a new
definition to the word "center," because shopping malls are often beyond town
boundaries and thus outside government control or taxation. Typically, they are at
the geographical centers only of parking lots.
Are shopping malls the new downtowns? Cohen rightly notes that there is
something contradictory in the notion of a shopping center trying to legitimize itself
as a focus of community activity even while defining that community in exclusionary
socioeconomic and racial terms. An essential difference between a traditional
central business district and a shopping mall is that the former is by definition open
to all people at all hours. The latter is private property, owned and operated by a
single corporation, and thus subject to coercive, centralized authority. The theme of
their design is enclosure, protection, and control. Litter, panhandlers, vagrants,
suspicious characters, protestors, and even cold winds are not tolerated. What
happens, then, when citizens seek to exercise their constitutional right to petition
the general public, to speak out about this or that outrage? A downtown street
presents no constitutional problem, but urban sidewalks feature so few pedestrians
that effective protest there is impossible. Shopping malls, by contrast, offer crowds
but not access, because management typically prohibits activities that might be
controversial or offensive. And private police forces stand ready to enforce such
rules, and public-relations personnel are at the ready to justify them. Cohen focuses
on this conflict between free speech and private property, concluding that, in New
Jersey at least, the right to expression is guaranteed in malls. Unfortunately, New
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
OCTOBER
1996
1119
All the World's a Mall
Jersey is not typical, as many state courts have thus far defended the right of mall
owners to exclude political activity'!!
Cohen's third point, the feminization of public space through the transformation
of the mall culture, is compelling, albeit Gunther Barth has put this shift about a
century earlier, when "the department store made the new phenomenon of a
feminine public possible," and when New York's consumer palaces so catered to
female customers that Manhattan's primary retail district came to be known as the
"Ladies Mile." Before Alexander T. Stewart, John Wanamaker, R. H. Macy, and
other early retailers adopted "departmental" organization and advertising as
standard procedure, Barth alleges that women rarely ventured into commercial and
business neighborhoods. Thereafter, women came literally to dominate them,!2
Cohen's contribution is to move the discussion to late twentieth-century consumption and to relate the experience and power of women to the proliferation of credit
cards and of part-time employment. With imagination and insight, she demonstrates how consumer credit expanded the financial clout of married women, giving
them control not only of present but of future family earnings. Part-time employment, however, was a Trojan Horse. Earlier in this century, Cohen notes, retail
clerking was a respectable, middle-class occupation that paid a decent, livable wage.
Shopping centers, however, experienced unusual peaks and valleys of busy and
quiet periods, and they sought to use part-time female labor to cut wage costs.
Unions fought desperately, and unsuccessfully, against this threat to their members'
economic well-being. The bottom line is that shopping centers now rarely offer
career or employment opportunities that reach a middle-class standard.
Germany provides a contrary example. There, until recently, almost all stores
closed by 6:30 p.m. during the week and 2 p.m. on Saturdays. In 1966, Chancellor
Helmut Kohl agreed to extend store hours until 8 p.m. during the week and 4 p.m.
on Saturdays. On Sunday, everything is closed. Bakeries cannot even bake bread on
Sunday. Quite simply, the German government has regulated shopping hours
according to the desires of small shopkeepers and organized labor. Small stores fear
that liberalized trading hours would ruin "Mom and Pop" stores and lead to
American-style, big-box retailing. And organized labor believes that expanding
legal shopping hours would open the door to part-time employment and thus
undermine the generous benefits and income that German clerks now enjoy. Both
the German and the American systems involve political choices. Thus far, Germans
have chosen higher prices and higher wages; Americans have opted for cheap
prices, cheap transportation, and Mammon-driven super stores,!3
A HALF-CENTURY AGO, almost everyone in America, whether they lived in a great
metropolitan region, a medium-sized city, a small town, or a rural area, made their
11 The best treatment of the phenomenon of individual rights in urban and mall type situations is
Robert C. Ellickson, "Controlling Chronic Misconduct in City Spaces: Of Panhandlers, Skid Rows, and
Public-Space Zoning," Yale Law loumal105 (March 1996): 1165-1248.
12 Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New
York, 1980), 181.
13 On Germany's regulated shopping hours, see "Economy Poor, Germans Yield on Store Hours,"
New York Times, June 12, 1996.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
OCTOBER
1996
1120
Kenneth T. Jackson
major consumer purchases in some sort of a centralized shopping environment. In
communities of even modest pretensions, that place was at the confluence of the
trolley tracks, where pedestrian traffic was the heaviest and land values the highest.
Even in smaller communities, the town had a visual and clear center, if only a rural
post office and a general store.
Over the past five decades, this has changed. Small towns across the nation,
whether on the open plains of Nebraska or the winding rivers of West Virginia, have
seen their downtown shopping districts wither and die. Old businesses and buildings
are boarded up and abandoned; other structures, poorly maintained, struggle along
with marginal firms as tenants. Meanwhile, several miles away, often adjacent to an
interstate highway, a Wal-Mart, a K-Mart, or some other discount retailer rests in
the midst of a large parking lot. Such is the physical shape of America's modern
consumer culture.
There is some evidence to suggest that, in recent years, Americans have finally
become bored with malls or perhaps just tired of the effort it takes to navigate them.
The industry peaked in 1978, when sales per square foot of retail space averaged
$197 a year. Malls have become so homogenized and predictable that they have lost
much of their entertainment value. Revealingly, the number of centers under
construction nationwide has been declining since 1988. Older shopping centers, in
particular, have often closed or been razed. Some, like the 2.2 million square-foot
Roosevelt Field complex on Long Island, with parking for 9,000 cars, have had a
complete makeover in order to keep up with current trends. Smaller indoor malls,
lacking the advertising budgets of larger operations, have encountered cycles of
decline once associated with inner cities. The interiors of those structures have
become ghost towns, with white butcher paper over the windows and specialty retail
space perennially unleased. Meanwhile, new, so-called category killers like Home
Depot, Price Club, Toys 'R' Us, Staples, and T. J. Maxx are taking customers from
the malls. Occasionally, several category killers come together to form what is
called a "power mall." It is discount with a vengeance, a place of take-no-prisoners,
no-frills shopping, where the mantra is value, and where the upscale shops and
elaborate fixtures of the traditional mall are dismissed as frivolous affectations of a
bygone era. 14
Nevertheless, in 1992, the largest enclosed shopping and entertainment facility in
the United States opened in Bloomington, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis.
Known as the Mall of America, larger in square footage than Red Square,
containing twice as much steel as the Eiffel Tower, and featuring 400 separate
stores as well as an indoor amusement park, it is the biggest monument yet built in
the United States to consumption. It takes up the equivalent of 88 football fields
and features a formulaic 4.5 parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of leasable
space, which translates to 13,000 automobile spots within 300 feet of a door to the
mall. The structure has already become a "destination" facility, meaning that
almost 50 percent of all out-of-town visitors to the Twin Cities say that the Mall of
America is their main reason for being there. Boosters like to say that it is now the
14 Dean Schwanke, Remaking the Shopping Center (Washington, D.C., 1994). Also see John T.
McQuiston, "The Reinvention of a Shopping Mall," New York Times, April 23, 1993; Kirk Johnson,
"Discount with a Vengeance," New York Times, December 7, 1993.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
OCTOBER
1996
All the World's a Mall
1121
third largest tourist attraction in the United States, trailing only Disney World and
the country-music capital of Branson, Missouri. Meanwhile, Minneapolis and St.
Paul, both perennially listed among the most "livable" American cities, lack the
crowded sidewalks and colorful shopfronts that are a sign of urban health. IS
In my view, the shopping mall and the automobile culture that makes it possible
waste time, energy, and land that the United States can ill afford. Clearly, I am in
the minority. The modern shopping center and shopping mall are at the core of a
worldwide transformation of distribution and consumption. They represent, along
with music, computers, suburbs, and skyscrapers, one of America's major contributions to twentieth-century culture and life. When historians of the twenty-first
century try to sort out the nature and meaning of the retailing revolution in
post-World War II America, they will have to start with the work of Thomas
Hanchett and Lizabeth Cohen.
15 Among the dozens of newspaper and magazine articles on the Mall of America, particularly good
are Neal Karlen, "The Mall That Ate Minnesota," New York Times (August 30,1992): sect. V, p. 5; and
Eric Hubler, "Four Million Square Feet of Mall," New York Times (October 25, 1992): sect. XX, p. 33.
Kenneth T. Jackson is the Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social
Sciences and chair of the department of history at Columbia University, where
he has taught since 1968. His books include The Ku Klux Klan in the City (1967),
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985), and, with
Camilo Vergara, Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery (1989).
He is also the editor of The Encyclopedia of New York City (1995). Now
completing a book for the Twentieth Century Fund on suburban balkanization
and discrimination, he is beginning work on a history of transportation policy
in the United States. Jackson received his PhD from the University of Chicago,
where he studied with Richard C. Wade, Daniel J. Boorstin, John Hope
Franklin, and Walter Johnson.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
OCTOBER
1996