The modern shopping mall dates to 1956, when Southdale Center opened in Edina, Minnesota. Architect Victor Gruen designed it as the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled mall, with two department stores anchoring each end and a central garden court. That became the template for American malls, but it had several earlier precursors dating back to ancient times. There’s a fine line as to what constitutes as mall versus a market. My travels to the Middle East make me want to call markets and souks malls of their day. Turkey is perhaps the best example and I like that one because it always makes me think of Marco Polo and his caravan travels from Venice to China, but the malls of Turkey predate Marco by quite a bit. Kanesh and Anatolia were in business by 1900 BC. They were walled trading colonies of Assyrian merchants, the karum, in central and southern Turkey. More than 20,000 clay tablets survive, recording tin and textile deals, credit, and interest, essentially the oldest business archive in the world. I bet they were covered from the noonday sun, which made them…malls. Then there was Tyre and Carthage, both places on the Mediterranean where the Phoenicians (big-time traders and mall rats) set up port emporia that dominated Mediterranean trade in metals, purple dye (you can never have enough of the stuff, I say), glass, and timber. My favorite poet laureate, John Masefield wrote of “Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, With a cargo of ivory, And apes and peacocks, Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.” It’s one of the few poems I can quote for some reason. Then came the Agora in Athens in the 6th century BC and onward. It got even more mall-like and was part civic center, part marketplace, with stalls grouped by trade and officials checking weights and measures. Let’s not forget Alexandria at the Nile delta with it’s Pharos Lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world. The grain, papyrus, and spice hub was there’s linking the Mediterranean to India via the Red Sea.
But the real mall program is most associated with Trajan’s Market in Rome, which dates from around 110 AD. I spent many a Sunday morning in its successor Porta Portese Flea Market during my high school years. But where the Flea Market was outdoors and low-end, Trajan’s Market was right next to the Roman Forum and very chic. Porta Portese is the Hidden Meadows Sellers Fair. Trajan’s Market is more like Fashion Valley Mall or Westfield UTC in La Jolla. But I can’t leave ancient mall times without a shout out to Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, which started in 1455. It’s a covered, multi-shop complex that seemingly goes on for miles in the most exotic way imaginable. It has over 4,000 shops across dozens of covered streets, and is still one of the busiest markets on earth.
Flash forward to Victorian England. This is where the real shopping arcades began in true and recognizable form. They were glass-roofed arcades built in the 1800s, such as London’s Burlington Arcade (1819) and the Cleveland Arcade (1890), where grouped shops gathered all under one roof. They took their inspiration from The Rows in Chester, England (from the 13th century), a two-tier covered walkways of shops, a medieval precursor of the multi-level mall. Then there was Gostiny Dvor in St. Petersburg (1757–85), which was a massive purpose-built shopping arcade, and Passage du Caire in Paris (1798), the oldest of Paris’s covered shopping passages. But Burlington Arcade in London was the birthplace of the gathering of luxury shops under a skylit roof, still patrolled by beadles (ceremonial English officers…think Beefeaters). The concept had legs and even crossed a few ponds. The Arcade in Providence, Rhode Island (1828) is the oldest enclosed shopping center in the U.S. and Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan (1877) that is the glass-domed showpiece, often cited as the oldest active shopping mall and is still going strong today.
A tangent in this history is about a visit I made to Moscow in 1988. We think of things like shopping malls as being so American and so tied to our capitalist way of life, but my hotel in Moscow was right next to a place called GUM. GUM is the large historic shopping arcade on Red Square in Moscow, across from the Kremlin. It opened in 1893 as the Upper Trading Rows, a three-level complex of about 1,000 shops under a glass-and-steel roof. That design makes it one of the great 19th-century predecessors of the modern mall. The name is a Soviet-era acronym. It originally stood for Glavny Universalny Magazin (“Main Department Store”), and today it stands for Glavny Universalny Magazin or “State Department Store,” depending on the period. In Soviet times it was one of the few well-stocked stores in the country, known for long lines. Since the 1990s it has been a luxury shopping center with Western brands, cafés, and its well-known ice cream. When I went there during the early days of Glasnost, it was a smelly horse stable of sorts and nothing like the high-end place that the oligarchy has made it into.
The modern American mall actually began at Country Club Plaza in Kansas City in 1923 and has the distinction of being the first shopping center designed around the automobile. Open-air malls (sounds a lot like a souk, right?) started with Seattle’s Northgate in 1950. It was a set of stores along a pedestrian walkway with parking around them. By the time Southdale Center in Minnesota (predecessor to Mall of America) came along with its first fully enclosed, climate-controlled mall, it became the template for every suburban mall that followed. Malls spread quickly during the 1960s–80s along with the suburban boom in America and peaked around 1990. Construction largely stopped after the mid-2000s, as e-commerce and changing habits took hold. Do you remember in 2000 before the dot bomb when we all thought brick and mortar was dead for good?
The American mall didn’t so much die after 2000 as split in two: a few hundred top malls thrive, while the rest hollowed out. About 150 enclosed malls closed after supply peaked in 2008, leaving roughly 950. Even after the post-pandemic rebound, about 35% of U.S. malls are expected to fail over the next 20 years. New construction essentially stopped. American Dream in New Jersey (2019) is the rare exception. It was built by the Mall of America Ghermezian family, an Iranian-Canadian family with shopping malls roots that go back to the Silk Road. I actually met old man Ghermezian in 2009 and he asked me the funniest question anyone has ever asked me. He said, “How come you’re not Jewish?” Hmm? I’d never thought of it that way.
Anyway, between mall overbuilding, e-commerce and the collapse of way too many anchor stores (Sears, Kmart, JCPenney, Bon-Ton, Toys “R” Us and Macy’s ever-impending closures), its not so crazy to think that the mall is dead or dying. So, when Kim and I went to UTC yesterday, I wasn’t sure what I would find. Since I am decidedly NOT a mall rat, I hadn’t been in quite a while. What I saw was lots of high-end stores but not so many wandering people. But Kim pointed out the velvet ropes outside of one of the boutiques and even though there were no lines there at the early hour of our visit, she tells me that’s a telltale sign that things are not so bad. If anyone can be rusted to know the fate of the shopping mall, it’s the world’s foremost global shopper, Kim Marin. So, I’m not writing any mall eulogies just yet.