Who wants to sit in that desolate-looking spot?” Frank Lloyd Wright carped of the atrium inside the first enclosed shopping mall, the Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota.
But 75,000 people rushed there the day it opened in October 1956 and marveled at the 72 stores on two floors, the 800,000 square feet of retail, the 5,200-space parking lot, the 70-degree controlled climate. The Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen, already acclaimed for building the nation’s largest open-air shopping center, had birthed a new phase of American culture.
Over the next 40 years, another 1,500 enclosed malls would dot the landscape, from suburb to shining suburb, insinuating themselves into everyday life so profoundly that just “going to the mall” became a pastime. Hundreds of malls, meanwhile, have closed and been demolished or converted, overtaken by a renewed emphasis on walkable neighborhoods and challenged by that overwhelming force of 21st-century living: online shopping.
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