Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

by Alexandra Lange

I grew up with the shopping mall. It existed to me as a social institution, and the hundreds of trips with various friends, designed to while away my teenaged years, all sort of blend together. Only the outliers stick in my mind: I distinctly remember going by myself—a shocking rarity—to The Wall, our mall CD store, to buy the Clueless soundtrack. Not only did I go to the mall with commercial intent, but because both “the mall” and “Clueless” were tagged as “feminine,” I had a thirteen-year-old’s gender-performance based anxiety about the whole thing. Outside of that one fraught solo mission and the occasional “get dropped off by the Cinnabon to run into Software, Etc to buy PC games when they still came in huge cardboard boxes,” I cannot emphasis enough how going to the mall alone as a teen was verboten.

I did not grow up with architectural terms. I have, in fact, read only Jane Jacobs, the most basic of building blocks, and with my limited knowledge set I get an outsized thrill when books mention her in a way that takes for granted that you are already familiar with her:

“This is a classic in shopping center planning, in the sense that Rockefeller Center is a classic in urban skyscraper group planning…[Northland] is the first modern pedestrian commercial center to use an urban ‘market town’ plan, a compact form physically and psychologically suited to pedestrian shopping,” cooed Architectural Forum’s critic, now far better known for her defense of downtowns and urban living—in 1954 even Jane Jacobs could be a fan of the mall.

This was the only “in” joke that I spotted. I appreciated Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall because it didn’t give a hoot that I had no idea what clerestory windows were. I love that it knows that mall naming conventions follow a pattern–Northland, NorthPark, WestField, WestBrook, Eastpark, Eastmarch, Southdale, South Square–and it will still just pile those names on you like they are distinctive and you could possibly keep them all in your head at once. Meet Me never once talked down to me, even in some of the more dense architectural history portions when I almost wish it would have.

And to save you the trouble, I will steal the internet definition of clerestory windows: “a row of windows, higher than eye level, that are designed to let in natural light.” The dinaburgwrites difference is that, like a bad food recipe, I will clutter up the definition with tangents: the word clerestory is not pronounced kler-est-oh-ree, as I have always assumed, but like “clear-story.” And that apparently applies to the part of a church–the clerestory, natch–that gave the window-rows their name. Dear fantasy books, I’m sorry to say when you’re setting your scene in the collapsed temple of a dead god, I will no longer pronounce clerestory in the cool way that I made up in my head. I will still mangle a bunch of your proper nouns, though, no matter what letters you put on the page.

Ah, so, clerestory is like a microcosm of the first half of Meet Me; you get a lot of architectural history, and, at least for me, a lot of it was new and didn’t always make sense on initial encounter. This is my first book about physical architecture, though, so grounding it in something I was intimately familiar with–the American shopping mall–was like easing into a murky lake; I wasn’t quite sure how far out I would be able to touch the bottom. I also wasn’t sure I wanted to be out there amongst the spooky plantlife and aggro snapping turtles.

The layout was simple: A large, square Hudson’s department store sat at the center, dressed in simple brick with a vertical grid of white concrete columns offering some articulation and distinction from a distance. At the ground level, the edge of the building sat back from the grid, creating a fourteen-foot-deep covered passage around the edge of the whole complex. Five additional buildings with smaller stores flanked the sides and back of the anchor store in a “cluster scheme.” Between each of the buildings, landscaped plazas with fountains, flowers, sculpture, and trees offered seating and shade.

This is a description of an early mall, and once you read it enough times to be able to form an image in your head (it took me a while, because verbalized architectural detail is, as I said, not my forte) it seems “normal” because we, the suburban generation, have grown up with the form. But Meet Me lets you know why each and every choice that makes up the typical American mall was made. Unsurprisingly for construction borne of the civil rights era, a lot of the reasons were pretty racist:

The shopping mall, from its origins in plazas such as [Country Club Plaza] in Kansas City, has to be seen as a racist form, born from speculation that a whites-only version of the city–even a city bedecked in English or Spanish garb–would prove to be a better return on investment.

My understanding from the history lessons of the book is that malls were intended to be “safe” replacement downtowns for white-flight suburban women, plunked down in empty fields in a vaguely cardinal direction from the nearby (and newly built) island of suburban homes—hence the “[direction] + [land type]” naming convention. The mall as a structure was isolated by what the book refers to as “moats” of highways and parking lots so that only those suburban car-havers could get there; protection from the dangerous elements of the city from which the suburbanites fled in the first place. Car supremacy & anti-black racism, the beating heart of mid-century America.

you should have already heard this in your head.

After the history portion runs its course and we catch up to modern times, the shift in Meet Me toward more contemporary and speculative theories relies more upon authorial voice and personal story. It makes sense, as there are fewer dense structural forms to explain. It’s nice pacing: the foundational information thins out and you start hurtling toward the end of the book with more anecdotes, more personality, and more easy-listening stories:

Asian-American expressions of longing for the boba shops of one’s youth are not just about the physical space, or the drink, or the companionship; they’re as much about the time, however fleeting, spent within the bubble of comfort and belonging. It’s about missing the period of your life when you could afford to let bubble tea occupy such a large part of it.

Having the 2020 covid pandemic squarely in the “personal anecdote” section and not the “historical impact” part is still a little chilling. In late 2022, after the lifting of general social restrictions, the youtube deadmall tours seem less fascinating and more unrelatably liminal—back when the streets were empty and no one could get into a mall, ghosting through the ruins of commerce as disembodied camera-eyes felt pressing, important, somehow. Not to say it isn’t still interesting, but I can walk through decrepit infrastructure again, if I want. I am back among people—the call of the mall feels less exciting, at least to me.

By the close of the book, I liked understanding the root of why society began to circumscribe and enclose commerce into monoliths. I appreciated the hope for malls laid out on the final pages, but I simply don’t see it. Shopping centers are not downtowns, and whether they shift into community-forward small businesses, lifestyle destinations like gyms or spas, or restaurants targeting different demographics, they still cannot solve the fundamental issue that malls are a private space masquerading as a public good:

The space of the mall looks like public space, but with their private cops and rules about loitering and unaccompanied minors, most shopping centers were never truly open…As Elisabeth Cohen writes, suburban shopping centers, like suburban housing developments, were planned to exclude. When developers and store owners set out to make the shopping center a more perfect downtown, they aimed to exclude from this public space unwanted urban groups such as vagrants, prostitutes, racial minorities, and poor people. Market segmentation became the guiding principle of this mix of commercial and civic activiy, as the shopping center sought perhaps contradictorily to legitimize itself as a true community center and to define that community in exclusionary socioeconomic and racial terms.

There is no shred of design in a shopping mall that isn’t created to pull money from your pocket. And if its spaced is used by groups without money—teens, unhoused—new rules will ensure the riffraff is cleared away for ease of use by the abundantly monied.

But! I don’t want to end on a completely dire note, so let us close out with the etymology of “mall”, and why I remember being incredibly disappointed at seeing highway exit signs for “mall” or “business mall” in my suburban mid-late-driving-years teens and going to explore, only to find out it was a row of glass-fronted offices or corporate campuses:

Indoor shopping malls of the 1950s and 1960s took their cues from the origin of the word “mall.” Pall Mall is a London street, long home to gentleman’s clubs at which the aristocracy drank, ate, and played together. One of the games they played was pallamaglio, or pall-mall, an early version of croquet that employed palla (ball) and maglio (mallet). Players used their mallets to move balls down a long, linear course, really an alley, at the heart of the city. While the game fell out of fashion, that name for spaces that suited the requirements of the game persisted. A linear, landscaped promenade came to be known as a mall.

Cool facts are always cool, and they get cooler in context. Meet Me is full of both.