Malls, Malls, Everywhere Malls

  Most cities have them.  Many have these multistory structures filled top to bottom with stores, eating courts, and an equal amount of parking.  Some are small with a few stores while others have acres, upon acres of temptation.

By definition, a mall is a collection of stores, services, and parking possibly with banks, movie theaters, gas stations, etc.

Malls have only been around ninety some odd years. The first one was built near Kansas City, MO back in 1922 by the J.C. Nichols company.  It was called the Country Club Mall and the idea was for it to provide a business district for a residential area. It had a single building with a paved lighted parking lot.

Later in the 1920's with cars becoming more popular, business districts became clogged with traffic so companies began building strip malls further out.  Strip malls differed in that they were a straight line of stores often anchored with a grocery store, and/or drug store with other convenience stores in between and parking out front.

Although the Grandview Avenue shopping center (Columbus Ohio) opened in 1928 with 30 stores and parking for 400 people, the Highland Park Shopping Village (Dallas, TX) which opened in 1931 received credit for being the first planned shopping center.  What made it different is that it occupied a single piece of land rather than several blocks with streets running through and the stores all faced inwards, rather than towards the street.

About this time Sears and Montgomery Wards who started as catalogue based operations, began opening stores on its own piece of land with parking lots but in the suburbs where more people lived.  Another shopping center/mall in Columbus, Ohio encouraged night time shopping when Don Casto, developer of the Town and Country Shopping Center hired a 90 year old woman to dive from a 90 foot platform into a four foot pool of flaming water.

This event took place in the lighted parking lot where people could come to see and while there, they could check out the shopping center.  Malls continued to grow and change.  In the 1950's one shopping center opened in Seattle that was actually two strip malls facing each other with a walkway between the two while the first two story mall opened in Framingham, MI one year later.

In 1954, this concept evolved into a mall with a store at the center surrounded by a ring of stores with the park lot enclosing the mall first build in Detroit Michigan.  This mall also made history when it became the first mall to be air conditioned.

Two years later in Edina MN, the first totally enclosed mall opened, complete with central air and heating, two department anchor stores, and a common area.  The Southdale center has the reputation for being the first regional mall.  In the twenty years after World War II, as the populations in the suburbs grew, so did the building of malls, especially strip malls so that by 1964 there were just over 7,600 of them in the United States.

In less than a decade, the number of malls doubled and new types opened such as the "festival marketplace" in Boston filled with food and specialty shops or the first vertical mall in Chicago filled with stores, a hotel, offices, condo's and a parking garage.  Some malls got bigger and bigger becoming super malls such as the Malls of America complete with amusement park while others featured factory outlets.

There were a few years in the late 80's and early 90's where construction dropped due to the Savings and Loan crisis but things snapped back and construction began again.  What is found at malls depends on what the customer wants because the owner of the mall wants to keep stores in it so the population changes as the demands change.

I've even seen a few shopping malls that loose stores to the point it has to close.  There is one I've seen over the years in California loose tenants. The only thing that survives is a couple of restaurants, a movie theater and the odd used bookstore. I expect one of these years its going to totally go out of business.

Let me now what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.