Most Americans have a strong impression or feeling if they think about the mall, whether or not they spent lots of their lives there or not. It could be formed by the memory of slurping an Orange Julius or smelling the sweet scents of Bath and Body Works. It might also be shaped by the fact that malls appear everywhere in popular culture, from Joan Didion’s 1975 essay On the Mall to movies like Mallrats and George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead to the Starcourt Mall featured in Stranger Things.
What began as an easy one-stop shopping destination is becoming something different altogether: the place where people head to socialize and eat and watch movies. And while we might complain about the proliferation of TikTok or the fact that most people don’t even shop anymore, it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t always like this. https://time.com/3805133/flashback-to-the-timeless-malls-of-the-1980s/
In the 1980s, it absolutely was common to see teenagers at a mall chilling out and hanging out with friends. During the time, there clearly was no Internet for many people (the only way to have online was to utilize text-based newsgroups) and most people used film cameras that had to be taken to a store to possess them developed. Malls were the right place to hold out, as they had food courts, arcades, and movies you could watch for free in the food court while you were awaiting your picture to develop.
While they were initially designed to displace department stores and provide modern, idealized town centers for segregated suburbanites, by the 80s malls had develop into a space for socialization and entertainment. This is particularly true for teenagers, who looked to malls as places to strut their stuff and flaunt their style. In an article for Vogue in 1993, Charles Gandee interviewed a guy who called himself a “mall rat,” who said that he used the atrium of his local mall as his personal stage to execute “the time-honored ritual of showing off.”
Eventually, the trend of teenagers chilling out at malls started initially to decline and most of them closed down. It was partly due to the rising popularity of the internet and online shopping, but it absolutely was also as a result of fact that malls were viewed as dangerous places where gangs and unrestrained youths would congregate and cause trouble. Many of them were also poorly maintained and deteriorated as time passes, making them look more and a lot more like ghettos.
But despite these trends, some malls remain open, and they’ve found ways to survive the changing landscape of consumer culture. So, will the mall ultimately be replaced by a virtual one or will it adapt and continue to generate memories for new generations? It will soon be interesting to see. For the time being, here’s a look back at some of the most popular vintage photos from the heyday of American malls.
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