that i will remember. 2022 wisconsin book festival. every year there's one. and ever alexandra said yes. five months ago i've been talking this book talking to people about the history of the mall as much as i possibly could. and here it is today. i'm delighted. who has been to the mall before? i know there's some people who have been to the mall. fantastic. the mall, as someone who was born in 1980, was the center culture for me growing up in oconomowoc and we didn't have one. we had to go to brookfield. i think that i'm not alone. i talk about how important the mall was to me in certain group of formative years, and i am delighted to see people of all ages here so we can get a wide variety of people who say the modern mean anything to me or i was alive and an adult when they invented the mall and it's ridiculous or whatever they're going to say this book is a fascinating cultural history. it is a fascinating architectural history. we know from meet me by the fountain. people didn't used to have cell phones. you just had to kind of go and believe they were going to be there for you and maybe there'd be like an in sync or new kids on the block going on, depending on how good your mall was at the time. i want you to put your hands together and please help me welcome alexandra lange. seemed like a form of architecture that everyone had seen, and so they would be motivated to learn more and understand better and then once i got into my research as, you'll see a little bit today i found out there were so many things that could be explained in and around the mall that it was like an even bigger topic than i initially realized. and that's just like what makes any book project really fun. so, so just a little bit about myself. so i'm a design critic and this is fourth book, my previous book was called the design of childhood. and like one of the things that i learned a lot about for that book was children's. so after i speak here, i definitely want to go down and check out the children's room and library because it's kind of something that i collect in my head. my book was published june and it covers the history of indoor shopping malls from the 1950s to the present and each chapter of the book really covers decade in the life of malls, from invention to some demolition. and the last chapter suggests a lot of ideas about how to repurpose malls for our, you know, digital possibly future. i'm sure here wisconsin there are a number of examples of dead or dying malls. and one of the things i hope people leave my book and maybe leave here today with is the idea that malls can have a second life or sometimes a third life and they don't to just be what they have always been. so i first had the idea for this book in 2018 when i read about the italian architect renzo piano's involvement with a project called city center. bishop out in san ramon, california. that's like in the greater bay area in northern california, the word city center were in the name of the project. but when looked at the map, it didn't seem to be that close to any cities and piano himself kept calling a piazza in his beautiful italian accent. but this an italian hill town and i suspected and my research later proved that this was, in fact, a mall. but why did no one want to call it a mall so cut to almost four years later. and my book that in part answers that question by linking malls to fashion cycle like malls are made for the same kind of disposable reality in a sense that, the clothes that are sold inside them are so once upon once the defining news narrative of shopping centers became dead malls after the 2007 recession. a lot of developers. wanted to distance themselves from word mall, if not from the architectural typology of shops around the central square, which is an ancient typology. so i also found once i dug into it, that there are lots of malls that are alive well, but maybe an equal number that are dead and dying. so this is really is a story about some things that are alive and some things that are dead. and i think a lot of people just want to separate things into categories. one or the other, a or b, and really it's both. so as i write in the book mall architecture was really made for malleability. it was made to change. unlike lots of other buildings, the mall is a framework for other smaller architectures. anchor tenants like department boutiques, food counters, kiosks that be able to swap businesses in and out easily. the mall exterior, which is typically blank except for fun science like this one is timeless and easily updated with new signage. and it seemed to me that by borrowing into the past of the mall, it's best designers its original intentions, its 70 year legacy at this point i could help both the mall lovers and the mall haters figure out what to do with these ubiquitous structures. so for the rest of my speaking time today, i'm going to take you through some architectural in the history of the mall. and after that i'm happy to take any questions that you have. so there are many states that claim credit for being, you know, the originators of the mall and california is actually one of them the. california mall story begins westchester which was then a new aerospace industry suburb of los angeles. and it begins with the design of what was actually a freestanding department store. the man typically and i think correctly credited with inventing the shopping mall, was a man named victor. he was born in vienna and he fled the nazis and emigrated to new york in 1938. his first job was working for the industrial designer norman bell. geddes on what would become the futurama pavilion for general motors at the 1939 world's fair, which can see here that pavilion is notable for mall history for two reasons. number one, it has a 35,000 square foot model of. what the usa would look like in the year 1960. so, you know, 41 years in the future. and it was a model because it was for general motors that included downtown skyscrapers, suburban housing, 14 lane highways and a heck of a lot of cars to the exterior of the pavilion. it was designed as a stream object itself with long snaking up the exterior and guiding the huge crowds that came into the building. so this is basically like early disney or trader joe's organizing the line architecture when a decade later guru and his first wife designer elsie crumb, were asked to design a freestanding department store for westchester, california. they were obviously thinking back to this world's fair experience in terms of the design that department store millie barnes was a mid-priced store and it was ahead of the curve in realizing that the market for their wares was moving out of downtowns. all the women living in those little single family houses that were being in california and lots of places, the war we're going to need a place to shop, but while they had arrived at downtown department stores by street car and bus these stores were only accessible by car, so than surrounding this brand new store with even more giant parking lot grew and in it turned of the parking lot into a promenade drivers x access top floor entrance. as you can see here through these dramatic crisscross ramps and up on the top floor. there was also a nursery for children and a restaurant with a view of the surrounding suburb at street level. they created this series of display windows which were set at an angle to the sidewalk so that they could be seen both by pedestrians walking by and by who were speeding by. the outside, as you can see, is pretty plain, except for the giant mclaren's logo. so the the giant logo really became the model for department stores attached to stop shopping malls, which tend to be solid, windowless with a big logo at the scale of the highway and came to think of them as a giant version, the store shopping bag, which basically looks the same but mclarens despite having all of these facilities embedded in it, was only one building and a years later grew and was contacted by the dayton family of minneapolis their department store, dayton's, which is now the target company was a traditional downtown anchor store, but by the early 1950s they had begun to see a downturn. their business, like the store owners in many other cities, hudson's in detroit, neiman marcus and dallas, they realized that they were going to have to open stores in the suburbs, but they wanted to exert design and control over the surroundings for their stores. and that's it grew and came in. he offered modern design with a sensibility and the design for a shopping mall that was centered on a plaza that was meant to remind shoppers of main street or the town square or even the bustling streets of his native vienna. you can see that design in this bird's eye view with the black sky indicating the central plaza. it was also surrounded by two department stores and then two smaller bands of individual shops. the mall was an improvement on the town square. however because as the advance press for southdale mentioned, the first indoor shopping mall offered 365 shopping days a year in climate controlled comfort. and in minnesota. and i think the same must be true in wisconsin state for like deep snow in the winter and very humid summers. the idea of having all of these other days in which would be pleasant to shop was really a big selling point to kind of underline this point. the central open space at southdale was known as the garden of perpetual spring, and it featured plants and fountains. it had a carousel, it had an which is the kind of cylindrical structure that you can see in this photo. aviaries were very popular early malls which i can't really imagine that now. and it also had two sculptures by the important sculpture. sculptor harry bertoia, which are still in place. and bertoia a fair amount of mall sculpture and a lot of other ones are also, you know, scattered america. those sculptures are as the golden trees. again, underlining this kind of indoor nature theme. so southdale was a huge hit. national press covered the opening as if it was major suburban breakthrough which i would argue it was and grew associate soon had more work they could handle over the design of the mall would mature the pinwheel plan that southdale was designed on would be discarded in favor of much simpler, more easily replicable plans. the simplest version of that really shaped like a capital i with one department store at end, and then a double run of shops going between them. typically there would be planters and benches down the center, off and under a skylight. but this simple version could also dressed up and throughout the 1960s, some of the country's best architects experimented with the mall as a site of invention. a great example. this is north park center in dallas, which was built in 1964 by the developers ray patsy nasher. and it's still by their daughter, nancy there's a whole interesting saga there, really only about ten malls that are still under family ownership in the u.s. today. and many of them are, in fact the most successful models. north park is one of them. south coast plaza, kind of between l.a. and san diego is another in outside detroit, somerset collection, which is owned by the forbes family. another one of those family owned malls, north park was originally l-shaped with one department store at each end and one at the corner. and the architect in north park, e.g. hamilton, designed the mall to have a very elegant, minimalist structure of white brick, polished concrete floors. and there's a little flower shaped in the corner of the frame of. every storefront which you can kind of see by the tea and tapers in this image. so the idea was that the could come and go, you know, none of the stores you see in this picture are still around, but that the architecture would remain the same and would remain kind of untouched by the passage of time. so i would say north park, you know, still looks like this, which is kind of amazing. and that's partially thanks to careful maintenance and partially due the devotion of the family to keeping the mall up when north park doubled in size in 2006, the new from the same firm actually. repeated and updated the original of some materials they have glass railings now, which you couldn't have had in 1965. but white brick, the concrete and those little bug pieces all stayed the a grand or model for the mall was. the arcades and galleries that up in the mid-19th century in the u.s. and the united states thanks to advances in cast iron and glass technology. the granddaddy of all of those galleries is the galleria vittorio emanuele in milan, which gave its name and form to dozens of models with long barrel vaulted glass roofs. i've found as i've gone to different places, the gallery is often the nicest mall in a town and a lot of them look, i think just like this example in houston with just the super long glass, you know, running for several blocks. but the houston galleria was actually the first of this style of mall in 1970, and it was by the visionary developer gerald hines, and designed by joe obata of oak is a st louis firm. hines post, which was the area in which the galleria was built as the node of a new urban. he was really trying to create a second downtown for houston and the galleria, which also pioneered the mall ice skating rink, was anchored. two department stores, including this neiman marcus, which had a design inspired by le corbusier's latourette, which is a monastery which is obviously a very ironic reference. i mean, i also think the ice skating rink is funny because like, okay, you're building a mall in or wisconsin and you have the gall, the garden, perpetual spring, but you build a mall in texas and you have an ice skating rink year round. so it's like, let's flip, flip the seasons on their head. the galleria also anchored, ongoing and really successful use development, which includes hotels, housing offices and a sports club that has a track on the roof that goes around the outside of the skylight. so when the history of architecture design we often focus on the designer or architect, the author of the work but a little bit different when it comes to the history of malls. victor gruen was trained as an architect and. he worked as a designer during the early of his career. but once malls took off, his real role really more that of a salesman of the concept, like a lot of people have asked me, you know, what, victor gruen, so successful because there were other developers doing same thing. and honestly, you know, part of it comes down to personal charisma. you know, i feel like if he were a developer now, you know, maybe would be on tech talk, he would definitely all over the business channels talking because you can tell by the coverage of him at the time that he you know, he would say anything. he would for heroic photos. he was very willing to be a media personality personality. he actually had a partner named larry smith who, you know, nobody ever mentions was an economist. and they worked together to make the financial argument for malls that would appeal civic leaders and bankers and real estate people while he, like the developers, you know, used architectural renderings to speak to communities about the beauties of the mall. so there are a number of charismatic developers in the mall story from the gnashers in dallas to hines in texas to james rose, who i'll speak about in a moment, about more and beyond, hines began as a solo office tower developer, but in projects like the galleria and houston, and one just after in dallas. he expanded his scope to city making putting malls the center of new mixed use neighborhoods. this promotional brochure that i'm showing you here was something that he showed around to potential investors before the design was finished. you can see that this doesn't have the skylight. but what interests me about the brochure that it treats post oak as if it were already a place it's sort of like, you know way people use photo realistic renderings today and the brochure really presents the galleria as kind of a theme park of life where everything is taken care of under one roof everything is fun it's a mall utopia with ice skaters and the carousel and the fancy circus banners gallery is really created a bridge between the architect of the past and the present and many of the new galleria shape shopping malls that built in the seventies, eighties and nineties were built into existing cities are a great example of this is the eaton center in toronto, which above a huge transit hub. and it's really the heart of a city again, a place like toronto gets very cold in the winter. so everybody to, you know, make their transit pass so they can cut through the eaton center and the galleria form really becomes the look of choice for developers and architects who are trying to make downtown shopping competitive with the suburban shopping malls, westside square in los angeles is example of the style of mall, and it was highly effectively as an interior setting in clueless, there's one chapter of my book where i talk about teen movies because they have so often and so effectively been set at malls and the experience of in movies actually syncs pretty closely with the experience of real life teens. movies are a great shorthand to talk that in the book i talk about how mall atriums are essentially catwalks and feel like this scene in which cher and christian jung kind of the most beautiful kids in school, ascend on this escalator up towards the light of the skylight in the mall. really makes the point about how the architecture is set up to showcase people and showcase certain kinds of activities. but by the early 1980s, the suburban mall formula of shopping, a pinch of entertainment like the carousel or the skating rink needed an update. it had been tired and people weren't really willing to travel as far for things anymore. so this is where a california named john gertie comes in. gertie had built a fair number of cookie cutter malls, including the glendale galleria, and he that the entertainment part, the mall experience should be brought to the foreground rather than remaining in the background. and he was very dismissive of the tasteful european styling of the galleria. he thought malls should be fun and they should look like fun. his first attempt to do this was, horton plaza in san diego, which is an indoor outdoor mall. given the nice climate and diego and it was built over part of the city's historic downtown and its design and to resemble a hollywood version of an italian hill town with stripe palazzo like buildings that you might find in siena and lots and lots of level changes. but gertie took that idea the mall as entertainment much with the mall of america which was for a time the largest mall in the usa which centers on an actual park and has four wings themed different world cities. the idea was, you know children thrills for the kids and a taste of sophistication. the adults again all under climate controlled roof at the mall of america, had all of the regular shopping for department stores and two levels of specialty shops. but there was also enough to do you could fly to minneapolis for the weekend and never leave the mall. and in the first kind of flush of excitement about, the mall of america people did that. there were flights to minneapolis just for the mall, essentially from all over the usa. the section i'm showing you here with the green metal roof and indoor streetlamps, market street was supposed to look like a sort of european with little stalls on the ground floor selling food, handmade gifts like an brick lined street. the developers of the mall of america, 555 group had previously the west edmonton mall in which had even more extravagant themes, including indoor pirate ship and it kind of makes me sad today that their more recent projects, the american dream mall in new jersey, among them our list themed and more of a generic luxury look with acres of white marble and stainless steel railings. i have a lot of nostalgia for the kind of you know faux garden district look of the original mall of america but i think one of dirties most important insights which had been part of the original mall pitch was how you get families to stay the mall longer. and he it just you know to the maximum level by putting an entire theme park which was originally camp snoopy in the middle of the mall with the restaurants arranged around the central atrium overlooking, the roller coasters. it was kind of like a state fair happening all the time or a trip to disney without leaving home state. and while your kid was riding the roller, you could have a drink or buy clothes or just browse, knowing there was no threat of and very little crime. so one of the ways that see malls starting to reposition themselves in the 21st century actually goes back to jodi's idea of entertainment. an anchor, you know, malls have movie theaters which are more more elaborate seating, elaborate food options. there are vr experiences, there are trampoline, parks, climbing walls and just a couple of weeks ago, i read about a mall, north vancouver, where they were putting like an indoor mountain bike track in the former sears. so there's a lot of things you can do with a mall. but in adding market street to the mall of america gertie was also following another in mall design, which was return to downtown. the proliferation of malls in the early sixties and seventies had as the downtown merchants feared siphoned shoppers off to the suburbs. so city found themselves with dense walkable streets that were empty of people. so enter james rouse, an early developer of shopping malls around his native baltimore. he thought that some of suburban shoppers along with tourists and office workers could enticed to shop downtown if it offered an experience that could be had downtown. an experience of open air, pedestrian walks, real old architecture and lots of local businesses. people had to see what was special about their. but it needed to be packaged little bit and i hadn't been to madison before today, but i spent this morning walking around downtown, so of course i ended up on the state street, pedestrian mall and think you can see that it has a lot of design similarities to this faneuil hall marketplace in boston faneuil hall you know basically kicked off a giant urban trend for. the building a pedestrian plazas are about 200 built in. the u.s. between 1975 and 1990 and now most of those are closed. but the ones continue to thrive, are often college towns. so, i mean, basically madison is a great illustration of a point i make in my book, and i don't know when state street mall happened, but i kind of guessed by the signage that was it was in the eighties. maybe somebody here. okay. all right. so, yes. so it's like. right, it's like. right there with the trend and it was really fun for me to see it. so well used this morning because, you know, that's kind like what i think more cities want and more cities need to have. so the rouse with the designers, ben and jane thompson came up with the term festival marketplace to refer what they were doing. they taking industrial architecture that was past its prime and turning it via adaptive reuse into a new type kind of shopping district. he was very successful at this for time faneuil hall marketplace is here. this is what the interior looked like sort of begat baltimore's harbor place, which has more of a seafood theme and manhattan's south street seaport and pier 17, an along with the other malls that i was just talking about. so i hope can kind of look at this interior photo, faneuil hall, and see how the colors and materials and textures of the festival were really different from those of the mall. it warm instead of being cold with festival like fabric banners and roofing open stalls instead of individual boutiques, brick paving and so on. one of the things that the thompsons put in their kind of design manual for faneuil hall was that nothing could be wrapped in plastic like everything had to be out and touchable. and i think sometimes when go into new retail concepts today, i think oh okay. like this part of the seventies is totally coming back because you know when you can shop online. the reason to go to a store is so that you can touch things. so i feel that all of these patterns are really cyclical, both in cities and in in general. during the late seventies, the humorous calvin trillin would actually write as a satire of such places in the new yorker, which i found and it's really delightful because the brick and the kitchen stores, you know, everyone had a copper pot because julia child told them to became kind of a cliche. but for people who are used to shopping, fluorescent light loading only on floor plastic wrap places, this was really a revelation a number of the top top architects in the profession design which is something that people often find surprising. ben thompson been head of the architecture program at the harvard graduate school of design gilbert of hk, also designed the arrows, air and space in washington dc. others you might have heard of include the office of arrow saarinen, which designed the neiman marcus dallas i.m. pei and cesar pelli, whose work you see. but the interest in the mall in, the upper echelons of the profession to peter out in the 1970s as malls became more you architects started afraid of commerce that it would taint their practice to design something commercial. and this is something that john gertie raged about. you know, often interviews from the nineties on because, he felt like he couldn't get any respect. it may interest you to know that frank gehry, of all people, designed a shopping mall. he spent the early part of his career actually working for victor gruen, and he designed santa monica place for james rose, the same innovative developer, faneuil hall. santa monica place is basically the west coast version of faneuil hall. it was very white and beachy instead of industrial and brick and metallic, instead of warm, it gary designed this mall during the same period in which he designed his famous house. and you can see some of the same materials like the chain link on the parking garage that he used in his, as well as the angles, indoor plants and the mall. he was really working through the same ideas in both projects. ultimately gary was really unhappy with this project because some parts of his design vision clashed with that of the retailers and developers who kind of thought they knew how to make a mall work. and after this he swore, wouldn't do any more commercial projects. but i don't know. i think it's kind of great. i like the what if idea. like what if gary had gone on to design more malls? like what if he became a famous mall architect instead a famous museum architect? so the last chapter of book is devoted to the mall today and it includes projects like this one in new york city, which is new essex market and opened in 2019 and was designed by shop is like a pretty up and coming younger firm it might look a little bit different in the materials, but it's really based on the same idea. rose and the thompsons brought to cities, taking the local, the historical and putting it into a more high design, more centralized, easier to use context. i feel like this ceiling which actually follows the underside of the seats in a movie theater that's upstairs, has an echo of the coffers and the dome of a place like faneuil hall or the structure, a galleria ceiling and 1970s projects like that. the part, the chapter that also seems to resonate with a lot of people, a section i have on adaptive of malls, and particularly with this example, which is austin community college, highland campus, it uses all of the parts of a dead mall, highland mall, which opened in austin in 1970 and has built a number of new structures. so you have classrooms, the old boutiques, you have an eating area in the former food court, you have this internal seating and part of an old department store, and they cut skylights into it so that there's more natural light, but they've reused the concrete and steel, which is increasingly important now that we're more aware of, you know, how how costly it is to extract building materials and that, you know, we shouldn't just be throwing them away according the colleges chancellor students associations with the mall actually helps some first generation students feel comfortable on the college campus and they saved a giant fiberglass hotdog from original food court and it's become popular selfie location at highland so i kind of wrap up my you know summary skim through my book here i hope you becomes clear that i didn't write this history of malls for nostalgia. like i thought the book would appeal to, you know, eighties babies like me but i also want people to understand that the knowledge about how are and were well design kind of well thought through concepts and how they have become community spaces. i feel like armed with this knowledge, you know, all of us should be better able continue what might be done with the dead mall and to consider it with some creativity and excitement know like the excitement that those festival marketplaces or a new mall opening town once generated. there are a lot more stories to be written about malls and the ones i tell in my book are really just the start. so thank you. i'd love take questions that people have, questions because you're supposed to go up to the mike over there there. i saw that we use travel the state of wisconsin go exploring all the malls. i the decline in them but i do see now and i'm really excited is that malls in that manner have some decline some haven't but they're doing it with food now like in milwaukee they have a market place here they have some place on the east side and that's really exciting to see. just a comment what do you think about that? yeah, there's actually a large section, my book about food and i talk a lot in particular about bubble tea as kind of which i love, which my kids as a driver or like an exemplar of kind of like how malls are using food today. i see bubble tea as part of a line of low cost sugary kind of attractive food that has always been popular at malls like if you think of, you know, kind of the original mall snack as being a cookie from mrs. fields, it's like you have cookie and then you had smoothie shops and, you know, cinnabon in there somewhere. and today you have bubble tea, which you know kids love. and it's like it's very instagrammable and something that like people will go out to like you can't have it at home. you have to go out. and it's very sociable. like what flavor, what's your favorite flavor, etc., etc.. so yes, food is a huge driver because again, like i was talking before about entertain ment experiences, you know, food is, an entertainment experience in our culture today. so i think there are a lot of malls where they've actually, you know, replaced the department store with, you know, a high end food market, eataly or a more local version of that where there's fresh for sale, maybe packaged food take home, but also a restaurant where you can go and a friend there is, a really old dead mall designed by victor gruen in outside detroit called northland. and that's what they're planning to do with the former hudson's department store, turn it into a food concept. so i think it's a sign, you know, the movement of culture are more interested in food, more places have more food from more other places. you know, on tap. i mean, i can just tell like that there's a lot of food culture in from walking around today and people will leave their house for that. people want to be sociable around that. yep so the kind of thing that i got the presentation was that like dead malls can be very purposed into new things. but could you explain little about like how malls die or what a dead mall is? sure how malls die? well, the short answer to that is capital ism, but that's not a very good answer answer. one, i'm not a business. and the whole time i was writing this book, i said, okay, there's all this business stuff, malls over here. like, i love to talk about the design and the urbanism and the culture like. but i have to get into the business stuff. so one important kind of part of malls is that during their, their heyday, basically, you know, 1962, 1990, like there were hundreds of malls built and they kept building them when a mall owner to know when a mall wanted to build a new mall, they didn't necessarily go to a town that didn't have a mall. many times they would go to a town that did have a mall that was doing well but was ten years old and they would build a new mall five miles further out of town because, you know, first drinks suburbs, second ring suburbs. people had built houses further out during that time. so they centered the new mall in like the new ring of sprawl. well, when you build new mall five miles away from an old mall, both malls cannot continue to be healthy. the new cannibalized the old mall and they that language that kind of like zombie which i find really funny so all of the you know shopper ads are like ooh brand new mall bright and shiny we'll go there. so then you have a dead mall. so basically like mall owners like killed their own sector of the economy by over america like if you look at the numbers of malls that we have in the u.s., there's this too much shopping per person so even had we not had the 2000 recession 2007 recession, i think we still would have lost lot of malls because there just simply aren't shoppers. so that recession combined with online shopping now combined with the pandemic and combined with, you know, the death of the department store, like has really taken out a lot of malls. so it's actually a right sizing if you about kind of the the shopping but unfortunately that leaves these very large structures can be a real drag on the economy communities. that was a great question. i grew up with the glendale mall in indianapolis. i want to you about the roofing and unruly thing and reroofing of malls. glendale started with an open piazza style. they it for the first relaunch of the mall and now, you know, decades later, they unwrap it which and they've done that here in madison to at the hilldale mall which makes no sense at all in a winter climate. could you talk about the roofs? yes. again, that that goes back to my earlier mention of how malls are also part of the fashion cycle. so in the early mall development period, some of them were malls which technically means an indoor space and. some of them were shopping centers, which technically means, you know, an space. so, you know, they'll be a plaza in the center, but it's en roofed, as you say. but, you know, by the by the 1980s, like any mall that was, you know, going to be fairly high end sort of had be roofed. so a lot of these earlier malls built in like, you know, the 1960s that had started smaller, they roofed them, added another wing, they added a movie theater, they added a third department store, something like that in order to keep themselves competitive. well, during by the 1990s that had, again, you know, that version of malls had become old hat. and they started to build from scratch things called lifestyle centers and lifestyle centers, essentially high end malls, but outdoors. so they would still have anchor department stores at either and they would have essentially like a pedestrian mall, you know, the center. but it would be all built from scratch and all in the middle of a parking lot. and those tended to take on the architecture of their locations. so know you'll have kind of brick ones white pediment in connecticut and know there's some alamo looking ones in texas and things like that. so once the lifestyle centers became the new things in malls some of those older model, model malls that had roofed themselves, wanted to roof themselves so that they would look more like a lifestyle center. so maybe that was a long explanation, but i, i find all of this so funny because it's like anything you can think of that has happened, already happened, and it'll probably happen again. this has been really great and i know that you've been looking this from an architecture standpoint, but i had some women's studies classes at that time. we had learned that malls were also created in to protect women because women were the shoppers. and so was kind of like keeping women indoors. i was just curious if you from a sociological perspective, you know, got got any information you were researching malls. yeah. no, that's a great point. i do talk a little bit about kind of the experi of women vis a vis the mall. i would say that malls are designed to protect women. it's not so much the indoors thing is like a little bit of fear, downtowns, you know, as downtown started to decline, malls were seen as a safer place, you know? well lit, well cleaned, you know, had of the amenities. and so that was why both women, children were thought to be safer in a mall than they were on streets. i would they were also designed for women because they were designed to give the women who were in the suburbs with their kids something to do during the day, you know, because in that immediate period, like there were all these single family houses in the suburbs and the men went to work in their cars and, you know there was no provision necessarily for a social place for women. and that's where i think malls really came in and probably saved a lot of women from quiet despair because. when you went to the mall, you would see your friends. you would have things for your kids to do, like it was a more social and community place. the other thing that the mall did for women is it offered a lot of women either a secondary job. or career opportunities like working for the stores, like a huge percentage mall employees have always been women and having those job opportunities in the suburbs was really important. my question pretty much follows up here on the social, social, whatever, the social aspect of the whole thing we used to. i live in northern wisconsin, go to the mall, america like five times and it was much smaller malls were better what it did they did for me and know with the twins. 12 to 1618 you could go to the mall, drop them off with their friends, they would come out exhausted. i mean, they tried on clothes. they reached they did everything. it was great. and as time on and i went beyond the tween thing malls became exhausting i didn't have enough time in my life to do it so do you see did the malls the sociological of more going back to work you have time to wonder 12 stores i need to look for five white shirts. i just a white shirt in and out well i think that's a great point. i mean number one like i feel part of the reason people have an emotional attachment to malls is because they spend so much time in them as teenagers like teeny, your teen year years are really a very vulnerable and intense time. so whatever you're doing during those years really imprint is upon you. i have teenagers myself now, so i'm like seeing this in action and having this kind of safe space to have an independent life, to shop at the stores that, you know, you're trying to work out your personal and like a lot of that exhausting trying on is like am i a hot topic or am i gap person or i limited person? you know, i'm dating myself here, but so but yeah i when when there weren't so many women with time on hands in suburbs, the kind of peak hours at malls really changed a lot. and also you more kids being dropped off at the mall without their parents was problematic you know for some mall owners and you saw like i would think an even an uptick in just weekend usage of the mall and that's where things like mall walking come in you see mall owners trying to strategize like, you know, who's available the work during the week during, the work day, like how might our malls serve these different populations are looking for different things at different times of day. and so like mall workers, which there are a lot of communities, you know, use the mall for year exercise and they tend to take over the mall first thing in the morning, you know, walking a lot of the stores were open and then, you know, having coffee, doing their shopping like right at like 9 a.m. or 10 a.m.. so it kind of depends on. cultural patterns change the patterns of use in malls. excuse me. hey, so my era of mall going was like the early 2000s. that was sort of the my teen years. i definitely have a lot of memories of like the giant mega malls i lived near des moines, so we went to like the new mega-mall and i was like pretty confident that it was like a center of social activity at the time. and it certainly was. we were dropped, you know, to wander the mall with our runs. but then i watched stranger the season three where they said a lot of time in this eighties mall which like looked just glorious to me as like a center like all the families were there. the moms were in their exercise classes like the kids. so i'm just curious and maybe you sort of answered this like, what do you see as the peak of like malls as a like a social space or like a public space? like what era? yeah. i mean, i really i see it as being centered more in the like. i think that stranger things like part of the reason that season so much with people is like it like this very pure version of the mall where it was making everybody happy and in fact i should just tell you like i use stranger things to help sell my book, like i started my book proposal with stranger things because i okay, like it makes it topical. and, you know, the duffer brothers are definitely babies. they actually grew up in the same part of north carolina, as i did. but there was know, a secondary peak, i think, in the early 2000. so kind of post third way, the wave of but pre-recession like there was a lot of interest there. you know there were many malls where the lifestyle centers also flourish. and so it's not that there's only one era of know young americans that spent their at the mall. i think yeah. their history itself has kind of a cyclical nature, like when we are far away from, an era to see it as history. and often that's about 30 years. like that's when the preservation groups feel that they can get in and start talking about preserving buildings. so i think the eighties have hit that point. they seem historic where people have nostalgia for them, where a show like stranger things can really exploit that nostalgia. i went to this stranger things experience and they have this like fake food cart for you take selfies at and i was like it would actually be nicer to be in a real food court right now. like and they wouldn't be price gouging me quite so much. so, yeah, like nobody has nostalgia yet the malls of the early 2000s but i bet they will one day. i had just three real quick things. one was to mentioned stranger things, but you touched on that because i'm about the age where i remember i'm about those kids age. so i remember those malls and those stores and it's really fun for me to watch that the nostalgia in it. but i also wanted another woman mentioned hilldale mall which i grew up about two blocks away from the west side of madison and when they revitalized i at first i was a little skeptical, but i think they really did did a really good job with that. and did open it up. and it's a of things you talk about are what did with that mall so i don't know if you would ever have a chance to get out to the west side to see that. but i think it's really pretty neat how they turned a regular mall into what it is now and. the third thing is i live up in old claire, wisconsin, and they used to have a mall before lived there. that is now done, but now they have a new one. but i have the feeling that one's going to slowly but surely die. they just closed the movie in there and that's that was kind of like the death knell of it i think. but now they're already talking about how they're to revitalize that. so i find that interesting, too. and i'm going to wonder what they're going to do with. yeah, i mean, like at the peak of malls, there are maybe 2000 in the u.s. now think the number is more like eight, 700, 800. so i know that my my book can never about all the malls and i was actually really worried about this when i you know everywhere went with somebody to be like well have you been this mall have been that that was so you like it's like a game of gotcha but i'm really hoping the book and it sounds like has worked today will do is like give people a framework for understanding their mall for understanding that like what's at hilldale hillsdale hilton mall like isn't alone. you know, it's part of these national movements and so it's like a framework for understanding your own experience. even if i'm not talking about like the particular mall that you to because you know, very few things that happen in cities are actually unique like it's always patterns of cities, similar sized cities, of similar climate. and i think it's really helpful to look to other places for examples and then, you know, bring them back to your town. hello. thank you so much for talk coming from i thought it very interesting like looking a different country that you mentioned bubble tea which is our national one bar national foods. yes i found it very interesting. it's being like utilized how it's being like change and like how people are receiving it outside of where from. and i always find it very interesting. there's new stuff like popping bubbles and stuff that which is not like that authentic, original yeah, but yeah i found very interesting was concept of festival malls and particularly the return from suburbia to downtown. and since the original move from suburbia was characterized by a decline in downtown streets, how did the make up of like businesses in research did you see changed when the return to downtown occurred and was there a revitalization of local business that that was a more part of the traditional main street like type shops or was like more like other stores coming in from other places as they tried to commercialize and try to make it more clean or convenient in some ways. that's a great question. so i would say the first like the first wave, the first ten years of these sustainable marketplaces, they were really well, that wasn't a term that they were using then. but that's how we talk about this kind of retail now, where there somebody in charge who if they saw a cool new shop opening up in another area would say, oh, do you want to try a kiosk at our festival marketplace? like i think it would work with the mix. so like really carefully trying to pick local merchants and then trying to keep the mix really fresh. but what happened over time and i saw this especially at south street seaport in new york city, is you they kind of stopped paying attention and then more chain stores come in and then, you know, tourists come from out of town to have an authentic new experience. and they're like, wait, we j.crew at home? like, we don't need to go to j.crew in new york city. and so they become more the maintenance isn't kept up the the the architecture which is historic but it was renovated in a period like to look dated like i love seventies architecture i think it's really fun but to a lot of people just see like those brown those round lights and they're like, oh it's old like i don't like that. so i feel that if they had kept it up like the way the owners north park have kept up their mall, like could have continued to succeed in that original mode. but by letting it become worn and more generic, they kind of self-sabotage it. yeah. oh, okay. all right. well, thank everyone so much. those are great questions and thank you for having me. our third and final panel will examine challenges to the public park ideal and we are honored to have, as our moderator allegra happy haines, who is the executive director of denver parks and recreation. she was