Shopping Mall

Object Lessons

by Matthew Newton, Christopher Schaberg (Series Editor), Ian Bogost (Series Editor)

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

The mall near Mat thew Newton's childhood home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was one of the state's first enclosed shopping malls. Like all malls in their heyday, this one was a climate-controlled pleasuredome where strangers converged. It boasted waterfalls, fish ponds, an indoor ice skating rink larger than Rockefeller Center's, and a monolithic clock tower illuminated year-round beneath a canopy of interconnected skylights. It also became the backdrop for filmmaker George A. Romero's zombie opus Dawn of the Dead .

Part memoir and part case study, Shopping Mall examines the modern mythology of the mall and shows that, more than a collection of stores, it is a place of curiosity, ritual, and fantasy.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, History, Architecture, Americana

176 pages, Paperback

First published September 7, 2017

Reviews

[Chance Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

The dying mall fascinates me. Buildings lying empty and decayed like concrete whales stranded on asphalt beaches. My hometown had a dead mall and a "new" mall, which is now an old, but still breathing, mall. I've been to bustling malls and malls that feel like dark caverns populated with bargain stores and churches (salvation on a budget). So I was drawn to this book. Billed on the flap as "part memoir and part case study," Shopping Mall is at its best when focusing on the latter, but it is unfortunately, for me, heavy on the former.

This book is in a series called "Object Lessons." I'm unsure if the other books are as self-indulgent as this one, as I haven't read them and don't plan to.

Matthew Newton crafts loving images of a nostalgic past. His final image is a stirring one -- "It is the mall rendered in spare parts pulled from memory, its image flickering like a hologram, threatening to vanish before the future ever arrives." But for me, the memoir portions soon become more about Matthew Newton and less about malls. His personal story is so loosely tied to the concept, it reads like "here are things that happened to me in a shopping mall."

The naval-gazing puts this book in "it was good" territory for me, but the abjectly bad copy-editing lowered my enjoyment of the book further. Does Bloomsbury employ a copy-editor? Do they need freelance help? Take notes: The phrase "wrap his knuckles" creates an entirely different image than the author likely intended. The phrase "standing across from Charles and I" demonstrates that the "Object Lessons" crew needs lessons in objects of prepositions. Other issues include, "Usually its apples, bananas, yogurt, and string cheese on my list." (There is a correct "it's" in the previous sentence, making this one even more baffling.) and Newton's use of the phrase "two-year-old son" three times in five pages, without mentioning any other kids, so this is clearly his ONLY SON why does he have to remind us that he's two years old every other page? Where is the editing?!

Most of these slip-ups I noticed at the end of the book, so a) I must have been skimming the memoir parts in the middle, b) I was grumpy, or c) the copy-editor they did hire gave up around page 100, or they expected the reader to.

There is also a baffling chapter where Newton writes in second-person, addressing the reader, but as if the reader were inside the board game Mall Madness. Even I, as a board game fan and dying mall looky-loo, thought WTF.

When Newton is focused on his subject (the title subject on the book's cover), he draws smart connections between shopping malls, suburban culture, and white anxiety. He also interviews a photographer of dead malls who gives him the best quote in the book: "The things I photograph are the direct result of a system that defines progress only in economic terms." In that sense, the mall, formulated in the 1950s, brought to prominence during the excess of the 1980s, on life support in the 2010s, is a sobering metaphor for America itself.

[Theediscerning · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very mixed bag, this - which encapsulates the whole series it belongs to. Brilliant social commentary about the shopping mall, and all the attendant inane consumerism and time-wasting it seems to have been parent to, is interrupted by the most OTT and OT autobiography. Makes you grateful for Internet shopping.

[Simone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like the other books in the Object Lessons series, this is all at once sort of a mixed bag and also really interesting. This weaves some sociological thoughts about consumerism and the rise of mall culture in the post-war period with memoir chapters on Newton's own relationship to a specific mall in Pennsylvania.

Quotes below mostly for me:

"Gruen's projects...all reflect the same philosophy and share the same features: a nostalgia for a community you can trust, architectural forms that recall the past and people-centered European streets," wrote Giandomenico Amendola. 'The Gruen strategy builds on people's longing for a world in which they feel safe. The underlying model is the traditional community and the everyday life of small provincial cities or of Europeans historical town, enriched by elements of Disneyland's Main Street. Nostalgia, filtered by historical and mass media stereotypes, has proved to be a powerful and effective strategy." (p. 59).

"These sprawling shopping centers showcased and facilitated a new lifestyle, one that aligned with the country's excessive and increasingly suburban mindset-and they created a strange facsimile of urban shopping districts but in a setting so vast it was almost unrecognizable from its predecessors. As write William Severini Kowinski once describe it, the shopping mall was like 'Main Street in a spaceship.' With everything consolidated under single roof retail services, dining, and leisure-the conveniences of the mall were intoxicating....It was as if suburbanization and the emergence of the shopping mall had ushered in a new system of beliefs, where laziness was now a virtue and convenience trumped personal initiative." (p. 45).

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

These consistently fascinating books from Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, which has as its goal to uncover “the hidden lives of ordinary things”, always have much to offer and Matthew Newton’s contribution is a great example. His history of the American shopping mall gives an insightful and in-depth portrait of these massive shopping areas from their earliest incarnations to their somewhat jaded reputation now, not least because of some real-life mall shootings. Newton describes the heyday of malls and the part they played in the lives of ordinary American people. However, Newton intersperses his exploration with rather too much of his own personal story and that unfortunately is not quite so interesting, although it does admittedly give a personal view of the importance of malls in daily life.

[Aaron Wenger · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times deeply interesting, and at other times deeply skippable. Although basically well-written, the free mixing of personal essay and cut-and-dry history detracted from both modes. This little book did a pretty good job of presenting a story of white flight, post-war sub-urbanization, and shallow corporate hollowness, but what else is new.

[Jason Diamond · Rating 5 out of 5]

This series really gets better and better. Newton linking his own life to the malls he knew growing up, and telling not only his story, but the fall of a very American institution, is really engaging and profound.

[Stefani · Rating 4 out of 5]

I grew up in New Jersey, a state infamous for its pollution, reality shows that lampoon Italian-Americans, and...malls. It often felt like wherever you were in NJ, there was nothing but a sad and monotonous blur of corporate office parks, squat strip malls, and second-tier outlets, as far as the eye could see. Well, let's not get cocky here, because, despite my assumption that NJ led the country in sheer number of malls, they are, in fact, only #11 in the nation according to this website my link text. I stand corrected.

Anyway, despite this suspiciously low ranking in what I could only call a race to the bottom, mall culture is still as firmly embedded in my psyche as any other coming-of-age experience during my formative years, as I'm sure it is for any other red-blooded American growing up during the '80s and '90s. After all, who doesn't remember the dimly-lit arcade ubiquitous in every mall, populated by stoners, gamers, and other menacing characters? Surely we can all relate to being dropped off on a Friday night, free to roam the mall's perimeter for hours of unsupervised hang-out time?

This book is interesting because it presents a hyper-focused analysis of the shopping mall's past, present, and future: its inception in the mid-'60s as an exciting, new, futuristic concept of a social hub and town square all rolled into one; heyday in the “shop til-you-drop” '80s, and current state of decline. I could probably have done without the author's extensive insertion of his own life story into the mix, but, otherwise, a fascinating look at a moment in American culture that is slowly dying.

[Eileen Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

love these compact Object Lessons books from Bloomsbury Academic, they pack a lot of information into a small book!
I live in UK and Shopping Malls, or Shopping Centres as they are known here are a relatively new phenomenon to us.
The ones I have visited all seem to be clones.. Same shops, restaurants, same layout even.
The Malls in US are a different shopping experience though.
I understand that people use the Mall for exercise when the weather is inclement - Mall walking I think it's called.
I've visited some Malls whilst in Pittsburgh a few years ago, not sure about the one the author described, there are so many!
All in all a very interesting informative book which I recommend you read.
I was given a digital copy of this book by the publisher Bloomsbury Academic via Netgalley in return for an honest unbiased review.

[Brice Fuqua · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was a kid, a shopping mall opened, for the first time, in my home town. It was a small building, with just two anchor stores and a lot of mom and pop businesses relocated from various parts of town. About ten years later, a new, much larger mall opens across town. The big stores moved out. The little shops were wiped out by the chain stores in the new mall. Before long, the original mall was abandoned.
Eventually, it was bulldozed and replaced by a conventional strip mall. Now, thanks, in part, to digital retailing, the strip mall has also been closed. It’s giant parking lot used by teenagers for impromptu beer parties and doughnuts in their cars. .
This tale of the rise and fall of a shopping mall has been repeated all over the country, and is the topic of the latest in the Object Lesson series: Mathew Newton’s Shopping Mall.
Newton begins with a visit to the oldest enclosed mall in the U.S, , Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota. Opened in 1956 and designed by Austrian immigrant, Victor Greun, Southdale was intended to replicate a European city’s town square. But by the time Newton visits, Greun’s old word decorations had been removed to make room for kiosks and more storefronts.
Gruen, a socialist, lived to regret his mall concept. He saw malls turned into shrines for capitalist mega-consumption.
The second part of the book tells the story of the author’s interaction with his home town mall, Monroeville Mall in a suburb of Pittsburg. We see Newton as a child waiting for his mom to get off work after an exhausting shift as a complaint manager at a department store. The teenaged Newton discovers girls and heavy metal music while roaming the mall during the summer. After dropping out of high school, he meets his future wife at the mall.
The Monroeville Mall becomes temporarily famous as the setting for George Romero’s 1978 zombie movie, Dawn of the Dead. The surviving humans barricade themselves in the mall to try to hold off the zombie army.
Dawn of the Dead was released just as mall culture was reaching its peak in the U.S. Old people were using the mall as a de facto community and exercise center. Teens used it as a place to hang out without parental meddling. And adults found the mall as a safe place to shop amid the increasing crime and violence of the cities.
Newton does a fine job of describing the euphoria people felt entering a mall. To many, it was a place of endless possibilities. His parents wander around a furniture store, daydreaming about the kind of house they may someday own.
But it was during this time that critics of shopping mall began to make their voices heard. The mall was a magnet for white flight to the suburbs, leaving inner cities to decay into poverty and crime. These people decried the shallow materialism that malls perpetuated and their sterile uniformity.
Newton concludes his book with an account of the shopping mall in decline. After being laid off during the Great Recession, He returns to the Monroeville Mall to find its ice skating rink pulled up, its giant clock with animatronic animals gone, and many storefronts vacant.
People began to fear going to the mall after a mass riot broke out between rival gangs. A few months later, a mass shooting there destroyed the illusion of the mall as a safe refugee. As Newton wanders through Monroeville, he notices life-sized cardboard cut outs of shoppers, what designers call people textures, placed in abandoned storefronts to create the illusion that the mall is busier and more successful than it really is.
The most memorable part of Newton’s short volume is an interview he does with a woman who expresses a sad nostalgia after her home town mall has closed. All of her greatest childhood memories were centered on the mall: birthday parties, school shopping, dating boys for the first time. Now the home to all of those memories is gone. She comes, too late, to realize that her youth would have been better spent somewhere else than at a shopping mall.

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shopping Mall by Mathew Newton is a personal history of what was one of America's centers of popular consumerism. Newton is Associate Editor at the Carnegie Museum of Art, USA. He has written for, among others, The Oxford American, Esquire, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Rumpus, Guernica, and Spin.

Malls were the center of so much American culture in the 1980s and 1990s. That may seem like an odd thing to say, but the mall came to represent something to American youth in that period. American movies included malls from Fast Times at Ridgemont High to the horror movie Chopping Mall and The Blues Brothers to Jackie Brown. The mall was a place to hang out as well as shop. In the late 1990s, I went with friends to the mall, we never bought anything material, but it was a place where many kids hung out on Friday or Saturday nights. When I was stationed in California I made it a point to visit the Galeria -- the mecca of Valley Girls and Mohawk punk rockers as well as the setting for several teen movies of the period. Later I went to the Mall of America in Minnesota. My visits were not for shopping, but more for visiting the "landmarks."

Newton starts with a visit to one of the oldest malls in the US, the Southdale Mall in Minnesota. He was trying to capture a little bit of the magic from his youth. By now, though, malls have been emptying out and closing down. His pilgrimage came empty. Newton goes on to explain growing up and the role the mall played in his life and his families. The malls had everything, imagine a physical Amazon.com. There were even two floor Barnes and Nobles that dwarfed Daltons and other book sellers. There was something for everyone from department stores to specialty stores including head shops. Newton's mother even worked at one of the anchor stores.

For those who grew up around the mall culture or were simply annoyed by it. The malls original intent of being a social place for the community with open air meeting areas, fountains, and coy ponds. In more modern times, they drifted away from the community and became centers that fed the conspicuous consumption that was the 1980s and some of the 1990s. They did offer some community for school choirs to sing Christmas carols or meeting places for clubs and organizations. Teen singer Tiffany ran a series of mall tours, spreading her music as well as bringing money into the malls.

Shopping Mall is a history of an American institution as well as the author's personal experience growing up in the mall culture. Today malls are closing faster than ever. Stores that were anchor stores have gone away (The May Co. and Montgomery Ward) and others are fading fast (Macy's, Sears, JC Penny's). Newton tells of the rise and fall of the mall as an American icon. It's not that Americans have quit shopping or meeting up; it's that is done online now. A good history with added nostalgia.

[Eric Xia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yeah, some parts are very unremarkable; but I wouldn't tend to immediately dismiss the author's personal experience as skippable and his broader cultural theorizing to be more interesting. I've never actually really considered the mall as a phenomenon that began in the Northeast, and so much of this book is centered around the east coast (Pittsburgh in particular) making it strangely alluring.

I'm realizing that my perception of the more recent open-air developments is actually more a reaction to homogeneity or a forced authenticity than to the consumerist aspect of things. I really *like* going to the theater, and restaurants, and buying things. It's just something that has changed about the expected audience that makes these things feel so weird.

For example, I really like Alderwood Mall, for example, where there's no pretense towards sophistication. Despite all of its shortcomings, it feels more accurate of an attempt at the suburban utopia, as the replacement for the town square, as the new common space for people to hang out. Same with Third Place Books at Kenmore, they are designed to cater towards everyone. Much more utopian. It's these new developments, Northline/Totem Lake etc. that both seem like fake, elitist, and soulless places. If only they had bookstores, I guess.

[Glen Helfand]

The mall is a shopping center of the universe in Matthew Newton's short hybrid memoir and social history. It is a locus of memory for a kid growing up in the 1980s, and the book starts with a kind of search for something lost. Malls, as the book reveals, are mutable. The hopes and dreams-- the initial (sub)urbanist dream of architect Victor Gruen to create the human equivalent of biodiversity, 1980s investor/development schemes, to the social unrest and the tear down dead malls--evolve. This book came out before the pandemic, so their current fate isn't addressed. Newton recounts moments of youth in which the mall provided a sense of stable community-- waiting for his mother after work at Gimbel's department store, his sense of unrootedness on holidays when the stores were closed, food court romances, etc. These are ordinary memories, and he augments them with the narratives of films set in malls (like Dawn of the Dead and Chopping Mall), fictions built on dreams of shopping paradise, and a place to meet your girlfriend.

[Chrissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an unexpectedly spare but fascinating view of the mall. Having read entirely too many other (but in no way enough) books on malls and mall culture, this volume focusing on the way the author related to and used the mall from the time he was very young through adulthood gave a good overview of a form of commerce that seems to have an almost human life span, having been developed in the late 1950s, matured into culture in the 1980s, and slowly eased into a senescence as the commercial culture around it changed and the social dimensions where gradually neutered.

What struck me in particular was the way the author gave an intimate view of his local mall and why it mattered to him.

I would recommend this if you're interested in mall culture, sprawl, or the way commercial space has a meaning (potentially) beyond consumerism.

[Dianna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This title has been provided by the publisher VIA NetGalley at no charge in exchange for an honest review.

'Shopping Mall' is the first volume of Bloomsbury Academic's Object Lessons series that I've read. The series examines "the hidden lives of ordinary things." Although the books in this series are intentionally brief, I found Davis' look at shopping malls to be engrossing. A blend of personal narrative, history, and cultural analysis that really gave me clarity on the subject...especially the recent cultural role of malls and what their future may hold. The format is appealing...basically a podcast (reading time is about 1-2 hours) in text form and ideal for busy, curious non-fiction lovers.

'Shopping Mall' is available now wherever you purchase/borrow books.

[Jordan Schriver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhere out there, a historian must have written a history of the American shopping mall - something full of names and dates and other history book things. This book is not that book, but it has enough of that kind of thing so that I feel better informed about the subject. History is only about 1/3 of the text. The rest is social commentary and stories from the authors’ life. Much of what he says is very relatable and will strike a chord with anyone who has watched a mall that played an important part in their life die. This book is a beautifully written eulogy for all of those malls. Well worth the read.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I especially enjoyed learning about the history of the shopping mall, and the original vision Victor Gruen had for the mall. I also appreciated Matthew Newton's examination of what the shopping mall had meant to him in his youth, and his exploration of its meaning in the American psyche. But I was dismayed by one glaring grammatical error that impacted my confidence in the writer; I'm surprised an editor didn't catch and correct it. On the whole, I found it an interesting read, if also just a bit too much about Newton's own experiences at the shopping mall.

[Denise · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book based off other reviews. But, it was more autobiography than about shopping malls. Almost half of it could be torn out and still tell the author’s biography and the mall life. More facts or points of interests about other malls would have been nice even with the fact that the mall he constantly discusses does have a very eventful history, albeit tragic. I skimmed the second half. Disappointed.

[Lexi Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for my English class to write an object lesson paper. This book was actually really interesting, and I did enjoy it. It was a good base for understanding how my paper should flow. It basically talks about the deeper meaning that shopping malls hold. I know it sounds kinda goofy, but it was very interesting to see how shopping malls directly impact consumerism and people's everyday lives.
Update: I got an A on the paper, so I def recommend :)

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

More of a memoir of a now 40-year old with local and mall history sprinkled in, it's a book that can be sprinted through like taking a trip to one store for khakis or lingered upon as if you decided to loll by the food court or the movie theatre. The ubiquity of the American shopping mall he describes makes the main Pittsburgh-area setting familiar to folks even in other parts of the country.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Newton artfully blends memoir, cultural history, and sociology in this book o' malls. I love the organization into three parts (childhood, adolescence, and adulthood) that delightfully merge mall history w/ the author's experience of malls at those ages. I was actually getting a bit misty at points while reading a nonfiction book about malls, so that should say something!

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aspires to comment on the proliferation, fall, and rebirth of the American mall, but is more memoir than social commentary. Mostly avoids issues of race, class and gentrification. Still, he's got a nice style and this is a pleasurable read. Could serve as a primary resource for research on consumer culture in the 1980's US.

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely, if somber, collection of essays about the history of the shopping mall and what it means to people in its many transitions over time. I found it very bittersweet but loved the insights. It's almost reassuring, even as I lament the loss of a beloved time in my life I can never return to.

[Sabrina Singh · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this for my English course and loved it so much, there's so much symbolism and I love how it's divided into 3 developmental stages in life. The way that the mall stayed as a constant object involved in his life made me think of my own :) would read again, loved reading him grow up.

[Josh Spilker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great! Really like these

[Kat Stromquist · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sort of dreamlike patchwork of memoir and journalistic work, reflecting on one of my favorite subjects.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're a Gen Xer like me, shopping malls were the backdrop of your coming of age. Newton does them justice.

[Carolyn Carlisle · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

First half was pretty good.

[giulia · Rating 3 out of 5]

i grew up in the old mall behind my house that my dad worked maintenance at, so much of this made me feel nostalgic. thanks to capitalism i no longer feel joy in such places 😮‍💨

[Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Matthew Newton’s short 2017 book Shopping Mall, published as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, essays discussing the “hidden lives of ordinary things,” explores the history of the mall through Newton’s own personal experiences with malls and other public spaces. Beginning with a pilgrimage to Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota in search of remnants of its designer Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen’s lost humanistic vision, he folds his own memories, especially those of his own local mall, Monroeville Mall in western Pennsylvania, into his reflection on the shopping mall as a US icon. Monroeville, built in 1969 and the filming location for George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, seems like an especially apt example to focus on, representing many of the shifts that malls have been an expression of socially.

Like nostalgia itself, Newton describes malls as offering contradictory visions in US culture, emblematic of both a flattering “portrait of success and happiness” and a darker one of “greed, lifestyles of excess, and a national obsession with material goods.” He also, using the term “render ghost,” expresses the mall’s eerie liminal relationship to the present, offering both a memorable past and a prosperous tomorrow, made even eerier if the mall itself becomes obsolete and abandoned. Representing so much of late twentieth-century life, both our memories and what we believed about the future, the mall itself, then, feels like a lost time, an embodiment of the ephemeral American dream.

I continue these thoughts at Harris' Tome Corner discussing Dead Malls: Nostalgia in the Ruins.