Booked on Planning

Meet Me By The Fountain

• Booked on Planning • Season 4 • Episode 8

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What if shopping malls weren't just retail spaces, but carefully designed social hubs that reveal profound truths about American culture? Alexandra Lange's "Meet Me by the Fountain" takes us on a fascinating journey through the unexpected origins and evolution of one of America's most influential architectural forms.

Throughout our conversation, Lange uncovers surprising connections between malls and urbanism. Despite their reputation as anti-urban spaces, malls offer valuable lessons in creating environments where people actually want to spend time. Climate control, ample seating, accessible restrooms, and opportunities for both planned meetings and chance encounters—these simple amenities are often overlooked in our public urban spaces but prove crucial for creating functional social environments. 

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Stephanie Rouse:

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Stephanie Rouse:

You're listening to the Booked on Planning podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked on Planning. Well, welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked on Planning. In this episode we talk with author Alexandra Lange on Meet Me by the Fountain an inside history of the mall. Like many listeners, while I have many fond memories of the mall from my youth, it's not a place I particularly enjoy going to today. But this book had me thinking differently about malls and I'm kind of interested in visiting one to look at the mall in a new light.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I also have so many wonderful memories of the mall from my childhood, so it was great to see the mall get the recognition and attention that I actually think it deserves. As we discussed in the episode, I never really thought about the mall as an area that planners should really be giving their attention to, though.

Stephanie Rouse:

Agreed, and one of the interesting takeaways that was unexpected was that the mall can teach us about urbanism. It seems like such an anti-urban land use at face value, but early concepts for the mall by legends like Victor Gruen highlight the potential of malls as places for social interaction and gatherings that are often missing in many communities today.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yes, I was also surprised by that, given how all of our malls are currently set up, and, of course, we're thinking about malls from the 80s and 90s at this point. However, there are quite a few good examples in the book about how cities and developers are reusing all of the parking spaces left over as the mall quote unquote declines, and utilizing urbanist principles to redevelop the area. So let's get into our conversation with author Alexandra Lang on Meet Me by the Fountain an inside history of the mall.

Stephanie Rouse:

Alexandra, thank you for joining us on Booked on Planning to talk about your book Meet Me by the Fountain an inside history of the mall. So reading this book, it really took me down memory lane and I'm sure anyone that reads this book is going to have a similar experience. Going back to our own mall experiences growing up, but the malls of my millennial generation are not the same as the original malls of the 1950s and 60s. Can you talk about early mall designers like Victor Gruen and what they had intended for shopping malls at the time?

Alexandra Lange:

Sure, first of all, thanks for having me, and one of the reasons that I really wanted to write this book was because of those millennial and, for me, gen X mall experiences. I felt like there were so many people out there who had this lived experience of the mall that maybe they'd never considered from a design planning, you know, cultural criticism perspective and I just felt like wow, like this, this needs to be a book. And like so many people, even outside my normal kind of architectural audience, are going to be able to relate to this book. So, just like I appreciate that framing of your question. But yeah, so Victor Gruen is generally considered to be the father of the shopping mall and Gruen has a really interesting biography.

Alexandra Lange:

He was a Jewish emigre from Vienna who came to New York in 1938, fleeing the Nazis, and a lot of his early work was very fancy, kind of jewel box modernist boutiques in New York City and he slowly built his career in retail during like the late 30s, early 40s and so by the time that the suburbs were really getting going in New York in the post-war period, he had this background of designing first, you know, individual stores and then department stores, and he looked at the American suburbs and thought, okay, we're building all these, okay, we're building all these new highways, we're building all these new single family houses, but where are people going to get together?

Alexandra Lange:

Like, where's the Cafe Society of Vienna? Essentially, in the suburbs of major American cities. And so the germ of his idea about the mall was really trying to bring back, you know, cafe culture, pedestrian culture, like the town square, main Street, you know, like whatever manifestation of that really old urban city building pattern. He realized that suburbs didn't have it and they needed it because it's a human need. So he created the mall for that reason to provide something in the suburbs that they felt like they were lacking.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I was unaware of the origin of the term mall, so I'm kind of assuming some of our listeners will too. Can you give a brief history of why we started using the term mall and how we think about it today versus how we kind of used to think about it?

Alexandra Lange:

Mall is actually a term from landscape architecture.

Alexandra Lange:

So you know, when you're thinking about the National Mall in Washington and a shopping mall, they actually have the same origin, which tends to kind of blow people's minds.

Alexandra Lange:

But that origin story has to do with an Italian lawn bowling game called Palo Maglio, which is basically kind of like bocce and croquet, like a combo of, let's say, bocce and croquet, and that game came over to London in the 18th century and the words Palamaglia got turned into Paul Mall, which is an actual square in London. Mall from that came to mean the court that Palamaglia was played on, which was a long, thin strip of grass generally surrounded by buildings. So that form became known as a mall. And if you think about the very simplest shape of the shopping mall, which is one department store at one end, one department store at the other end, shops in between and then usually benches and fountains and planters down the middle, like that is the same shape as the mall and that's actually the same shape as the National Mall. You know, from a game to a London Square, to this ubiquitous American post-war shopping pattern, like all of these things are malls.

Stephanie Rouse:

Knowing how an architect's mind works and how you start with this like really broad concepts, concepts and then kind of sketch and iterate and then all of a sudden you have this physical manifestation of whatever you started with. I can like just picture Victor Gruen looking at one of the Pall Mall courts and then working his way into this new design for a shopping mall.

Alexandra Lange:

Yeah, it's interesting. So the first indoor shopping mall designed by Gruen was Southdale in Edina, minnesota, which is a suburb of Minneapolis and that in fact did not have that long skinny pattern. It was sort of a pinwheel shape with, again, two department stores and two banks of smaller stores but around a square, like. I think he was thinking more of a town square rather than a mall when he designed that one, but that was kind of an inefficient pattern and it was a little more complicated to fill and to build. And so while Southdale, like, has that kind of pattern, pretty soon thereafter Gruen and other mall developers moved to the like the long skinny pattern, I call it the I shape, and that was kind of mall history.

Alexandra Lange:

But it's actually just interesting that you bring up kind of the way that architects can, you know, boil down a pattern into its like geometric basics. Because I think that's one of the things that people find really hard to do in a mall because they're so distracted by the sights and the sounds and the smells and the you know clothes in the stores. And so people often say, oh, I get lost in the mall and I'm like, well, you'll never get lost in a mall if you kind of understand the basic design principles. But it's very hard to you know kind of drill down to those design principles when everything about all of the stuff in the mall is attempting to distract you.

Stephanie Rouse:

Exactly, and you talk about pedestrian malls in the book, which were a concept that ultimately would fail in most cities that tried it. You wrote that 11% of pedestrian malls actually succeeded in the 21st century. What was the issue with these malls and why did so few of them succeed?

Alexandra Lange:

Yeah, pedestrian malls are really interesting. I live in Brooklyn and Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn is one of that 11% that persisted, you know, post 1960s, 1970s, heyday. The thing that's required for a pedestrian mall to be successful is a built in pedestrian population. So some of the most successful pedestrian malls are in beach communities, college communities and other tourist centers. So Boulder, colorado, burlington, vermont, santa Monica, like those, are the really famous ones, along with, I would say, fulton Mall in Brooklyn. So all of those places have good public transportation access, have a population that either doesn't have a car or doesn't want to have a car, aka students, and so they can take advantage of the pedestrian scale and the pedestrian facilities. But if you just put a pedestrian mall in a city where most people drive, that sort of takes them out of the natural pattern of the way the rest of the city is built and it becomes very difficult to attract people to come downtown to shop at that mall, and that's why so many failed.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I have a lot of lovely childhood memories at Pearl Street in Boulder. It's really one of my favorite places to be. One of the major observations that you make in the book is that both of the major professions that think about shaping cities we were already talking about architects, but then also planning has failed to take notice of the act of shopping as something more than just a distraction, but actually a shaper of cities. So why do you think that both of these professions have overlooked the mall and shopping so much?

Alexandra Lange:

Well, I have a one-word answer to that that you guys can probably anticipate, which is sexism. I mean, who does the shopping? I think that there are two kinds of shopping that are part of people's daily routine, but majority of it is done by women. Half of that is utilitarian shopping you know, food shopping, drugstore shopping, like basic errands and the other half is, let's say, you know, food shopping, drugstore shopping, like basic errands, and the other half is, let's say, pleasure shopping, and the former is considered sort of boring and beneath notice and the latter is considered to be often a waste of time and so neither of those are really taken seriously as a major shaper of people's roots.

Alexandra Lange:

But I mean, I think in more recent years, when people have started to look at, say, sexism in transportation planning, one of the things that's often brought up is that women's daily routes are much more complicated than men's daily routes, let's say, stereotypically, by and large, and most transportation systems are designed for the point-to-point commute, like from the residential area to the center city and back, without any stops.

Alexandra Lange:

But a typical women's route will involve dropping kids off at a daycare, picking up something at the supermarket. It has many more points and one of the things that 21st century transportation systems have to take into account is those more complex routes. Take into account is those more complex routes. So I think that the mall in some ways is analogous to that, because the mall was a positive thing for these women in the post-war era that often didn't work and were stuck in the suburbs to make their daily round of errands much more pleasant, because they would run into friends at the mall. Some of them had nurseries where they could drop off their kids so they could do those errands more efficiently. So the mall is really a boon to women, especially in that you know, kind of post-war you know two parents, one working, living in the suburbs pattern and the importance of that for making the suburbs a more humane place, a less dystopian place, is often left out because those activities weren't considered so important.

Stephanie Rouse:

We just had an example of a current example of the mall and serving as that kind of central hub for women, connecting with our last book Meet Me at the Library. There's a library and I cannot remember which town it's in, but they put a library in the mall and it served as this huge draw where parents bring their kids for story time or little activities and then all of the moms get together and catch up and have this little social activity as well. So it was interesting how these two episodes overlapped, without really intentionally overlapping.

Alexandra Lange:

I think it's the Anna Rundell Mall in Annapolis that has one of the largest public library branches in a mall, but it's not alone. There are other ones, but that's one of the largest and I've definitely communicated with the people there because it's such a great example of building community in this, you know, capitalist space.

Stephanie Rouse:

So malls were built to sell fashion and newness, and they had to. You know, the shops have to turn over and pull the latest new fashion. So then the malls that you know housed all these shops were doing the same thing, which is very unlike most architecture that we build to last, would you say this has contributed to so many dead malls in recent years, or are malls not understanding this design characteristic of redesign or die that kind of shopping as a field has?

Alexandra Lange:

I feel like there are kind of two ways to answer that question. I mean the first way is that mall architecture is built to change, in the sense that the storefronts can be swapped in and out very easily and that doesn't necessarily have to make any changes on, like the kind of common areas of the mall. However, those common areas can start to look very dated. I mean, we've all already lived through many eras of kind of you know what does public architecture look like, and one of the reasons that you know many malls start to decline is because another mall is built in their town and it number one. Like you know, kind of it siphons people off with its newness, but often the aesthetics of that mall are more contemporary, are more fashionable. So people that sort of didn't notice that the old mall was getting run down or maybe like has the color and materials palette that's no longer in vogue really like see that when the new mall opens? So mall architecture itself has like sort of infinite capacity for change. But we do all perceive things as being more or less fashionable and you know, making a materials decision at one time can severely date your property.

Alexandra Lange:

One of the malls that I talk about in the book at length is North Park in Dallas, which was built by the Nasher family and opened in 1964.

Alexandra Lange:

And that mall was designed by EG Hamilton, who was an architect who'd worked for Minoru Yamasaki, and he designed it in this really beautiful minimalist way with, you know, poured concrete floors and white brick and some very delicate branding details.

Alexandra Lange:

And the same family still owns that mall and they have basically preserved it. And it's so interesting to me that the aesthetics of that mall have probably kind of gone up and down and you know, like sort of through the washing machine of fashion, but they are fashionable again. So by preserving it and kind of keeping the very, very simple lines of that mall, they actually like managed to keep it fashionable for almost 60 years now. And when they added on to it in the early 2000s they kept the same materials palette. They could change a few things you know we can make much larger pieces of glass now and they took advantage of that but they kept that same like white brick, concrete floors, very clean, and it still looks great. So I think that sometimes mall owners are too quick to freak out about their materials palette being dated rather than trying to sort of showcase it and set it off, because every material dates eventually.

Jennifer Hiatt:

It's almost impossible, at least in my world, which partly I'm a lawyer and a planner. When I think of malls, I immediately think of some of our infamous First Amendment cases and you feature some of them in the book such as Amalgamated Food Employees Union versus Logan Valley Plaza, lloyd Corporation versus Tanner and New Jersey Coalition Against War in the Middle East versus the JBM Realty Corp. So what should our listeners know about their personal rights and potential public space when they are visiting a mall?

Alexandra Lange:

So I'm not a lawyer and that was one of the most fascinating things for me to research in this book, because the legal cases involving the mall are super interesting and a lot of the Supreme Court and state Supreme Court decisions are really well written and that was just kind of a world of writing and research that I'd never gotten into before. And then also the, let's say, the rightward drift of legislation vis-a-vis the malls as public space, the mall as a place of protest, was also very interesting and you can see a lot of parallels in politics today. Yeah, you mentioned Logan Valley Plaza. That's a Supreme Court case from 1968, which was the first time that the mall essentially encountered the law. And that was a case. It was sort of a strip mall where the union employees of the supermarket in the mall wanted the freedom to protest their working conditions and initially the owners of the mall said that they could not protest on the property because it was private property.

Alexandra Lange:

And that case went all the way to the Supreme Court and Thurgood Marshall actually wrote the opinion for the majority saying yes, the employees did have a right to protest at the mall and his argument in that case was that in the late 20th century, main streets were often no longer the central space of a town and malls were replacing them, and so if malls were going to replace them, they had to still operate as a de facto town square.

Alexandra Lange:

I mean, that's just kind of an incredible thing to read in 1968. Now, unfortunately, like over the years since then, slowly that right and that sort of belief that the mall was essentially a town square needed to operate as such has been chipped away, and at this point the question of whether you can protest at the mall is a state by state question. It was, you know, kicked back to like state constitutions and state Supreme Courts, so in the majority of states you cannot protest at the mall. A very famous example of this was during the Black Lives Matter protests. A group came to the Mall of America in Minnesota at Christmastime and protested, and they were all arrested because Minnesota is not one of the states where there are free speech rights in the mall.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I think it's really interesting. So Logan Valley Plaza is kind of having a resurgent as the idea of social media has built up. And where is the public square now? Right here in Lincoln, you could probably go protest on O Street and people will just drive by you. There's not a real collective area except our Capitol where people go, and so I just think it's really fascinating. We kicked the mall question back to the states, but the federal government keeps grappling with social media. And where are we going to come down? And if social media is a town square, will the mall question come back up, as malls are kind of seeing a resurgence of people coming back to the mall? I think it will be an interesting area of law as it starts developing.

Alexandra Lange:

Yeah, that's really interesting. One of the things that interests me about social media and many people is its ability to you know kind of broadcast news, both verbally and visually, and I think one of the reasons you need a public space to gather in now is often sometimes so you can transmit those pictures of people gathering in the public space. It's why a lot of times people are angry that sometimes the mainstream media is not covering protests enough, because they're seeing all of these pictures of protests on social media and you're like this looks like news. So the ability to kind of get around the mainstream media with social media is important. But there's also kind of a feedback loop between the IRL gatherings and the online gatherings. That I think is beneficial for mass protest but also shows you why the government might be nervous about people sharing protest on social media in the same way that they are nervous about people protesting at the mall.

Stephanie Rouse:

It's an excellent point. So a quote from your book is that the mall has a lot to teach urbanism. And me, like I'm sure, some other listeners and we talked about how planners have discounted the value of the mall at the beginning of the episode probably are saying, really, but what do you think that malls can teach us about urbanism?

Alexandra Lange:

I think the primary lesson is really just about what people like to do. I mean, why do people like the mall? People like the mall because it's open in all the seasons, it has benches, it has bathrooms, it has coffee. In a lot of places it's a place where you can have kind of loose ties, social gatherings, run-ins, easy way to meet up with people in a kind of low-lift way. And so I think all of those things are social and humanist patterns that urbanism should be accounting for.

Alexandra Lange:

If you know, one of the things that urbanism is supposed to do is bring people together, make their lives easier, and the mall kind of concentrates all a lot of that in one place. And I think it's really stepped into the breach in a lot of places where you know public urbanism is not doing a lot of work. So I would like to see like the public functions of urbanism take up some of that work, and you see it in some places that are trying to, you know, get more public bathrooms, get more public benches. You know there's been a real renaissance in urban parks, I think that have more services and kind of more things built in. It's not just a field, but still like there's a lot of room for improvement out there and I think the mall has a lot of good lessons.

Stephanie Rouse:

Yeah, you have a whole section on mall walkers, which is something I knew. You always knew about it and my father-in-law retired a couple of years ago and he became a mall walker and, especially in the winter months when it's bad weather out, want to make sure that he's safe when he's out walking early in the morning, and that's just something that it's so hard for communities to make. You know their entire network accessible and free of cracks, heaving sidewalks and you have to deal with so many things like tree roots getting in the way of stuff, whereas the mall just doesn't have any of those issues and it's so much easier to be that kind of accessible, safer space.

Alexandra Lange:

Yeah, and hopefully he's built up like a community of friends and acquaintances that he's also walking with, if he's going there that frequently.

Stephanie Rouse:

That's also important for older people. Yeah, he knows there's two ladies. I can't remember he knows all about them because they apparently all go at the same time. But that was another interesting thing that you mentioned in the book about how COVID really impacted a lot of those networks that had been created at malls, as these mall walking groups, and when the malls shut down during COVID they lost that network.

Alexandra Lange:

Yeah, I mean I think with what we know now about COVID, it's clear that if they had been masked, those networks could have continued to exist and in fact that was probably, you know, kind of one of the safer activities that they could have been doing. So it's really too bad. But yes, I mean the mall in general acts as a social hub. But yes, particularly for older people, those mall walking communities are important, like at multiple levels for, you know, public health, and COVID really broke that. And I mean I heard anecdotally about some people that ended up walking in mall parking lots sort of like around the outside of the mall during COVID, which seems sort of tragic to me because really there's nothing less appealing than a mall parking lot in most cases. But just that kind of identification with place and activity and trying to make sure, even in a time of crisis, that you clung to like a bit of that I think is a really important lesson with how identified people become with particular spots in their cities.

Jennifer Hiatt:

As Stephanie mentioned in the introduction, we are both millennials and as a generation, we do tend to get accused of killing everything, including the mall, and a lot of people say that it is because of our online shopping. I found it very interesting as I was reading your book and I kept thinking did online shopping really create the death of the mall? What do you think?

Alexandra Lange:

Online shopping did not create the death of the mall. I would say the death of the mall is really like a three-part problem. Online shopping is definitely part of it, but if you look at the statistics on the percentage of retail, every year that was done online, pre-pandemic it never rose above about 20% of retail sales, rose above about 20% of retail sales. During the pandemic it zoomed up to about 35%, but it started going down almost immediately when things began opening back up. So even after people had become more accustomed to the quote unquote convenience of online shopping during COVID, they quickly realized that there were many things that they wanted to shop for in person and in fact they had missed shopping in person. So online shopping took a chunk, but it was not the whole problem. I would say the larger problem was number one.

Alexandra Lange:

The 2007-2008 recession took out a huge number of department stores, especially the middle income department stores that had been the anchors for many malls, and it was very hard for malls to recover from those initial draws no longer being draws and then to fill those very large retail spaces like that are kind of like the face of your mall.

Alexandra Lange:

And then the third part of the death of the mall is that the US was really, really overmalled in many, many cities and I've told this anecdote and people generally are like oh yes, I remember that when this happened, you know, initially in the 1960s there would have been one mall.

Alexandra Lange:

Then the suburbs get a little more built out, then there's another mall and your city can probably support like two to three malls. But then in the 90s, just kind of like the peak era of mall building, developers would come in and build a new giant mall on the very outer edge of the outer ring of suburbs and that mall would cannibalize the shoppers of all of the other malls, like there had stopped being like new retail territory at that point. So people were just stealing their competitors' shoppers. And if you look at any charts of the number of retail square feet per person in the US, it's, I think, almost double the closest other industrialized nations. So we just have so much more retail than we need. So in some ways the death of the mall retail than we need. So in some ways the death of the mall, while exaggerated, because it's not the death of all malls is right-sizing the amount of retail square footage that we have per person in the US.

Stephanie Rouse:

So outside of the US, in the final section of your book you start talking about other countries and it feels like Latin America and Asian cities are actually getting them all right with their designs. What are the differences and what lessons could we learn in reviving some of our defunct malls?

Alexandra Lange:

you know, talk to people over the past like two plus years since my book was published, because almost every audience I have has people from Latin America and Asia and they start talking about their malls and I'm like, yes, you're like your mall is doing great, like that.

Alexandra Lange:

That's why I have a final chapter, because I'm hoping that more people will write more books about the specific cases of their malls. In terms of, you know, countries and continents, I'm an Americanist so I felt like what I could best talk about was the American mall. I would say the big difference in both of those cases is that the mall is much less suburban and more urban. Malls are typically vertical, at least to a certain extent, you know, like up to eight stories, but more typically like three stories, so it's a more compact footprint, and they're generally attached to public transportation systems, so they're not isolated in the middle of a parking lot and they are accessible on foot or on public transportation from residential neighborhoods. So in many cases they're serving the same kind of quasi public space function for these neighborhoods, but everything around them is more urbanized, so kind of as with the pedestrian malls in the US. If you have more of a built in population that's literally like right there, like right on top of your mall. It gives it a better chance of success.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I find it very interesting that Gruen used the term blight proof neighborhood when he was talking about one of his master plans for a big shopping area, because, as we were just talking about, that's not necessarily true. So now cities all over the country, including Lincoln, actually are blighting parts of their existing malls. What do you think that cities should be thinking about as we seek to redevelop these areas?

Alexandra Lange:

as we seek to redevelop these areas. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's so interesting about Gruen is that he came from this European model. He built the mall, but in his initial conception of the mall he thought that the developers of the mall would then develop housing, office space and other services around the mall. In his vision, they always had a big parking lot, but there were other uses that you could have walked between around the mall. In his vision, they always had a big parking lot, but there were other uses that you could have walked between around the mall. What happened is basically the development community in the US is very separated by type, and so retail developers don't want to do housing development, and so even in those initial days, the retail developers just sold off their extra land and let the housing developers do what they wanted to do, which was cul-de-sac.

Alexandra Lange:

So it's really interesting that a lot of the most successful mall redevelopments now are basically making what was a single-use property back into mixed-use, essentially re-urbanizing it Like.

Alexandra Lange:

One of the best examples of this, I think, is Garden State Plaza, which is a very large old mall in Northern New Jersey and it actually is doing quite well, but the owners of the mall decided that they wanted to make it into more of a mixed use community, and so now they're building housing and some like co-working spaces in the extra parking lot of their mall and they're even going to make an outdoor green.

Alexandra Lange:

So right back to this town square idea that will complement the sort of indoor town square at the mall, and so, yeah, they're really thinking of it as an opportunity in what is, you know, a more densely built up area now than it was when the mall initially started. An opportunity to, you know, make money, obviously, but also create more of a pedestrian kind of almost town-like atmosphere around their existing mall. And I see things like that happening with more distressed properties also. But I just like that example because it's like there was actually nothing wrong with the mall, but I think the owners are very smart to try to kind of get ahead of the next wave.

Stephanie Rouse:

What's also encouraging is here at the University of Nebraska, for a couple years now, one of the professors his architecture studio is focused on our original mall and redeveloping it, because it's just covered in a sea of parking, and the students each year come up with all of these ways to incorporate new housing and community spaces and art studios and all those, all these different ideas for taking the existing mall and then building it out into a more of a community like what you're talking about.

Alexandra Lange:

Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things that I was really hoping that this book would help with was give professors, studio leaders, a text to give students to get them excited about working on the mall.

Alexandra Lange:

Because I feel like for a long time, when the dominant narrative about the mall was dead malls and people were almost kind of like glorying in the ruin porn of the photos, the idea of redeveloping a mall didn't seem very sexy and I felt like, oh, you know, I know, architecture professors kind of have to sell their studio. So it's like would the youth pick a studio that was redeveloping the mall? So I thought, okay, if there's this text that talks about malls in this more creative way, maybe that can help to encourage more creative thinking, just generally speaking. So it's great to hear that that's happening. I also get asked about housing a lot, because obviously that is the major crisis in our country today. A lot of people like romanticize the idea of actually inserting housing into the body of the mall, but I think really building housing in the mall parking lot is the smartest and cheapest way to do that.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Maybe the fact that the younger generation is really excited about the early 2000s with your book. Now maybe they can make the malls really cool again and make designing malls cool again.

Alexandra Lange:

I mean, it's always good to leverage nostalgia into something that's kind of more than nostalgia builds on nostalgia. So I think that would be pretty fabulous. I follow one Instagram account of this woman who basically, you know, dresses up like it's still the 80s and takes pictures of herself in malls. But she's too young to have done that the first time around and it's really fun and I feel like that, like that's the proper spirit, like try to get into an understanding of what happened there and why they were important to an older generation.

Stephanie Rouse:

So, as this is booked on planning, in addition to your book, which we recommend all of our listeners check out, what other books would you recommend our listeners get a copy of?

Alexandra Lange:

I was going to recommend Amanda Hurley's book Radical Suburb. It's a great small book that looks at suburbs that aren't stereotypical, not your cul-de-sac suburbs. To give the moms, who were also the architects, peace of mind by having a lot of collective and communal space where the kids could all run around in a pack that could be seen from the big pieces of glass in all of their houses but meant that the kids weren't siloed in their own backyards, it's just a great kind of alternative. Look at what we're talking about when we talk about the suburbs.

Alexandra Lange:

In terms of shopping history, I really love the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, which is this compendium that was edited by Rem Koolhaas, among others, and came out of a big studio that he did on shopping at Harvard now almost 20 years ago. But it has a great deep dive on the escalator and things like that, really taking apart all the parts of the mall. And then also there've been a bunch of recent really good histories of the department store which is obviously this building block for the mall, and one of them is called when Women Ran Fifth Avenue by Julie Satow. And then a friend of mine, Elizabeth Evitz Dickinson, has just written a biography of Claire McArdle, who was an early feminist designer whose career was really supported by department stores just before and then after the war. So all of those are really fun things to read.

Stephanie Rouse:

All great recommendations, all new to the show. Sometimes we get some repeats.

Alexandra Lange:

Yeah, I mean, I didn't scroll through all of the shows so I wasn't sure, but I'm glad to offer new ideas, yeah we have quite the library building now with this question that we added a couple years ago. Yeah, it's a great idea because I think every book has these offshoots and subsets of the topic, and so you can take it in whatever direction interests you the most.

Stephanie Rouse:

Well, alexandra. Thank you for joining us on the show to talk about your book. Meet Me by the Fountain An Inside History of the Mall. Thanks for having me.

Jennifer Hiatt:

We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Alexandra Lange on Meet Me by the Fountain An Inside History of the Mall. You can get your own copy through the publisher at Bloomsbury Publishing or click the link in the show notes below to take you directly to our affiliate page. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked on Planning. Thank you.

People on this episode

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Jennifer Hiatt

Co-host
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Stephanie Rouse, AICP

Co-host