You walked through the automatic doors and the temperature changed and the changing of the temperature was the first lie the shopping mall told you which was that you had entered a world where the weather did not exist and the weather not existing was the control and the control was the point. The shopping mall was seventy two degrees in January and seventy two degrees in August and the seventy two degrees was the constant and the constant was the comfort and the comfort was the trap. The shopping mall had no windows and the no windows was the second lie which was that time did not exist inside the mall and the time not existing meant you stayed longer than you intended and the staying longer was the profit.

Victor Gruen designed Southdale Center in Edina Minnesota in nineteen fifty six and Southdale was the first fully enclosed climate controlled shopping mall in America. Gruen was an Austrian Jewish architect who had fled the Nazis in nineteen thirty eight and arrived in New York with eight dollars and the arriving with eight dollars was the immigration story that built the shopping mall. Gruen's idea was not a shopping center. Gruen's idea was a town square. He wanted Southdale to have apartments and offices and a school and a medical center surrounding a glass-roofed garden where people would gather the way they gathered in the piazzas of Vienna. What he got was a building full of stores. The developers took the enclosure and threw away the community and the throwing away of the community was the betrayal that haunted Gruen for the rest of his life. He called shopping malls bastard developments and the calling them bastard developments was the father disowning the child.

The shopping mall became the town square that Gruen had wanted but not in the way he intended. The mall was where teenagers went on Friday night because there was nowhere else to go and the nowhere else to go was the failure of the suburb to provide any public space for young people. The food court replaced the lunch counter and the replacing was the downgrade because the food court had no counter where you sat next to a stranger and talked. The food court had tables where you sat with the people you came with and ignored everyone else and the ignoring was the isolation disguised as choice. The anchor store was the department store moved to the suburb and the moving to the suburb was the killing of the downtown department store. Macy's moved to the mall and downtown died and the dying of downtown was the cost that nobody calculated when they built the parking lot. The Mall of America in Bloomington Minnesota opened in nineteen ninety two with five hundred and twenty stores and an amusement park and an aquarium and the having of an aquarium in a shopping mall was the absurdity that proved the mall had become its own city and the becoming its own city was what Gruen had wanted except the city had no government and no citizens and no history. The city had shoppers.

The mall was the third place that was not a third place. Ray Oldenburg wrote about the third place in nineteen eighty nine and the third place was the place that was neither home nor work where people gathered and talked and formed community. The coffee shop was a third place. The barbershop was a third place. The mall pretended to be a third place but the mall was a private building with security guards and the security guards could ask you to leave and the asking you to leave meant the mall was not public and the not public meant the gathering was conditional and the conditional meant the mall was not a town square. The mall was a town square with rules and the rules said no loitering and no soliciting and no photography and no sleeping and the no sleeping was aimed at the homeless and the aimed at the homeless was the exclusion that the town square never practiced because the town square belonged to everyone and the mall belonged to the REIT.

The shopping mall is dying. There were over twenty five hundred malls in America in nineteen eighty six. Nearly a quarter of them have closed or are closing. The dying started with the internet and accelerated with the pandemic and the accelerating meant the anchor stores that held the mall together pulled out and the pulling out meant the smaller stores lost their traffic and the losing of traffic meant the mall became the dead mall and the dead mall is the ruin of the late twentieth century the way the Roman aqueduct is the ruin of antiquity. The dead mall has an empty fountain with no water. The dead mall has a directory with store names that no longer exist. The dead mall has an escalator that does not move. But the shopping mall understood something about America that the internet does not understand which is that people want to be around other people even if they are pretending they are only there to shop and the pretending is the permission and the permission is necessary because Americans need a reason to be in a room with strangers and the reason was shopping and the shopping is gone and the room is empty and the empty room is the question which is where do the strangers go now.