Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards

"A smart and accessible cultural history."-Los Angeles Times

"A fantastic examination of what became the mall ... envision[ing] a more meaningful public afterlife for our shopping centers."-Vulture

A portrait--by turns celebratory, skeptical, and surprisingly moving--of one of America's most iconic institutions, from an author who "might be the most influential design critic writing now" (LARB).

Few places have been as nostalgized, or as maligned, as malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce, the agora of the suburbs. In their prime, they proved a powerful draw for creative thinkers such as Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, and George Romero, who understood the mall's appeal as both critics and consumers. Yet today, amid the aftershocks of financial crises and a global pandemic, as well as the rise of online retail, the dystopian husk of an abandoned shopping center has become one of our era's defining images. Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, really? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated?

In her acclaimed The Design of Childhood, Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. She now turns her sharp eye to another subject we only think we know. She chronicles postwar architects' and merchants' invention of the mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. In Lange's perceptive account, the mall becomes newly strange and rich with contradiction: Malls are environments of both freedom and exclusion--of consumerism, but also of community. Meet Me by the Fountain is a highly entertaining and evocative promenade through the mall's story of rise, fall, and ongoing reinvention, for readers of any generation.

ISBN-13: 9781635576023

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Publication Date: 06-14-2022

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d)

Alexandra Lange is an architecture critic and the author of four previous books, including The Design of Childhood. Her writing has also appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, New York Magazine, the New York Times, T Magazine, and CityLab, and she was previously the architecture critic for Curbed. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and has taught design criticism there and at the School of Visual Arts. She lives in Brooklyn.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Why We Go to the Mall 1

Chapter 1 Every Day Will Be a Perfect Shopping Day 14

Chapter 2 The Garden 46

Chapter 3 The Mall and the Public 76

Chapter 4 Make Shopping Beside the Point 114

Chapter 5 Whose Mall Is It Anyway? 153

Chapter 6 Dawn of the Dead Mall 183

Chapter 7 The Postapocalyptic Mall 219

Conclusion: The Mall Abroad 252

Acknowledgments 265

Notes 267

Index 299

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