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.