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

 I'm a member of the Mall Generation (a better name than GenX). I remember Sunday rides with my dad to the Woodhaven Mall - a little one-story mall with a Wilco (Woolworth's other brand), a supermarket, and a Gaudio's Garden center as anchors. The central area had a fountain and the Paperback Booksmith (where Daddy usually bought me a book) was on one side, next to a women's clothing store. There was a donut shop where I'd get a grape drink and a chocolate iced donut before Daddy and I played pinball. There was also a 4-screen movie theater where Mom and I saw most of the live action Disney movies of the era. Sometimes we'd go to the larger Neshaminy Mall (where I made my first clothing request - I asked Mom for a Zoom shirt when I saw them in Pomeroy's) or the Oxford Valley Mall with its large circular ramp between floors (I'd be allowed to run down it once per visit).

We moved before I became a teenager, so my main malls were different. Plymouth Meeting was closest, but low occupancy until the first IKEA in the country opened up on the property in 1985. Michelle worked in the shoe store summers during college and one year she also worked at The Bombay Company. I waitressed that summer and around 11 am most days I'd come visit her and we'd sit in the back (no one shopped at The Bombay Company during the day), knit, and discuss last night's Eastenders. Willow Grove was new, three-level and shiny with a large food court, and had more trendy stores. Montgomeryville was a bit of a drive, but larger and busier than Plymouth meeting - and also near my high school so I was likely to run into friends. 

College didn't stop my mall days - freshman year we'd take the occasional bus trip to the Monroeville Mall and after I brought my car I made regular trips there and occasional trips to the larger but hard to get to (I have no sense of direction) Century III Mall. After college, Quakerbridge Mall and a "prestige" mall also along Route 1 had theaters with enough screens for me to go to the movies twice a week and bookstores for me to browse while waiting. I still remember the teens trying to get into Species having a hissy fit because my friend Van (then 30) and I (26) weren't carded when we bought tickets for Nine Months (for years we had a standing appointment to see Hugh Grant movies - usually in mall-attached movie theaters). What ended them was a 1999 job with a mall leasing company. They decided to have temp lawyers review all their leases as part of their Y2K update and seeing the expectations per square foot (and about once a week spending an hour or so after work in King of Prussia mall waiting for the traffic to decrease - that was always my least favorite mall, dating back to it's outdoor era, because I found it disorienting) just killed my desire to enter a mall more than a few times a year, if that.

Alexandra Lange is another mall kid, and in the introduction to Meet Me by the Fountain reminisces about her malls, comparing them to her first post-COVID mall trip, to the new and massive American Dream in East Rutherford, NJ. From there, she analyzes mall trends by decade.

Malls started in the 1950s, with suburbanization, and they catered to middle-class white women who'd left cities but still wanted convenient shopping. Initially they weren't enclosed, strips or blocks of shops with courtyards and paths in between. Developers envisioned a private version of the public square, and malls contained services like hairdressers, dry cleaners, and dentists that we don't think of as "mall" businesses. The 1960s brought enclosed malls, protecting shoppers from the heat of Phoenix, the cold of Minneapolis, and the dreariness of March in Philadelphia. Malls got larger and developed somewhat standard layouts based on letters and with anchors at the end of every strip. The 1970s brought the urban mall, starting with Boston's Faneuil Hall which restored a historic building, and expanding into new malls like Harbor Place in Baltimore and The Gallery (now The Fashion District) in Philadelphia. All three opened to fanfare and impressive sales, but their promise faded, with Faneuil Hall now for the tourists, Harbor Place an almost empty construction zone when I visited in 2018, and The Fashion District being threatened by a new arena for the 76ers.

The 1980s were the zenith of mall culture, and of mall profitability. Owners realized teens had disposable income and wanted a safe place to go. WaldenBooks received most of my money, but there were Duran Duran posters to buy at Spencers, cassettes to buy at Sam Goody or We Three Records, clothes from whatever store was "in' among my friends, and then something from the food court, usually a bacon and cheese baked potato. Maybe a few video games if the mall had an arcade (only Montgomeryville did among "my" malls).  Times were changing as I aged out of my teens, though, and by the 1990s malls began to restrict teens, saying they could only enter with adults or during certain hours (most of which were during the school day). The 1990s was also the start of the mall's decline. Maybe turning away paying teens was a bad idea, but the main villain was over expansion and economic whims. Malls grew faster than the population and ended up competing with each other for shrinking dollars as the economic distribution became dumbbell shaped. By the 2000s, anchors were closing and big boxes and outlet malls arranged like the 1950s "town centers" took over. Plymouth Meeting Mall is now quieter than it was pre-IKEA (that store moved to a big box strip a few miles away) and most of the business in that complex goes to stores with outdoor entrances only. Megamalls, like the Mall of America and American Dream seem to be surviving by adding experiences (both include amusement parks), and the mall is thriving in parts of the world where it's still a novel experience. 

Lange's book isn't all Hot Topic and Macy's, teenagers and senior mall walkers. Malls are both public and private, and she discusses how that affects the ability to protest or simply disseminate minority opinions. Malls were also built for people like me - middle/upper middle class and so white I practically luminesce. What happens when malls become the place where non-white working class people shop? I constantly read that The Fashion District underperforms, but even before its makeover, it was profitable - but the customers no longer looked like me and chains were leaving. Is that why it's being called a "dead zone" that should be replaced by a "privately funded" (if you believe that, I have a mall to sell you) sports arena that the most optimistic estimates say will be used 40% of the year? I have my suspicions. Other malls are being reimagined as college campuses or being razed for mixed use development. If The Fashion District is truly failing, we should try that rather than give in to the whims of a sports team owner.

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

 I prefer baking to cooking (probably a side effect of being single - I have no one to share ideas, admire my work, or help clean up) which is probably why I'm not much of a kitchen gadget person. Still, as a 21st Century person with a microwave and KitchenAid mixer (Mom bought me one the first Christmas I had my own house so I wouldn't "borrow" Big Yellow, which Daddy bought her for Christmas 1979), I'm far ahead of early humans who had a pot, a knife, and a spoon. Food writer Bee Wilson tracks the evolution of cooking and utensils from pre-history to the bread maker and Oxo Good Grips. 

She starts with a wooden spoon - everyone has one (and in the hands of Lisa Scottoline's South Philly matrons, it's a threatening symbol of power). It's simple, useful, heat resistant, and hard to improve. Even the stick end is useful for stirring oatmeal. So simple that we don't think about how central is is to cooking. She then moves to pots (for much of history, cooked meals were soup/stew/pottage - throw ingredients into the pot with some fluid and cook until it's time to eat) and knives. This is where specialization begins. No pot is perfect for every use (if it's a good conductor, it won't heat quickly; sautéing in a stock pot or making spaghetti sauce in a frying pan is difficult-to-impossible), and while there are some multi-purpose knives, the ideal blade size and shape depends on the job. As she expands into the idea of cooking, the use of ice and eventually refrigeration, and the kitchen itself she explains how gadgets may come and go, but the basics stay. They may be refined (as the late appearing fork moved from a skewer to the two prongs still used to stabilize meat for carving and eventually to the 3 or 4 pronged utensil we use every day) or combined (the spork and it's relatives, which she lists in a footnote), but at their core they're identifiable through the centuries.