Most Americans have a solid impression or feeling when they take into account the mall, whether or not they spent plenty of their lives there or not. It might be formed by the memory of slurping an Orange Julius or smelling the sweet scents of Bath and Body Works. It might also be shaped by the fact malls appear everywhere in popular culture, from Joan Didion’s 1975 essay On the Mall to movies like Mallrats and George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead to the Starcourt Mall featured in Stranger Things.
What started off as a convenient one-stop shopping destination has become something different altogether: where people head to socialize and eat and watch movies. And while we may complain about the proliferation of TikTok or the fact a lot of people don’t even shop anymore, it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t always like this. https://time.com/3805133/flashback-to-the-timeless-malls-of-the-1980s/
In the 1980s, it absolutely was common to see teenagers at a mall hanging out and spending some time with friends. During the time, there was no Internet for most people (the only way to have online was to utilize text-based newsgroups) and a lot of people used film cameras that needed to be taken fully to a store to possess them developed. Malls were an ideal place to hang out, as they had food courts, arcades, and movies that you could watch free of charge in the food court while you’re awaiting your picture to develop.
While they were initially designed to replace shops and provide modern, idealized town centers for segregated suburbanites, by the 80s malls had turn into a space for socialization and entertainment. This is especially true for teenagers, who looked to malls as places to strut their stuff and flaunt their style. In a write-up for Vogue in 1993, Charles Gandee interviewed a guy who called himself a “mall rat,” who said he used the atrium of his local mall as his personal stage to perform “the time-honored ritual of showing off.”
Eventually, the trend of teenagers hanging out at malls started to decline and many of them closed down. It was partly due to the rising popularity of the net and online shopping, but it absolutely was also as a result of undeniable fact that malls were regarded as dangerous places where gangs and unrestrained youths would congregate and cause trouble. Many were also poorly maintained and deteriorated as time passes, making them look more and similar to ghettos.
But despite these trends, some malls are still open, and they have found ways to survive the changing landscape of consumer culture. So, will the mall ultimately be replaced by an electronic one or does it adapt and continue to produce memories for new generations? It is going to be interesting to see. For the time being, here’s a look back at a number of our favorite vintage photos from the heyday of American malls.
Bayer Didget 
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