Secret Mall Apartment

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. There is so much to do at the mall. You can get your ears pierced. You can build a bear. You can go get an Orange Julius. Late at night, when the GameStops and the Hot Topics are all locked up and the food court’s taking out the last of the trash, it is usually time to go home. But what if the mall was your home? 

SECRET MALL APARTMENT: This ad came on for the Providence Place Mall. It was this woman talking about how it used to be so convenient for her to get everything that she needed for her kids–for herself. If only she could live there. I just had this idea. “Oh, we should live in a mall.” 

ROMAN MARS: The new documentary, Secret Mall Apartment, is about a group of artists who built–you guessed it–a secret apartment inside of the mall. We interviewed the group’s ringleader, Michael Townsend, a few years back. And after the story, we’ll have an update about what’s happened since then. 

In downtown Providence, Rhode Island, there’s a large plot of land that sits on the bank of the Woonasquatucket River. In 1838, it was the home of the Rhode Island State Prison, which was notorious for its horrid smell, dreary outward appearance, and reputation for solitary confinement. Later, the land housed the Continuing Education campus for the University of Rhode Island–and after that, a dirt parking lot called Ray’s Parking Lot. 

VANESSA LOWE: Then in 1999, in a grand effort to revitalize the city and with much fanfare, the Providence Place Mall was opened. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s Vanessa Lowe, producer of the podcast Nocturne. 

VANESSA LOWE: The mall, costing $500 million, was what was known as a “super regional”–a one stop shopping destination housing everything consumers could possibly want or need in a totally enclosed space. Partially funded by taxpayer money, it spanned 13 acres, offered 1.4 million square feet of retail space, and dominated the riverfront. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: It was the largest construction project in Providence’s history–this one building. And we sort of stood in watching it get built. 

VANESSA LOWE: Michael Townsend is an artist who lived nearby when the mall was still under construction in the 1990s. His daily running route took him past the construction site. And Michael says that, as he watched it go up, he had an open mind about the project. He was cautiously optimistic that it would be a welcome addition to the neighborhood. 

ROMAN MARS: But yeah, that didn’t last long. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: It’s funny, the revulsion to a building like that doesn’t really kick in until the skin gets put on. When something is in its erector set mode, where you just see the skeleton, it’s like, “Oh, that’s a pretty cool skeleton.” But as soon as the flesh is there, you’re like, “Ooh… Not pretty.”

VANESSA LOWE: Providence Place was going to be a big, boxy stack of shops without much in the way of architectural niceties. And on his runs, Michael watched as that big box was slowly filled with the things that make a mall a mall. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: As it’s being built, I started to sort of do mental maps of spaces. “That’s going to be a store, that’s gonna be a storage space, that’s going to be parking…” 

ROMAN MARS: But amidst all the construction, there was one part of the building that kept catching Michael’s eye–a weird space in the guts of the architecture that didn’t make sense. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: And I thought that was really odd. It didn’t seem to meet the profile of either a storage space or a parking space or store space. 

VANESSA LOWE: Michael wasn’t sure what the space was for. It seemed to exist only by virtue of the walls intended for the more legitimate spaces around it. But the result was this room. 

ROMAN MARS: It was an accidental room–a remainder left over by the long division of the mall’s architecture. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: I had never seen anything like it. And every time I ran by it, it was something that I would think about. 

VANESSA LOWE: Michael eventually put the strange room out of his mind. He probably would have forgotten about it entirely, except that four years later, a second group of developers, encouraged by the success of Providence Place, set their sights even closer to Michael. This time, they wanted to build right on top of the historic mill district, where Michael and a dozen or so other artists lived and worked, in an old industrial building they called Fort Thunder. 

ROMAN MARS: The developers had used a computer algorithm to figure out where to place a new supermarket so that it wouldn’t compete with other supermarkets in the area. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: And I got to see this computer printout, and it is sort of like a nuclear explosion map. You can sort of see the radius from each supermarket and their theoretical reach. And in the blank spot that was our neighborhood, they put an X directly on the building we were living. 

VANESSA LOWE: And that was just the start. The developers wanted to tear down all of the old mill buildings and replace them with yet more retail, with little to no pedestrian access. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: And it appears that the only mantra they have is if you see a space that’s underdeveloped, you have a God-given responsibility to develop it. And it was basically like having a complete stranger be like, “We’ve been thinking about it, and we think we want to knock your house down and make it a parking lot, if it’s cool with you.”

ROMAN MARS: Now, normally this would be the part of the story where we tell you that Michael and the other residents of Fort Thunder banded together to save their home in the face of the relentless march of capital. But no, it’s not that kind of story. Granted, they did save some buildings. But as for Fort Thunder…

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: Oh, our actual home? Oh, yeah, they [BLEEP] leveled that. They came in with bulldozers and cranes and knocked that sucker flat. 

ROMAN MARS: Fort Thunder was gone. The reason we’re telling you this story is because of what happened next. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: Because when I see something like that, I’m like, “Oh… Really? Game on.”

VANESSA LOWE: Michael and his friends had lost their home. And in their mind, it had all started with that first mall. That was the original seed of development that had led to everything else. And so talk began of a mall-related action. Call it art. Call it a stunt. But a plan started to take shape. 

ROMAN MARS: Michael and his friends decided that they would find a way to live in the mall for seven days. Yeah. Live in the mall. And they set a rule for themselves. They couldn’t leave. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: And without a second thought of thinking of how unfeasible that is, for our own well-being, we really thought that we had to do it. 

VANESSA LOWE: And if this sounds like a lark. Well, yeah, it kind of was. But a secretly serious lark. The four friends–they would eventually number eight–wanted to assert that spaces like the mall could belong just as much to them as to the developers. 

ROMAN MARS: To really do this right, they would need to find a space in the mall where they could hide themselves away. And Michael had the perfect place in mind. He began to search for that mysterious room that he’d noticed when the mall was under construction all those years before. He remembered seeing that the room was connected to a kind of crevice–a narrow gap in the building structure–that eventually led out to an exterior wall. So, one night, Michael went to see if the entrance to that crevice had ever been sealed off. 

VANESSA LOWE: Amazingly, it hadn’t. It was small and sort of hidden, but there was still a crack in the exterior of the mall. And so he and his then-wife, Adriana, turned themselves sideways and slipped inside. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: And then once you’re in, at that point, you are exploring a system of caverns–long, weird, vertical caverns. And there are places where it just falls down into the lower levels of the mall. So, you’ve got about a foot and a half of cliff, but you’re looking into a black abyss. And then this series of chambers ultimately gives you access to this space. 

ROMAN MARS: The room was tall and wide, filled with the byproducts of the mall’s construction from years before, broken in two by fours and screws and plastic zip ties that hadn’t even been worth removing. The space had literally been forgotten. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: And it was big. It was a big space that serves no other purpose. It wasn’t a storefront, and it wasn’t a stairwell. It was just big. And it was a thrill to physically find it and be like, “This is it! This is what I remember.”

VANESSA LOWE: The room was in the guts of the building–the part that no one was ever supposed to use or even really see. But Michael and Adriana saw that it could still be accessed by multiple hidden entry points, including from inside the shopping center itself. If you knew how to get there, you could walk there from the Macy’s. But as far as they could tell, they were the only people who knew this room existed. 

ROMAN MARS: It was at that moment that the friends scheme started changing. The initial plan had been to spend a week in the mall. But the way they saw it, they were sitting on 750ft² of underutilized space. Then they asked themselves, “What would a developer do?” because after all…

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: [ECHOEY FLASHBACK] “If you see a space is underdeveloped, you have a God-given responsibility to develop it…” 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: So, we decided that perhaps the absolute best thing we could do is just build a condo. That is always the answer. If you’re not sure what to do with the space, just make it a condo. 

ROMAN MARS: The new plan was no longer to live in the mall for a week. It was now simply to live in the mall, for days at a time, using the room as an apartment. And while that may sound like a nightmare to everyone but a few weird artists from Providence, Michael and his friends got to work on this little project with the excitement of new homeowners. 

VANESSA LOWE: Step one, of course, was cleaning. They had to get rid of all that debris. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: It’s sort of like, you know, a prison break movie. We were literally filling up our backpacks with just dirt and grime and then carrying it out of the mall and getting rid of it. 

ROMAN MARS: And for every backpack full of debris they took out, they’d bring a pack full of something in.

VANESSA LOWE: Gallon jugs of water for drinking and cleaning, clamp lights and extension cords for illumination, which they plugged into the mall’s internal power system, parts for an ad hoc kitchen… They even built a cinderblock wall to hide the space from anyone else who might venture into the cavern complex from its various other entrances. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: We went and got a door that was an exact mirror of the doors they use in the mall. So, if you were to find it–unless you’re looking really closely–at first glance, it just looks exactly like it had been built originally. 

ROMAN MARS: Finally, it was time to decorate. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: Anything we could buy at the mall we would. A low table came in–on top of that, proudly perched, was a television and our PlayStation. But if we couldn’t buy it at the mall, we’d have to bring it into the mall. And that’s for the large pieces like the china hutch or the four-piece sectional couch. 

VANESSA LOWE: No, but nobody looked twice so that you brought pieces of a couch through the mall? How did you get that in there? 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: In broad daylight. We avoided the night and sort of worked with the ebb and flow of the mall. We were just part of, you know, the living organism of its daily activities. 

ROMAN MARS: It may seem risky trying to furnish a secret apartment with a nested coffee table. But to anyone watching, it was just a person walking through a mall with the nested coffee table that they just bought at the mall. There is simply no such thing as a suspicious consumer item in a building that is dedicated to consumerism. 

VANESSA LOWE: The friends would sometimes stay in the secret apartment for several weeks in a row–just living–watching television, making collages with shadow boxes they bought at Pottery Barn, even cooking in the ad hoc kitchen… Michael remembers burning some waffles with a waffle iron and wondering if the smoke would give them away. 

ROMAN MARS: And when the eight friends weren’t enjoying their secret apartment, they were enjoying the mall–not as shoppers but as residents. Thanks to its late-night movie theater, the mall almost never closed. So, sometimes they would just roam the building with no goal in mind, observing its many moods. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: There are times when that entire building probably had maybe ten people in it, like in the middle of the night. There’d be security officers. There would be cleaning staff. And it’s a really wonderful time because it’s like having a public park, four levels deep, all to yourself. And in those moments, there’s a sense of ownership, and I just feel really good. 

VANESSA LOWE: Weeks turned to months and eventually years. Out of the emotional rubble of Fort Thunder, they’d finally found their refuge–and all thanks to the mall’s developers, who had accidentally provided a sanctuary from the world they were busy developing. 

ROMAN MARS: But as the old saying goes, there comes a time in every man’s life when he must stop living at the mall. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: Unfortunately, the seed got planted that this whole thing was going to unravel. And that’s because we had a break-in. 

VANESSA LOWE: One day they came back to the apartment, only to discover that someone had kicked open the door and stolen the PlayStation along with several other small items, including the art they had made and a photo album. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: But they left the silverware. They left the TV. We were like, “This is a very odd burglary.” Like, they didn’t take the things of value. They only took the things that were, like, super personal. 

VANESSA LOWE: Michael and his friends were spooked. They had managed to hide the apartment for four years, but now someone knew about the room. Someone could come back at any time and who seemed to be interested in them. So, they changed things up. They decided, from now on, they’d only stay there at night, when the chances of being caught were low–never during the day. 

ROMAN MARS: And crucially, they would double down on another rule they’d had since almost the very beginning. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: Don’t share it with anyone. Don’t physically bring anyone here who wasn’t involved in the making of it. So, a lot of my very, very good and best friends never saw this space. And I’m the one who took that rule and broke it. 

VANESSA LOWE: Michael was hosting a visiting artist from Hong Kong. Her name was Jaffa. He was driving her to the bus station on her way out of town. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: And we’re driving past the mall. And I say to myself, “What can it hurt? How could this possibly backfire on me?” So, I brought her into the space. Her mind was absolutely blown. You got to remember that this is at the peak of its build out. 

VANESSA LOWE: Michael showed Jaffa everything–the couch, the lights, the television… They were just days away from installing a water tank and a wood floor. In spite of the break-in, after four years of work, the apartment was on the verge of feeling like a real home. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: But when we’re leaving, I hear a walkie-talkie on the other side of the door, within two feet of us. And when the door opens, it’s three dudes and ties and sports jackets. And I realize– In that moment, I internalize that it’s over. 

ROMAN MARS: It turned out that the earlier break-in had been the work of two of the mall’s newest security guards. Instead of removing everything, they had taken the personal items in hopes of figuring out who Michael and his friends were. Now that Michael had been foolish enough to come back during the day, they had their man. 

VANESSA LOWE: General Growth Properties–the company that owned the mall–did not take kindly to the secret apartment in its walls. 

ROMAN MARS: You don’t say. 

VANESSA LOWE: After being handed over to the police and interrogated, Jaffa was eventually let go. But Michael soon found himself standing in front of a judge in criminal court, charged with breaking and entering and felony trespass. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: By the time I get to court, the mall has hired a lawyer. And they launched into all these details about the illegal things that I have done. And I keep my mouth shut. But after they’ve gone through this laundry list of illegal activities, they use the phrase, “This gave Mr. Townsend access to an apartment that they had built over several years that had the following things in it…” And it goes on to list in detail what the apartment looked like. 

ROMAN MARS: Including the coffee table, the television, a copy of the game Grand Theft Auto, an eight-foot china hutch, a four piece sectional couch, silverware for eight with matching glassware, a six foot. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: And the more details this lawyer gives, the more the judge just looks around–and he’s like, “What’s happening here?” And the judge hustles advisors close to him. And I hear him whispering. And then he looks up–looks me dead in the eyes–and he goes, “This is not a criminal act. We’re not sure exactly what it was, but this is not a crime.” 

ROMAN MARS: Whether the judge was perceiving a deep legal truth at the heart of this case or Michael was just the beneficiary of an incredible amount of white privilege, Michael may never know. 

VANESSA LOWE: In the end, he was slapped with a misdemeanor for trespassing and released. He had lived on and off in a secret apartment for nearly four years, and it was going to cost him almost nothing. But that doesn’t mean he got away entirely scot-free. 

ROMAN MARS: Just before Michael left the mall, the mall security team handed him a piece of paper–the same piece of paper they hand to brawlers, shoplifters, and anyone else who has overstayed their welcome in this most private of public spaces. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: This is a standardized manila piece of paper, which has a map of the mall. And it has this red line around the whole thing. And you have to sign it, and it says, “You can’t cross that red line.” So, they make it clear you’re never coming back. 

VANESSA LOWE: Now, over a decade later, Michael still lives right near the mall. But his days of running anywhere near its 13 acres are over. 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: And the biggest bummer for me is that if I want to go to downtown, the path that you bring your bike through is through the center of the mall where it bridges over the river. And now that I’m banned from the mall, I have to bike around it. And I’ve biked around it for ten years. 

VANESSA LOWE: Are you serious? 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: Diligently. I have never broken this rule. 

VANESSA LOWE: So you really can never go back? 

MICHAEL TOWNSEND: I can never go back. 

ROMAN MARS: Since we aired that story, Michael did honor the ban–up until very recently. At the climax of the new documentary, he sneaks back in to see what’s left of the apartment. But all he finds is a door and a couple of cinder blocks. Meanwhile, things are not going well for the mall. By the fall of 2024, its management company had fallen behind on their $259 million of debt, and a judge ordered them all into receivership. Attorneys John Dorsey and Mark Russo were appointed to turn around the mall’s finances and lure shoppers back. As part of their publicity push, they have effectively granted Townsend a pardon. They commissioned him to install art pieces in empty storefronts, and the mall’s movie theater hosted the premiere of the documentary. Dorsey even went into the mall’s catacombs for a photo op where the apartment had been. And one of the ideas that Dorsey and Russo have floated to save the mall is converting some parts of it into residential apartments–legal, non-secret apartments. 

That episode was reported by Vanessa Lowe, edited by Joe Rosenberg, tech production by Sharif Youssef. A different version originally aired on the podcast Nocturne. Secret Mall Apartment is playing now in select cities. Michael and his friends filmed almost everything they did at the time, and the footage is delightful to watch. We’ll have a link in the show notes. After the break, where did malls come from and where are they going? 

[AD BREAK] 

ROMAN MARS: In the credits of the Secret Mall Apartment documentary, there’s one name in the special thanks section that will jump out at you if you’re a long time 99PI listener. And that’s the name Alexandra Lange. We’ve had her on the show as an expert eight times, which I think might be a record. Anyway, back in 2022, she came on the show to tell us about the rise and fall of the mall, how the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift towards online shopping, and what we should do with all that empty space. 

Like many teens in the ’80s, my first job was at the mall. I was 14. I lied about my age. I was a busboy in an Applebee’s-style restaurant that no longer exists. On Saturdays, I often worked three shifts in a row. So I witnessed the entire circadian rhythm of the mall. At 8:00, I cleaned windows as the senior citizens in tracksuits powered through the empty halls, passing by shops with their cage doors still rolled down. By midday, the families took over. And my usual job of cleaning glasses and plates involved cleaning up piles of food spilled on the floor. By evening, the teens arrived. They couldn’t afford the restaurant, but I could see them in packs, congregating by the fountain, always ready with an unkind word or some act of cruelty. The mall felt terrible. I hated it. But despite this, on days when I wasn’t working, I had my mom drop me off at the mall. Kids in small towns and suburbs play the hand they’re dealt. And being able to walk around on your own, maybe buying a cassette tape of the Smiths’ live album at Sam Goody, is the best that life has to offer. 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: I was not a very cool teen, let me just say. I was a very nerdy teen. 

ROMAN MARS: This is cool adult and friend of the show Alexandra Lange. 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: I feel like there are a lot of teenage mall scenarios that I did not participate in. Like, I did not meet my first beau at the mall. I did not stroll around with shopping bags, showing off at the mall. None of that. 

ROMAN MARS: But no teen in the ’80s could completely avoid the gravitational pull of the mall. Alexandra is the author of a new book called Meet Me by the Fountain. 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: I think part of the whole argument of this book is really that people are social creatures and that the mall had to be created because the suburbs didn’t really initially think about a space for people to come together. 

ROMAN MARS: Even though we’re past the heyday of the mall, Alexandra says we haven’t seen the death of the mall, even after two and a half years of a global pandemic. 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: I think that people are people, and they’re going to want to, like, go back out and get together again. I think we’ve seen that in the tremendous use of parks during the pandemic. And when we can safely gather indoors, people are going to be excited to do that because who wants to go to a park in December? 

ROMAN MARS: We’re going to talk about how the mall became a ubiquitous part of American culture and what’s happening today as malls across the country start to disappear. 

Okay, so let’s get down to some basics. What is a mall? What makes something a mall versus other shopping centers that existed before or after? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: Well, a shopping center is outdoors and a mall is indoors. That’s the most basic thing. A shopping center is a strip mall or a line of stores facing the parking lot with some sort of, like, covering over the space in front of them, whereas a mall is indoors. And the earliest malls were basically just two shopping strips put together. So, you had a department store at each end and then two lines of shops facing each other and a covered, you know, central aisle that usually had fountains and plants and benches and other amenities. So, they were really just that super simple kind of eye-shaped plan. 

ROMAN MARS: And this shape–the long hallway–is where the word mall comes from. 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: That’s right. Yeah. Basically, the name mall comes from Pall Mall in London, which is a narrow street where they used to play a kind of bowling game. So, it was this long, narrow, outdoor space where people would come together to play. And so the mall from Pall Mall turned into a landscape term for that kind of long, narrow green space. So then when you enclose that long, narrow space under a roof, it is another kind of mall. So, the mall in Washington is also a mall from the same origin, even though we don’t really think about a shopping mall in the mall in Washington in the same way. 

ROMAN MARS: Right. That place with the reflecting pool and the Lincoln on one side–that’s the Capitol Mall. 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: Lincoln is the anchor store of the National Mall. 

ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLING] He is the Macy’s of the Capitol Mall. So, Victor Gruen is credited as the father of the mall. What was he trying to do? What was he trying to make? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: So, Gruen was an emigre from Austria. He fled the Nazis to the U.S. in the late 1930s. And he had really strong memories of the kind of charming streets of Vienna, where there are cafes and people gather at fountains and there’s this whole rich outdoor life. So, he came to America, he initially designed these very glamorous stores in Manhattan, and then he was taken up by some department store executives who were like, “Move to California. Design our department stores.” So, he started designing these freestanding department stores, and he just felt kind of crushed by the landscape around those department stores because you could go to the store and you could park and you could go in, but then you couldn’t do anything else. You couldn’t leave and sit at a cafe. There was nowhere to meet your friends. There was none of the kind of fabric of the city that he found in European cities. So, in the early 1940s, Gruen was living in New York and flying back and forth across the country a lot–major, major airplane miles. And he gets stuck in Detroit on a cross-country flight because of fog. And he thinks, “Oh, okay, I’m not going to waste this time I have on the ground in Detroit.” He asked his friends, “Where is life happening in Detroit?” And they said, “Oh, it’s all out in the suburbs.” So, he gets driven around the suburbs. And he finds what he’s been finding elsewhere in the U.S.–that, yes, there are all these new houses and, yes, there are all these strip malls, but there’s nowhere to go. And he thinks that he–master salesman–should be able to sell J. L. Hudson on that idea of building a branch department store and a shopping center in the suburbs. And over the next several years he does this. He actually sells them on the idea of building four of them: Northland, Southland, Eastland and Westland. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I’ve always wondered about that. Like, why do so many malls have cardinal directions in the name? No matter what city you’re in, they’re all, like, Westfield or Southport. Why is that? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: This is the origin story. And this is one way in which I know the book can be slightly confusing because all the malls sound the same. And it’s like, “Yeah, that was on purpose.” If you’re thinking about your city with the center point downtown, all of these malls wanted to establish where they were in relation to that center point. So, if you were driving north on the kind of main highway out of town, you would encounter Northland or North Park or Northfield or North Dale or one of these other things–same with south, east, or west. So, all of them are named after their cardinal points so that people know kind of where to find them in relation to downtown. And then the second part of the word is “Gate” because it’s an entry to the city, it’s “Land” because that was open land before, it’s “Park” because they’re attaching it to a parkway… Like, they have kind of vague geographical associations. The problem really comes at, like… I grew up going to Northgate Mall in Durham, North Carolina, but there’s a much more famous Northgate Mall in Seattle that was one of the first malls. And so you always have to specify which city you’re talking about. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. And it feels like there’s a certain point where the naming convention becomes just a meaningless convention. One of the fancier malls in downtown San Francisco is called Westfield. I don’t think it’s west of anything or a field at all. But, you know, maybe that’s just– I don’t know. Maybe you know. 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: No, no, Westfield is actually a huge mall conglomerate that’s now owned by Australians. But Westfield may be originally named after a Westfield that was in some town. 

ROMAN MARS: So Gruen designed these malls in Michigan. And he saw the early mall as more of a mixed-use hub. There were shops and department stores but also post offices and doctor’s offices. How long did that idea of a mall last? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: Yeah, Gruen definitely saw the malls as having a community function. And that’s really explicit in a lot of his writings in the 1940s and 1950s. And he wasn’t alone in that. There are other early mall developers, including James Rouse, who comes back into the story later, who also built malls circa 1955, 1956, that had community spaces. They might have church spaces. They definitely had doctors’ offices. A lot of malls also had nurseries. So, these early malls had a lot more community functions built in, and they were thought of as replacing downtown and having these mixed-use functions. But what happened was, over time, by the mid 1960s, there just started to be more and more malls. And they’re not being designed and created by these original developers. And the developers just want to make money. And they also found that, you know, the mall has been kind of incorporated as an American pastime. And it turns out you don’t need to have a community space for your mall to operate like a community center. It’s just doing that anyway. 

ROMAN MARS: So, the mall is often blamed for killing downtowns. But is this completely fair? Like, was the mall a reaction to filling a void that was already created by downtowns in decline? Or did they contribute in some way? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: The early malls were really predicated on investment by the department stores, but the department store owners only made that investment after they were already seeing a loss of business downtown. And the families who owned these department stores were frequently major urban philanthropists. They were the ones who paid for new shows at the museum. They were really power players in Minneapolis, Detroit, Philadelphia, and these other cities. But as the suburbs expanded because the houses were built first, they began to draw all of this energy away from downtowns. And initially, and now it seems foolishly in retrospect, people thought the women would drive back into downtowns to shop during the day–either drive or take public transportation. But once women and children were kind of ensconced in their houses in the suburbs, that was just impossible. Like, who would want to do that? And the shopping options were really limited because they were mostly these strip malls that had a supermarket and a drugstore and maybe a kid’s shoe store. But they didn’t have the kind of full service department store that they did downtown. So, department store owners really wanted people to keep going downtown because that’s where they had put all of this time and investment. That was not an accurate read on human behavior. So, very reluctantly, department store owners began first to build some small, freestanding stores. They called them “junior stores.” And then Gruen kind of came up with this way, by packaging the department store with other stores, that they could keep their sense of dignity. They really wanted their stores to still be glamorous and still be special and not just another thing by the highway. So, the Gruen idea of the indoor shopping mall allowed them to keep some of that glamor from downtown and also feed off other shopping, but move out to the suburbs. 

ROMAN MARS: So, these early malls go up. And they get a lot of attention, especially this one large mall designed by Victor Gruen in Edina, Minnesota, called Southdale Center. And it’s a big media story. But how are these early malls received by the architecture and design world at large? Like, how did they respond? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: The architecture press was totally wowed by the early malls. You know, Southdale in particular was treated as this kind of second coming. One of the amazing things is that Jane Jacobs went out to Edina to see Southdale and wrote this, like, very glowing write-up of it in Architectural Forum. And if you think about our stereotype of Jane Jacobs, she was all about the city. She was all about small business. But at that moment, it was really seen as an important new element or important new tool for creating urbanism in the suburbs. 

ROMAN MARS: The outside of shopping malls is really boring. They’re just these big gray boxes when you see them from the road. But all the design thinking goes into the inside of the mall with things like fountains and atriums. Why is that? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: I think that’s where the community idea–this kind of utopian community idea from the Gruen inception of the mall–really continues because if you’re in a space that just makes you want to shuffle along, like, say, an airport terminal, you don’t want to stay there. But if you’re in a space where there’s beautiful, natural light and maybe there’s a fountain that your kids can throw pennies into or maybe there’s a bench so you can, like, take a little break in between going from store to store, you’re going to stay there longer. And so, even if mall owners stopped paying money for architectural features on the outside, they still spent a lot of time investing in architectural features and the upkeep of those features on the inside. There’s a whole dialogue around maintenance related to the mall. And I think if you look at some pictures of dead and dying malls, one of the first things you see is, like, the plants dying or they’ve taken all the plants out of the planters or, you know, there aren’t enough trash cans anymore. And so part of the allure of the mall is of this beautiful and beautifully maintained indoor space that you can go to at any time. And the weather will always be perfect. And so that’s where the money goes. And that’s where, I think, some of the artistry goes. And the title of my book is Meet Me by the Fountain because that’s also how people orient themselves in malls, right? “Meet me by the blue fountain.” “Meet me by the red fountain.” The mall can be a confusing and kind of, like, jangly place, but these perpetual architecture features help us orient ourselves. 

ROMAN MARS: After the mall is introduced and it sort of begins to replicate, then we hit the building boom for malls in the ’70s and ’80s. And then they really begin to change the landscape of America. Could you talk about that time and the rise of the giant mall? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: The early malls, a lot of times, are really quite simple. It’s just, like, that eye shape or a T shape or a V shape with one or two or three department stores. And the reason you’re going to the mall is to shop, to go to the department store, to maybe get a snack in a snack bar… The food court doesn’t actually become part of the mall until the mid 1970s. And then in the 1980s, you begin to get the first wave of boredom with the mall. People are kind of over the mall. And that’s when John Jerde comes in–this LA architect–and he’s like, “Okay, how can we get people to want to go to the mall again? I know. We’ll put an amusement park in the middle of the mall.” And once you put an amusement park in the middle of the mall, it gets exponentially bigger. 

ROMAN MARS: And did every mall kind of react in this way? Like, I know there’s some key ones, like Mall of America, that has a roller coaster, an aquarium, and stuff like that. Did that effect kind of ripple out into other malls? Or was it really just sort of confined to a few big ones? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: The entire amusement park in the mall is really confined to just a few large ones. But the entertainment idea does ripple out. I mean, you get more and more ice skating rinks in malls. You get bigger and bigger food courts. And they get more expressive architecture so that going to the food court is kind of an event. And there are more and more different kinds of cuisines that you can sample. You also get arcades added to malls. So, the offerings of malls get broader and broader. And just their square footage gets bigger and bigger. Those malls also are a bigger investment for their developers, so they’re trying to pull from a larger and larger area. So, whereas the original malls were really just trying to serve the suburbs all around them and their quadrant of the city, these new malls are generally referred to as super regional malls. So, they are malls that people would really travel to. When you had to get your prom dress, you and your friends would get in the minivan and go to the mall that was one or two hours away because it had the bigger, better department stores. And you’d spend a whole day there. And it’s just a different mentality about shopping. And it’s a slightly different relationship to the mall itself. 

SAN DIMAS MALL FOOTAGE: This is the San Dimas Mall. And this is where people in today’s world hang out… 

MEAN GIRLS: Get in, loser. We’re going shopping… 

LET’S GO TO THE MALL: Let’s go to the mall, today / I went to the mall with a couple of friends / I had a whole week’s allowance to spend…

ROMAN MARS: You know, in the ’80s, during this growth and heyday of this sort of cultural ascendancy of malls, there’s a real conflict about the mall as a public space versus a private space. Can you talk about why that’s important and what is happening inside of a mall that’s different than what would happen if this was a shopping district in a city? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: As you can tell from the whole mall history, there’s been this desire to cast the mall as a community space and hence as a public space–to pretend, at least for a minute, that it’s welcoming to everybody and that anyone can go there at any time. But as the malls become bigger and actually start to serve as those de facto public spaces, you run up against the fact that store owners–mall owners–don’t really want all the things that can happen in a public space to happen in their mall. And the principal one of those is protests. So, there starts to be this whole series of court cases basically arguing over whether you can protest in a mall. And the protests that end up serving as the basis for these cases, in both the state and federal Supreme Court, are over a whole range of issues. Some of them are anti-war protests. Some of them are anti-fur protests. Some of them are union protests. But in each case, the mall owner asserts that they have the right to eject the protesters from their property because they are not private property. They don’t have to follow the free speech rules. And then you get attorneys arguing that if malls are going to be replaced downtowns, shouldn’t they also have to operate like downtowns and let whoever wants to have free speech have free speech in these properties? One of the earliest cases, in 1968, Thurgood Marshall goes before the U.S. Supreme Court and argues for the majority. And there’s this great passage where he basically talks about how the mall has replaced downtown. And I was so fascinated to find that A) it was Thurgood Marshall and B) that he had really articulated the way the malls had taken on this public role as early as 1968, in a Supreme Court opinion. After that decision, the Court gets more and more conservative, and the assertion of free speech rights in malls actually gets eaten away until it becomes a state issue. And now, that’s something that’s actually decided state by state. One of the most recent protests in malls that became a court case was a Black Lives Matter protest at the Mall of America right before Christmas. 

NEWSCASTER #1: During one of the busiest shopping weeks of the year, the Mall of America is caught up in a legal battle with protesters. 

NEWSCASTER #2: Four leaders of Black Lives Matter say they received letters on Friday threatening arrests if Wednesday’s rally takes place as planned inside the mall. 

PROTESTER: They’re trying to force us to say something that, you know, they don’t really have the authority to to do so. This is definitely not only an attack on Black Lives Matter but on everybody’s First Amendment rights and the right to speak out… 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: The protesters, like, marched in chanting. And all of the screens that were installed in the mall around all of these Christmas trees lit up with messages that the protesters had to leave. So, it was kind of like, “You’re ruining our commercial display for Christmas with your protests.” You have to think about why did the Black Lives Matter protesters choose the Mall of America? They chose it because there would be people there. There’s no point in a protest if you’re not going to have people see you and join you and have media coverage. So, in a place like Minneapolis in the winter, the concentration of people were going to be at the mall, and that’s why they wanted to protest there. And I think that’s really the rub of all of these court cases. If you’ve evacuated your city and put all of your commercial development in the suburbs, you have to leave space in the suburbs for things to happen that aren’t only commercially motivated, that aren’t okay with store owners, and that everybody doesn’t agree with. 

ROMAN MARS: We’re past the heyday of the mall now. How many malls have closed? And are malls actually dying off? What are the numbers like? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: At their peak, there were approximately 2,000 enclosed malls in the U.S. I think that number went down to about 1,500 over the past ten years. And people are expecting us to end up, after the pandemic, probably around, like, 800 enclosed malls. In the 1990s, which is basically peak mall, there were 140 new malls being built per year. But in 2007, there were zero new malls that were built. People aren’t wrong that the mall is dying. There is going to be this huge die-off. But I don’t think the mall is going away. I mean, 800 is still a lot of malls. And many of those are really the big marquee malls in their towns. In the New York area, it’s things like King of Prussia outside Philadelphia or the Mall at Short Hills in New Jersey or the Westchester up in Yonkers. So, the richest malls are surviving. It’s really what are typically referred to as class B and C malls that might have had Sears and other department stores that have now gone out of business that are dying. And so those are the ones that people film depressing glamor shots at and also the ones that are potential sites for adaptive reuse. 

ROMAN MARS: What do you cite is the reason for malls closing? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: It’s a whole bunch of things. You know, we’ve had this kind of panicky story for years that online retail was going to destroy bricks and mortar retail. It’s actually only 21% of retail sales even now. And the pandemic has accelerated that because more people were doing more internet shopping and found out that that can be great for a lot of things. But there are still many kinds of shopping that are really better done in person. And even before the pandemic, internet shopping hadn’t killed off bricks and mortar retail at the rate that initial dire predictions said it would. So, that’s part of it. There are also just larger changes in the way we shop. Department stores are no longer the arbiters of taste that they used to be. And more people want to shop in smaller stores, even if those aren’t necessarily independently owned. And then there’s also just a greater income disparity. During the rise of the malls, the American middle class was doing well and growing. And now there is this great disparity between the upper middle class that’s still doing great and the lower middle and working class who have less and less money. And people in those families are much more likely to shop in big box stores and discount stores because they don’t really have the income for kind of the middle range stores that used to be the bread and butter of the mall. 

ROMAN MARS: It’s funny because, today, there are lots of malls that are now home to employment offices and DMVs. And in a way, that’s super cool because that’s the mixed-use idea that was closer to Gruen’s original design of the mall. But you write that it’s usually a bad sign for the mall when this happens because they’ve probably given the DMV cheap rent because they’re desperate to draw people in. So, I mean, it’s just kind of ironic. 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: Yeah, I mean, that should be a good thing. I think having a DMV and other public services inside a mall would be great. Think how convenient that would be. If you have limited time on a weekend, you can get all of these things taken care of. And in fact, in the conclusion of my book, I talk about the malls in some other countries, including the Philippines, where many of the malls have a lot of public services just folded into them. My mother volunteers for the Friends of the Durham Public Library, and they run a used bookstore. And it was one of the businesses in an empty storefront in Northgate Mall in Durham before it closed. So, again, city services come in where commercial businesses don’t want to pay rent anymore. It’s hard for malls to recover from one of their anchor department stores closing unless something else big comes in. 

ROMAN MARS: Is there a way for struggling malls to recover? Is there a formula that actually works? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: Some malls have been saved or at least stabilized by things like trampoline parks coming in. Again, that’s the entertainment venue. One of the ways that I think malls can survive in the future is through smarter and perhaps more distinct curation of the mall stores. I mean, I know that “curation” is kind of an overused term. But I think for a long time malls were getting by on essentially all having the same mix of stores and restaurants–just at different price points. So you’d kind of decide how much money you wanted to spend that day and go to that mall. But going forward, it’s easy enough to get inexpensive chain store clothing online. So, malls could really distinguish themselves by stocking themselves with things that are all for families. Or I have a couple of examples in the book where malls have turned themselves essentially into ethnic food and business centers, depending on the changing nature of their suburb. So, you have a Latino mall outside Atlanta or a lot of Asian malls in Northern California that have businesses that are familiar to people from other places but also that they can’t get somewhere else and which sell things that they can’t get online. 

ROMAN MARS: When malls do fail and they do close, there’s thousands and thousands of square feet going unused. But there aren’t a lot of mall shaped things that you can put in there after one is gone. What happens with these dead malls? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: Well, a lot of times they just sit there for quite some time because not only do they have these many thousands of square feet that not a lot of entities can deal with, but often they’re owned by multiple entities. And so it’s not as easy as just one person selling the mall to one other person. 

ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLES] There have been some cases of adaptive reuse where a new business or something has taken over a dead mall. What is the most interesting example of that that you’ve seen? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: Highland Mall outside Austin, Texas, has been turned over the past decade-plus into the leadership campus for Austin Community College. And they turned one of the former department stores into this huge room full of computers–like a workshop space. And they have turned one of the other department stores into the headquarters for Austin Public TV–with a lot of internal studio and recording space and an auditorium. And the parking lot around the mall–some of it they’ve actually made green open spaces, sort of like a regular college campus. And around the perimeter, they’re building housing, some of which can be student housing, but other of which can just be affordable rental apartments. 

ROMAN MARS: It’s great if we could use these dead malls in some way. People always say that the greenest building is a building that’s already built. How do you feel about it when it comes to reusing malls? 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: I love to see these examples of adaptive reuse. When people talk about adaptive reuse, they’re often thinking about older buildings in cities. But at this point, malls are older buildings. I mean, many of the malls that we’re talking about that are failing are 50 years old. And I was actually talking to the chancellor of Austin Community College, and he was saying that lots of people have very poignant family memories of things that happened in the food court at that mall. These buildings aren’t just buildings in their communities. A) They’re very conveniently located. B) Everyone knows where Highland Mall is because it’s been a reference point. And we shouldn’t just kind of throw away those memories and throw away that kind of name recognition–along with getting rid of the tremendous environmental sink of the building materials. So, I really see the malls as an opportunity. And I would love for people to get more creative about what to do with them. There’s a lot of dead mall photography, which I think can be very beautiful. But it also kind of fixes them in people’s mind as these dead entities and, I think, kind of stops the mental process that it takes to then think of, “Okay, what are we going to do with it next?” And I guess coming from a design background, I just see them as an opportunity and a problem and something that could be really fun to think about and something that shouldn’t be depressing. But it’s like, “Oh, actually, there’s all this new free land in cities. What can we do with it?”

ROMAN MARS: Well, this has been so great. I’ve really enjoyed the book, too. It was just so much fun to both learn a lot of stuff and also, like, have all this information slot into my own sort of lived experience of a mall. I appreciate it. 

ALEXANDRA LANGE: Thanks for having me. 

ROMAN MARS: Alexandra Lange’s book is called Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. And if you buy the book, which I highly recommend, you flip it over, and you look at the back cover, you will find that someone has written, “It’s an architectural page turner. This insightful, witty, and smart book captures everything compelling and confounding about the American Mall. –Roman Mars, coauthor of The 99% Invisible City.” I wrote that for the back of this book. That’s how much I believe in this book. You should get it.

That episode was produced by Chris Berube, and fact-checked by Liz Boyd. Music for both stories by Swan Real.

This whole episode was produced and remixed by Martín Gonzalez, who actually grew up in Providence. He was scooping ice cream at the Ben & Jerry’s in the mall’s food court in 2003–all while this was happening–yet somehow was completely unaware of it until he heard the original 99PI Story. 

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Jayson De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. 

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. 

We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. 

You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.