Vintage Postcards Capture Shopping Malls of the U.S. in the Mid-20th Century
Alabama. Eastwood Mall, Birmingham
The first shopping mall was technically an outdoor shopping plaza that opened in 1922 in Kansas City. However, the first indoor shopping mall that mirrored how we think of malls today was opened in 1956 in Edina, Minnesota. Malls were often anchored by a large department store with a cluster of other stores around it. Continue reading »
Candid Photographs of Superheroes Posing With Their Young Fans at Malls in the 1970s and 1980s
Maybe it’s the bulging tights that elevate these from campy to creepy. Maybe it’s their eyes. Maybe it’s the unshakeable feeling that these children never forgot the day these pictures will taken. The photographs were shared by folks across the Plaid Stallions website sharing their childhood mall appearances from the 1970s and 1980s. Continue reading »
Through Photographer Jesse Rieser’s Lens, The Architectural Fallout Of The E-Commerce Revolution Is Beautiful
It’s easy to forget that the big box store is still young. Even in the relatively short history of U.S. suburbs, it’s a newcomer, spawned in the late 1960s and reaching its apex before the recession in the late 2000s. But within those four decades or so, tens of thousands of warehouse stores and malls changed what the U.S. looks like–a testament to how cheap and easy they are to build (about $45 per square foot, a third of what the average home costs per square foot). Continue reading »
Incredible Photos of America’s Malls In The 1980s
Throughout the 1980s, as America’s downtown districts declined in importance and the “big-box” stores began their slow march across the country, malls became increasing central to American popular culture, dominating the social life of a large swath of the population. In 1989 Michael Galinsky, a twenty-year-old photographer, drove across the country recording this change: the spaces, textures and pace that defined this era. Continue reading »
