My pals Ayres and Klinger and I walked the crowded corridors for hours on Friday evenings, hoping to meet girls.
We did this at the South Hills Village Mall in the late 1970s when we were teenagers and the American Mall was in its prime.
Built in the mid-1960s and the very first indoor mall in Pittsburgh, The Village was a typical large two-story building with “Anker†department stores at each end, a Sears Roebuck in the middle, and a variety of retail stores in between.
No mall visit was complete without a stop at the pinball and arcade room or Spencer Gifts, a novelty and gag gift shop that sold everything from lava lamps to Farrah Fawcett’s famous posters.
The mall became the marketplace for suburban children. Our younger siblings spent so much time there that their generation deserved the name “Mall Ratsâ€.
We were unsuspecting teenagers. We had no idea why or how the suburban mall evolved, but its birth – and its recent rapid decline – is an interesting, if complicated, American story.
According to a 2014 article in Smithsonian Magazine, the shopping mall explosion across America was fueled by urban exodus, suburban growth, and economic prosperity after World War II.
But that’s not the full explanation, the magazine said. The unintended good intentions of state economic policies and federal tax laws tell the rest of the story.
Smithsonian said that Congress aimed to stimulate manufacturing investment in 1954. To this end, it accelerated the annual depreciation rates for new buildings.
Depreciation is a tax concept that assumes that a machine or building has a finite lifespan – that it depreciates in value after it is built until it eventually needs to be replaced.
The Smithsonian article went to New York Magazine’s great writer Malcolm Gladwell to explain how mall developers were allowed to “deduct much larger sums of money that would technically be counted as depreciation losses – totally tax-free money.”
“Suddenly it was possible to make a lot more money investing in shopping malls than buying stocks,” writes Gladwell, “so the money went to real estate investment companies.”
According to World Market, over 1,200 malls skyrocketed in the US after the earliest examples were built in the 1950s.
A huge amount of money was being made by investors in new malls, but there were unintended social costs.
As millions of suburbs moved their shopping to the malls, many large retailers in the downtown cores of large cities and small shops on local highways were destroyed and decommissioned.
Shopping malls got their golds, but they have been in decline for years.
They have bled buyers and revenue from the growth of online shopping and now, having been crushed by a year and a half of COVID lockdowns, they are closing in large numbers.
Some malls, like my old teenage stamp place, seem to hang there. Sears has been gone a long time, but Target and Dick seem to be doing just fine.
According to the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, some mall owners are introducing innovative ideas to stay relevant and viable.
Others, NPR says, are transforming their huge, seldom-busy spaces into homes, medical facilities, office space, and other major reuses.
I wish you all better luck than Ayres, Klingler and I over 40 years ago. We spent hundreds of hours walking up and down the crowded corridors of our mall, but we’ve never met a girl!
Tom Purcell is a writer and humor columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Email him at Tom@TomPurcell.com.
