Dead Malls: Nostalgia in the Ruins

“This aching hunger for the past, nostalgia, is the defining emotion of our time.” Grafton Tanner, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, 2021

“No mall is forever; their lifespan, like our own, is finite.” Matthew Newton, Shopping Mall, 2017

“Malls have been dying for the last forty years. Every decade rewrites the obituary in their own terms, but the apocalyptic scale, the language and imagery of civilization collapse, keep reappearing; these narratives suggest an inevitability. And yet, the majority of malls survive.” Alexandra Lange, Meet Me by the Fountain, 2022

Recently, I was at First Ave seeing a concert, and the headliner, during her on-stage banter, asked whether or not the Mall of America was still a thing, if people still went there? It was an interesting question in the context of some of the books I’ve recently been reading about the rise and fall of malls in US society, works focusing a nostalgic lens on our recent history.

Growing up in the suburban Twin Cities, malls were ubiquitous in daily life. Edina, not too far away, was the home of the very first enclosed mall in the US, Southdale, built in 1956, though we shopped more often at the closer Ridgedale, illustrating the “dale” naming conventions used for malls across the metro. Whether Christmas shopping, looking for new shoes, or just needing a place to hang out for a while, driving out to a mall with my family, parking, wandering around, being bored in clothing stores, awaiting a visit to the nature specialty stores, I have few specific memories but an amorphous, shifting canvas of everyday childhood experiences.

When the Mall of America opened as one of the largest in the country at the time, I recall the local excitement, and remember more specific things, eating at the Rainforest Cafe or visiting Camp Snoopy on school trips. As I grew older, a growing snobbery made me kind of look down on what we called the “Mega Mall,” “Hugedale,” and malls more generally, wondering why anyone would want to go there instead of, say, the MIA or the shops on Grand Avenue. I rarely chose to go to malls often after high school, and I felt oddly childish when I did happen to go to one. This nostalgia of seeing the dated architecture and lost memories endemic in any mall you go to, no matter if you’d ever been there before, increased inexorably throughout the 21st century as malls began, it seems, to die. In regards to the question I opened this essay with, I think the MoA is still vibrant, but it represents some of the shifts in culture that led to the dark reputation of malls in later years.

As dead and dying malls became favorite locales for eerie photography and horror video games, their status as “liminal spaces,” a formerly arcane piece of academic terminology in anthropology, became a meme. Contrasting the nostalgia of your carefree younger years with the bleakness of the present, both on a personal and societal level, proved a heady mix, and it was these themes that I began to explore as I checked out works on the history of the mall and photo books showcasing the beautiful and melancholy, exciting and grotesque images of decaying urban infrastructure left to go to nature.

In this reading, I realized that nostalgia is a common element in much of the literature I’ve been reading lately regardless of subject, from contemporary political analysis to hauntings to post-apocalyptic fiction, each wrestling with the ambivalent, liminal boundaries between time, between our present moment, or memories of the past and our hopes and fears for the future. These themes appear repeatedly in the books I’m discussing here. Musings of past shoppers haunting the empty shops, of the closing of malls representing a harbinger of the end of our society, and the economic and political realities that shape these shifts in our lived environment.

It is difficult for people, I think, to accept that things change. It’s easy to become complacent and think things have been the same, they won’t change, this is just how it’s always been, even as things have changed so drastically this century. Or maybe, big, important things change but my boring suburb never changes. So, seeing that the mall you took for granted throughout your life so far is gone now, left to decay as though the world has ended, it’s disconcerting. The first malls developed within living memory, after all, so how can they be “dead” already? Time is a strange thing for humans to live in and the places we have existed shape so much of our memories, so when these change our very experience of the world can feel unmoored, with nostalgia serving as an island of stability.

Musician and academic Grafton Tanner’s fascinating and insightful 2021 work The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia is a strong place to begin examining these themes. Delving into the history and perception of nostalgia, what Tanner calls “the defining emotion of our time,” he provides a lot of valuable tools to understand nostalgia’s role in society through time, especially in the US. Writing from a leftist perspective, I found Tanner’s analysis to be a refreshingly balanced account of this oft-misunderstood emotion, neither condemning it as a completely reactionary impulse nor getting fully sucked into its appeals. At a time when the future seems so uncertain as we face daunting challenges from global warming and authoritarian governments, nostalgia can serve as both needed comfort and a powerful emotion for the powerful to exploit.

From its seventeenth-century origin as a disorder of European soldiers to its role in the grief of the Anthropocene, Tanner explores the role of nostalgia in various facets of society and culture, with each chapter serving as essays linking such disparate topics as gentrification, Confederate monuments, Chillwave and analog media, and the “cabin myth,” linking them all in his analysis of this bittersweet emotion. All in all, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock is an astute expression of our current moment and the ways that nostalgia both soothes and distorts, and makes the reader think about who may benefit most by appealing to nostalgic feelings as the future continues to look grim.

Tanner’s discussion of dead malls, in particular, was interesting in the context of the topic of this essay. Describing them as a form of “non-place,” an artificial private space designed to be as anodyne as possible, when a mall or similar corporate common fails, they become dead zones, places bereft of use but haunted by a more carefree past, difficult to return to use by the community.

The rise and fall of malls as an element of the suburbanization of the US, with its racial and class undertones, are described in more detail the next couple of works are useful companion pieces to Tanner’s arguments.

Matthew Newton’s short 2017 book Shopping Mall, published as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, essays discussing the “hidden lives of ordinary things,” for instance, explores the history of the concept through Newton’s own personal experiences with malls and other public spaces. Beginning with a pilgrimage to Southdale Mall in search of remnants of its designer, Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen’s lost humanistic vision, he folds his own memories, especially those of his own local mall, Monroeville Mall in western Pennsylvania, into his reflection on the shopping mall as a US icon. Monroeville, built in 1969 and the filming location for George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, seems like an especially apt example to focus on, representing many of the shifts that malls have been an expression of socially.

Like nostalgia itself, Newton describes malls as offering contradictory visions in US culture, emblematic of both a flattering “portrait of success and happiness” and a darker one of “greed, lifestyles of excess, and a national obsession with material goods.” He also, using the term “render ghost,” expresses the mall’s eerie liminal relationship to the present, offering both a memorable past and a prosperous tomorrow, made even eerier if the mall itself becomes obsolete and abandoned. Representing so much of late twentieth-century life, both our memories and what we believed about the future, the mall itself, then, feels like a lost time, an embodiment of the ephemeral American dream.

Shopping malls in general reflected much of the economic and cultural attitudes of the US during the latter half of the last century, and architecture historian Alexandra Lange offers a detailed and informative account of this history in her 2022 book Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. Throughout her work, spanning the originator of the mall concept Victor Gruen’s work on Southdale and other mid-century malls to the development of projects like 1991’s Mall of America and the ill-fated American Dream mall in New Jersey which opened in the fall of 2019, she discusses how malls have shifted and evolved many times through the decades.

It was revealing to learn how the leftist Gruen’s hope to craft a European-style town square community space in the growing but insulated US suburbs were quickly subverted by the capitalist forces endemic in the post-WWII US. Gruen became disillusioned by the limitations that stemmed inevitably from the private commercial functions the malls were founded to serve and regretted his own role in facilitating them. The Gruen transfer or effect became the term describing the way malls lost visitors in an illusory world of retail. Lange’s exhaustive research into the trends and ideas of shopping mall design and their place in society, from depictions in popular culture to the role they played in the development of the suburbs themselves, especially in terms of race, was fascinating, even a bit overwhelming.

All in all, I feel that she answers a lot of the questions that swirl around the current life of malls, including dealing with the Pandemic itself, as malls shift from shopping to experiences, hoping to draw in people interested in a unique place in the sameness of US cities and suburbs. Malls that offer these high-end amenities, like Southdale and the Mall of America here in the Twin Cities survive, while those unable, often due to serving less well-off communities, are the ones to fail, as was the case with Brookdale Mall in a Minneapolis suburb.

The background provided by Newton and Lange’s differing but complementary discussions on shopping malls as places in the cultural history of the twentieth and twenty-first-century US, and the added insights of Tanner’s analysis of nostalgia were valuable contexts for my reading. In particular, their work helped me identify what makes malls so poignant as places of nostalgia, and how powerfully nostalgia can shape a person’s artistic sensibilities. After reading The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, I could see the two contrasting sides of nostalgia in many of the works I’ve read recently, from that of Tao Lin and his wholehearted embrace of what Tanner calls the “cabin myth” in rejecting “modern civilization” for some pure time in the past, to Garrison Keillor, using his “little town that time forgot” to struggle with how time does not forget even rural central Minnesota. These issues were very apparent in the various works of contemporary ruin photography I began checking out.

“I feel my generation is the product of an age where many of the “too big to fail” insitutions did just that, where architecture became consciously disposable. In less than ten years, a Borders Bookstore might become a Target, a chain restuarant could go through three different life cycles, and a church might be converted into apartments. We are in essence planning for failure (or transition, if you prefer) whereas only a century ago the mindset was one of continued progess and expansion.” Matthew Christopher, Abandoned America: The Age of Consequences, 2014

“I remember going to the mall. I hung out there. These big, grand places that served as pinnacles of community were not only institutions or places of commerce. They were communal spaces where a lot of people went and shared good memories. These are very nostalgic places.” Seph Lawles, sAbandoned Malls of America, 2014

I think there is a common fascination with abandoned places, places where people once lived or worked or played that are now left to return to nature. Mysteries abound in their shaded, musty spaces. What happened? Where’d everyone go? Why’d they leave all this stuff? I have strong childhood memories of exploring deserted houses in the woods of Northern Minnesota, with some rooms seemingly untouched and others filled with garbage, with gaping holes in the floor leading into the darkness of the basement. Like stepping into history, this feeling of experiencing the physical presence of the past stayed with me as I became interested in the growth of urban exploration as I grew older.

Photographers in this subculture, capturing images of abandoned places in urban, suburban, and rural environments, evoked conflicting feelings from the artists and their viewers. Sometimes called “ruin porn,”, especially in situations that might be exploitative of the lived experiences of those affected by societal injustice which created them, as in the ruins of Detroit and Gary, they often appealed to my historical interests and a certain nostalgia, both for my childhood adventures and for the disappeared world that built these places was key, I think.

This makes the coffee table books collecting the work so fascinating to me, and so instructive of the elements of nostalgia discussed so far, especially when the focus shifts from capturing and preserving images of the remains of our human pasts after humanity has moved on, and capturing images of our own recent pasts, as we no longer see a future moving forward, with abandoned malls and shopping centers being central.

Ruin: Photographs of a Vanishing America (2009) by architectural photographer Brian Vanden Brink, for instance, highlights the transient nature of buildings, collecting images from across the US since the 1980s, stark and lonely monuments of a culture always on the move. As historic preservation expert Howard Mansfield notes in his forward, “The business of America is leaving” and that the “history of ruins is a history of roads. Our houses are often on the move. Ruins are just one stop- one frame- in this time-lapse of coming and going. We are the ghosts of this landscape.”

Similarly, Abandoned Iowa: Schools and Churches by photographer Nicole Renaud published in 2021, with her haunting images of 1900s country school buildings collapsing in on themselves as districts invested in modern consolidated schools during the latter years of the twentieth century, also illustrates the physical remnants of modernization.

French photographer Sylvain Margaine’s Forbidden Places collections published in 2014 and 2015 also show the same results of societal changes across Europe as well, leaving entire elaborate and beautiful structures, like the Bulgarian Communist Party Headquarters, the old Stella Brewery in Leuven, Netherlands, and even a kind of proto mall, the Diurni Venezia in Milan. Along with the quirky poetry written from the perspectives of the abandoned buildings by Margaine’s brother David, the work focuses on the “absurdity of a society that prefers to build new rather than trying to reclaim the rare gems of the past.”

Likewise, Australian photographer Shane Thom’s Haikyo: The Modern Ruins of Japan (2017) captures eerie, lushly overgrown urban and rural ruins in Japan, though lacking some of the historical contexts of the previous works and merely letting the imagery speak for itself, which leaves it without as much impact, I feel. These collections aim to capture these places before they are lost to time, melancholy reminders of cultural evolutions, as though sharing secrets hidden after a death.

This melancholic essence is carried in Matthew Christopher’s work in his Abandoned America series, Dismantling the Dream (2014) and The Age of Consequences (2016) which compile images shared previously on his website, but we can also see a bit of the nostalgic shift from lamenting the loss of our pasts to the loss of our future. The forward by peak oil doomer James Howard Kunstler in Dismantling the Dream exemplifies this, describing the work as “pungent with sadness and nostalgia that amounts to a beautifully composed farewell letter to modernity.” These collections focus mostly on the Northeastern US and especially Christopher’s home state of Pennsylvania with its rustbelt status, feel altogether gloomy, with the photographer himself referring to his work as not only a “showcase of abandoned buildings in America but also … to what I believed to be the abandonment of America itself- it’s ideas, its way of life, and its future.”

Christopher provides an informative background for each of the locales he photographs, from prisons to factories to hotels, grounding each loss in its own context. His work is, I feel, respectful of these places and the people who once lived, worked, or played there, from the tragic to the wistful, interested in preservation and capturing these images before they disappear, critical of a society that wasted so much.

Another online photographer, Seph Lawless’ work in Abandoned (2017) and Abandoned Malls of America (2020) takes on an even darker, more pessimistic cast, especially in his first collection Autopsy of America (2014). Provoking despair with its depiction of empty malls, deserted theme parks, and dead factories from across the US, but particularly Lawless’ home state of Ohio, places betrayed by the last forty years of capitalist neglect under neoliberal policies and deregulation. As journalist Michael Goldfarb writes in his introduction, Lawless’ “photos are documents of the recent past. They are history without words. They are explanations of how America got to Trump.” As trite early Trump era analyses blaming the election on the “economic anxieties’’ of the “white working class,” this is pretty typical. Still, it provides a good summary of what Lawless is attempting to articulate and the unsettling emotions his work provokes.

With the photographs punctuated by excerpts of his writing and statements to various news outlets, his edgy proclamations, feel simplistic at best, invoking nostalgia for an “American Dream” which was never granted to all. Unfortunately, his grim photos provide next to no context or background to back up his hyperbolic, overly dramatic claims. Looking at the information provided by Newton’s and Lange’s works above, the nostalgia for a lost US golden age, Lawless’ childhood as described in his memories of visiting the malls and amusement parks he would later document in their current, dead forms, are almost physical.

The nostalgia Christopher and especially Lawless exhibit in their photography are strong reflections of the sense of instability of the 2010s, seeing the haunted, apocalyptic-looking remains of places where our parents or even ourselves may have spent mundane but significant times in our lives adds to the sense that things are collapsing, even if humans have always built homes, businesses, and other edifices only to leave them to once they’ve outlived their usefulness.

Is This Place Great or What, the exhibit catalog of photographer Brian Ulrich’s Copia project published in 2011 by The Cleveland Museum of Art illustrates the reasons behind this shift, I think, and was my favorite of the lot. Attempting to “describe an economic and cultural trajectory set in motion in the twentieth century and how it evolved at the dawn of the twenty-first,” Ulrich’s intriguingly mundane photos of retail spaces from big box stores, thrift stores, and dead stores taken all over the US between 2001 and 2011 illustrate the last years of a world that we all took for granted. The very mundanity of these images radiate nostalgia for the recent past, from Target checkout lines to Savers full of bargains to the faceless facades of recently shuttered Circuit City locales.

The collection’s concluding essay by sociologist Juliet B. Schor specifically describes Ulrich’s work in the context of the 2008 recession, the aftermath of which we are still living today. Juxtaposed with faded documents describing the heyday of the abandoned Dixie Square Mall in suburban Chicago, which closed all the way back in 1978, Schor’s analysis of American consumer culture envisions what different uses this retail landscape may see. Lacking Schor’s refurbishment as libraries, educational institutions, parks, or other public uses, the natural world will make its own changes, which makes Scottish journalist Cal Flyn’s thought-provoking, intriguing 2021 book Islands of Abandonment an appropriate work to wrap up this discussion.

Throughout the work, Flyn travels to various sites left abandoned by humans across the world, reflecting on how their rewilding shows the resilience of the environment in recovering from human disruption. Whether left alone by war, disaster, disease, or economic decay, from West Lothian, Scotland, the “green line” of Cyprus, to the city of Detroit, talking to people connected to them, the places Flyn visits are each deeply instructive. Her descriptions of how these spaces quickly revert to a natural habitat are both disturbing and inspiring, and, as in many of these works, an apocalyptic theme runs through much of it, though Flyn’s focus provides a strange type of comfort missing in the other works, I feel.

As global warming bears down on us, and much more than a few malls will be abandoned in the face of climatic change, Flyn’s musings on the resilience of our planet, if not our society’s, is a fitting place to end this article.