Meet Me by the Fountain

An Inside History of the Mall

Alexandra Lange

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781635576030
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards

"A smart and accessible cultural history."— Los Angeles Times

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alexandra Lange, a portrait— by turns celebratory, skeptical, and surprisingly moving— of one of America's most iconic institutions.

Few places have been as nostalgized, or as maligned, as malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce, the agora of the suburbs. In their prime, they proved a powerful draw for creative thinkers such as Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, and George Romero, who understood the mall's appeal as both critics and consumers. Yet today, amid the aftershocks of financial crises and a global pandemic, as well as the rise of online retail, the dystopian husk of an abandoned shopping center has become one of our era's defining images. Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, really? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated?
In her acclaimed The Design of Childhood, Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. She now turns her sharp eye to another subject we only think we know. She chronicles postwar architects' and merchants' invention of the mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. In Lange's perceptive account, the mall becomes newly strange and rich with contradiction: Malls are environments of both freedom and exclusion--of consumerism, but also of community. Meet Me by the Fountain is a highly entertaining and evocative promenade through the mall's rise, fall, and ongoing reinvention, for readers of any generation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• By the Same Author
• Title Page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction: Why We Go to the Mall
• Chapter 1: Every Day Will Be a Perfect Shopping Day
• Chapter 2: The Garden
• Chapter 3: The Mall and the Public
• Chapter 4: Make Shopping Beside the Point
• Chapter 5: Whose Mall Is It Anyway?
• Chapter 6: Dawn of the Dead Mall
• Chapter 7: The Postapocalyptic Mall
• Conclusion: The Mall Abroad
• Image Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• A Note on the Author
• Also Available from Alexandra Lange
• Copyright