Shopping Mall (Object Lessons)

This is a quick read, got through most of it on a plane, but worthwhile; I found it to be both touching and troubling. It's really something of a memoir centered around a history and examination of the shopping mall in America. Newton captures how a place can anchor a persons life and memories and how that place fits into time and a greater history of the United States in the 20th and present centuries. The book's greatest strength is Newton's clear love for the mall and his struggle with that love. He writes about shopping malls with the feeling of someone reflecting on and questioning the more problematic traits of a beloved relative. The book touches on race, class, deindustrialization, consumerism, the digital revolution and more, but always grounded with emotion and personal narrative. A distinctly American and timely book, it is nostalgic while questioning nostalgia. I highly recommend and am considering looking more into this series.

I really enjoyed this book. Matthew Newton manages to mix together what is essentially his own life story with key elements of the rise and fall of shopping malls, and the impact they had on American life. It was surreal for me to read, because I grew up not far from the author and knew the mall at the focus of the book (Monroeville Mall) quite well. (It was where I spent a lot of time when I skipped school!) A must read for anyone interested in mall culture, dead malls and urban studies, and a treat for those who grew up in and around Pittsburgh and Monroeville, too.

Excellent, thorough story of the American shopping mall told through a mix of personal anecdotes and well-researched history. Though much has been written recently about their decline in recent decades, their context—architectural, urban, economic, social—as well as the huge presence they had in the formative lives of so many American adults, is often forgotten. At a pivotal time in the mall's history, this book and its evocative imagery gives new occasion to reflect on what the mall says about America, its consumer culture, its cities, and its future.

I can not recommend this book enough. It feels as though Matthew Newton crawled inside my head like in that Being John Malchovich movie as some parts of this hit very close to home. If you are looking for a good read check this book out!

Mr. Newton's account of the rise and fall of shopping malls in the U.S., along with his personal history attached to the malls, was extremely informative and entertaining. I look very forward to his next book!

A interesting read about everyone's local mall. The author writes about what we already subconsciously know, but have yet to think about.

When I was a kid, a shopping mall opened, for the first time, in my home town. It was a small building, with just two anchor stores and a lot of mom and pop businesses relocated from various parts of town. About ten years later, a new, much larger mall opens across town. The big stores moved out. The little shops were wiped out by the chain stores in the new mall. Before long, the original mall was abandoned.Eventually, it was bulldozed and replaced by a conventional strip mall. Now, thanks, in part, to digital retailing, the strip mall has also been closed. It’s giant parking lot used by teenagers for impromptu beer parties and doughnuts in their cars. .This tale of the rise and fall of a shopping mall has been repeated all over the country, and is the topic of the latest in the Object Lesson series: Mathew Newton’s Shopping Mall.Newton begins with a visit to the oldest enclosed mall in the U.S, , Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota. Opened in 1956 and designed by Austrian immigrant, Victor Greun, Southdale was intended to replicate a European city’s town square. But by the time Newton visits, Greun’s old word decorations had been removed to make room for kiosks and more storefronts.Gruen, a socialist, lived to regret his mall concept. He saw malls turned into shrines for capitalist mega-consumption.The second part of the book tells the story of the author’s interaction with his home town mall, Monroeville Mall in a suburb of Pittsburg. We see Newton as a child waiting for his mom to get off work after an exhausting shift as a complaint manager at a department store. The teenaged Newton discovers girls and heavy metal music while roaming the mall during the summer. After dropping out of high school, he meets his future wife at the mall.The Monroeville Mall becomes temporarily famous as the setting for George Romero’s 1978 zombie movie, Dawn of the Dead. The surviving humans barricade themselves in the mall to try to hold off the zombie army.Dawn of the Dead was released just as mall culture was reaching its peak in the U.S. Old people were using the mall as a de facto community and exercise center. Teens used it as a place to hang out without parental meddling. And adults found the mall as a safe place to shop amid the increasing crime and violence of the cities.Newton does a fine job of describing the euphoria people felt entering a mall. To many, it was a place of endless possibilities. His parents wander around a furniture store, daydreaming about the kind of house they may someday own.But it was during this time that critics of shopping mall began to make their voices heard. The mall was a magnet for white flight to the suburbs, leaving inner cities to decay into poverty and crime. These people decried the shallow materialism that malls perpetuated and their sterile uniformity.Newton concludes his book with an account of the shopping mall in decline. After being laid off during the Great Recession, He returns to the Monroeville Mall to find its ice skating rink pulled up, its giant clock with animatronic animals gone, and many storefronts vacant.People began to fear going to the mall after a mass riot broke out between rival gangs. A few months later, a mass shooting there destroyed the illusion of the mall as a safe refugee. As Newton wanders through Monroeville, he notices life-sized cardboard cut outs of shoppers, what designers call people textures, placed in abandoned storefronts to create the illusion that the mall is busier and more successful than it really is.The most memorable part of Newton’s short volume is an interview he does with a woman who expresses a sad nostalgia after her home town mall has closed. All of her greatest childhood memories were centered on the mall: birthday parties, school shopping, dating boys for the first time. Now the home to all of those memories is gone. She comes, too late, to realize that her youth would have been better spent somewhere else than at a shopping mall.