What's in Store for the Suburban Mall?

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Mega-shopping centers once flowed like Starbucks in America. Today, many are being mourned on sites like Deadmalls.com. Lee Eisenberg looks at how we lost our mall hegemony to the rest of the world.

In George Romero’s late-Seventies blood curdling classic, Dawn of the Dead, the four lead characters— a TV-station helicopter pilot, the requisite girlfriend, and two SWAT team deserters— decide they’d rather be anywhere but in Philadelphia. And for good reason. An attack of flesh-eating ex-dead people has invaded what is decidedly no longer the City of Brotherly Love, consuming (entrails and all) as much of the local populace as can be crammed into their skeletal stomachs. (All coming back to you now?) Having no time to dawdle, the quartet climbs aboard the WGON news chopper, heads west across the state where they eventually seek sanctuary in an enclosed suburban shopping mall.

Suburban shopping mall? A zombie-free zone? Romero’s delicious irony was not lost on one B-movie cineaste who described the mall the frightened heroes encountered: “mindless zombies mindlessly shuffling past mindless store window displays while mindless Muzak plays on loudspeakers, leaving us in the audience to ask, ‘How is this any different from what these people did when they were alive?’”

You can count on two hands the number of new enclosed malls constructed over the past three years. At the moment there are exactly zero on the domestic drawing board.

Romero elected to film the harrowing mall scenes in what was in fact a real live mall, prototypical of 1960s mall-ness, when the concept was still fresh and exciting. Should you for some bizarre reason be curious to visit this mall where Romero’s zombies shopped till they chomped, just fill up the tank, load up the kids, and head out to Monroeville, PA, a suburb fifteen miles west of Pittsburgh. Here you’ll discover that the Monroeville Mall is alive and assuredly zombie-free, aside from the scraggly teens hanging haunting the food court or the seniors doing their early a.m. walking thing. But, retail being retail, things have changed at the Monroeville Mall. When it opened four decades ago, the mall was anchored on each flank by two now-defunct department stores, Horne’s (d.1994) and Gimbels (d.1986). In their places there’s now a Macy’s and a Boscov’s, a regional chain. The mall’s third original anchor, JC Penney, continues to sit stolidly at the center of the complex, though anyone newly returned from the dead will find herself befogged by the gazillion Penney private labels that have displaced her once favorite clothing brands. As for the remainder of the Monroeville Mall, it’s pretty much what you’d find at nearly every other of the 1,300 enclosed suburban malls that as yet litter the suburban landscape: a what-else-is-new directory of specialty retailers ranging from Abercrombie to Zales, with Brookstone, Nine West, PacSun, and Victoria’s Secret, among dozens of others, cheek-by-jowl on levels one and two.

That the Monroeville Mall endured a long succession of up and down business cycles, not to mention the fraying of suburbia itself, is no small accomplishment. The past decade has nightmarish for mall developers, who today would cheer the arrival of a few busloads of hungry zombies so long as the creatures had brought along unexpired credit cards. What went wrong here? Well, many developers simply shot themselves in the foot or, in this case, their own square-feet. They knocked out mall after mall with a cookie cutter, placing them in too-close proximity and thus setting off a wave of cannibalization. Then, with the dawning of the Age of Cheap, malls buckled under the assault of big box discounters and warehouse clubs with everyday low prices and a dizzying breadth of merchandise. Then, retailers pounced on the outlet mall model, whereby shoppers drive an hour or two to harvest what they think are deeply discounted designer overstocks but what they get are items produced specifically to be sold in outlet malls— with a healthy profit margin built in. Finally, a sexy new retailing concept emerged to pave over what patches of scruffy real estate remained in our once verdant suburbs: so-called “town” or “lifestyle” centers with their cobblestone streets and ersatz gas lamps and so many brightly colored market umbrellas you’d think you’d gone to zombie heaven and were shopping in Marseilles, not Monroeville.

The net net: today you can count on two hands the number of new enclosed malls constructed over the past three years. At the moment there are exactly zero on the domestic drawing board. Of the enclosed suburban malls that remain, at least one of four is said to be teetering on the brink.