The Mall of America

The Mall of America opened with great fanfare in 1992 on the site of the old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota. It is the biggest shopping center in the United States (although others have more stores), attracting more visitors annually than Disneyland and Disney World, more than all the national parks and monuments combined (a French visitor once said he thought it was a national monument, and, in a perverse way, of course, it is).

A good place for shopping, the Mall of America is an even better place for thinking about consumer culture and the history of shopping. At its four corners, for example, it is anchored by department stores, the nineteenth-century invention that made shopping into a spectacle and created what William Leach calls “a land of desire.” In its hallways and central court, the Mall of America echoes the history of the galleria, a collection of shops covered by a single roof (often of glass). The Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele in Milan was the prototype, but American gallerias—such as the immense Cleveland Galleria—proliferated in the late nineteenth century.

The Mall of America reflects the inspiration of early shopping centers—like Country Club Plaza in Kansas City—with its size, central management, and themed architecture. Country Club Plaza added Mediterranean notes to Kansas, but the Mall of America has four different themed shopping “streets,” including the European references of West Market and the American urban expressions of East Broadway. The center also echoes the pattern of Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center, which turned fifty years old in November. Like Southdale, the Mall of America is a suburban spectacle crafted for a culture of cars. It shares Southdale’s introverted architecture, with its fully-enclosed, climate-controlled spaces. With its 12,000 parking spaces located on all levels, and its batteries of escalators, it also capitalizes on Southdale’s solution to the problem of circulation in a multi-tiered mall. Like more recent malls, the Mall of America offers not just shopping but “shoppertainment.” Its centrally located amusement park echoes Coney Island and Disneyland. With its movie theaters and bars and restaurants, it continues long-standing traditions of cinema and commercial sociability.

The mall also pays homage to its site. On the ground floor, you can find the location of home plate in the old Metropolitan Stadium (the first home of the Twins and Vikings), and 520 feet away, a lone bleacher seat commemorates Harmon Killebrew’s longest home run. In between is the amusement park, which is themed to suggest the boreal forests and logging history of Minnesota’s North Woods. Some of the papier-mâché cliffs were even molded from real rocks on the upper St. Croix River.

In all of this, the Mall of America is also an expression of commercial postmodernism, a pastiche of spectacle and hyperreality that keeps visitors in the building long enough to spend the money that makes this world go round.

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