The Malling of America

About the Book

A classic reborn! The mission: to boldly go where no writer had gone before—into the heart of mallness. These travels through the United States of Shopping became an international classic.

“THE MALLING OF AMERICA works primarily because it treats a sociologist’s topic with a writer’s sensibilities. A powerful emotional effect--the kind normally associated with novels.” Eric Burns, Fox News.

"I enjoyed it thoroughly as a job of writing, and found it very illuminating on a subject that has tended to fill me with despair."--James Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere.

“A striving, witty and observant guide" (LA Times)

“Rich in detail, social analysis and humor,” (Twin Cities Reader

"By far the best and most readable recent accounting.”(NY Times)

This edition includes everything in the impossible-to-find original hardcover plus an extensive new preface updating the mall world into the 21st century, and a bonus memoir concerning the writing and strange history of the first edition.

The Malling of America takes the reader on a journey across America, seeing small towns, cities and suburbs in every part of the country from the new perspective of their malls. There are stops in Boston and Baltimore, Chicago and San Francisco, Manhattan and Atlanta, Houston and Washington-but also Long Island and Orange County, Schaumburg and Silicon Valley, Edina and Evanston, White Flint and Paradise Valley, Hicksville and Daly City.

There are even side trips to Paris, Venice and Milan for meditations on shopping mall ancestors. But for the first time the focus is on these newly important places: Southdale, Woodfield, South Coast Plaza, Metrocenter, Roosevelt Field, the PruneYard, Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Tysons Corner, and many of the other capitals of this new reality.

Readers share in a variety of experiences, from a tense interview with the frightened manager of the Houston Galleria to the all-night process of putting the "home" in a hometown mall by decorating the Greengate Mall for Christmas. We see major mall developers in action at their Las Vegas convention, visit with mall employees and hear their pointed and funny observations, and get to know some of the most prominent mall citizens-teenagers and the elderly. We learn the realities of crime in the mall, including the bizarre story of Dr. Dirty.

We learn how these malls are embedded in local history and global trends, and are both troubling actors in a culture of hollow hype, and humanized places where people gather because the mall is the most pleasant-or the only-alternative.

We learn that the mall is more than a simple collection of stores-it is a carefully designed psychological selling machine. This book describes the social and cultural phenomena that came together to create the mall-from postwar prosperity and the baby boom to television and the fear of nuclear war. "The mall is television´s delivery system. What television proposes, the mall disposes."

The narrative tells how the shopping mall became the capital of the new suburbia-the community center and new downtown with a suburban twist. But when the mall appears at the gates of existing towns-like the author´s own hometown-it all but destroys them. "Towns disappear! Move over, Godzilla and H.G. Wells! Who needs atomic breath and a Martian heat ray?" Small wonder, then, that when even big city downtowns felt the pressure of suburban malls, they turned to a urbanized version of the same phenomenon that was bedeviling them-and cities malled themselves.

Anyone who has wondered how the mall works will find explanations that both mall managers and mall critics agree is accurate. And anyone who has had some strange sensations in shopping malls-or who just can´t stand them-will learn the sources of their "mallaise" from the not entirely

About the Author

William Severini Kowinski is a writer, editor, speaker and consultant living in far northern California. His articles and essays on the arts, ecology, media, politics and other subjects have appeared in periodicals and on-line journals around the world. Photo: Elizabeth Offner 1982.