Lange wants us to consider how in prematurely writing off the mall as dead, or in thinking of it as “a little bit embarrassing as the object of serious study, ” we neglect the important role these buildings have played in our lives. Meet Me by the Fountain challenges the dominant narrative. And yet, people keep shopping.” (A 2021 study found that as of June of last year, the number of mall visitors across the country was actually 5 percent higher than before the pandemic.) “And yet,” she writes, “the majority of malls survive.
Every decade rewrites the obituary in its own terms.” Lange considers how, since the 1978 movie Dawn of the Dead, we have been using “the apocalyptic scale, the language and imagery of civilizational collapse,” to describe the state of this most American form of architecture. Since the coronavirus pandemic hit, the forecasts have grown only more dire: In June 2020, a former department-store executive predicted that a third of malls would close by the next year.Īs the design critic Alexandra Lange writes in her consummate study Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, “Malls have been dying for the past forty years. The cause of death was variously chalked up to the growth of e-commerce, the demise of the department store, and the fact that our country has been overmalled since the 1990s, when developers saturated the suburbs, building new shopping meccas just miles from old ones. Then came a string of stories in 20, when Time, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN declared the end of the mall anew, all citing a Credit Suisse report anticipating that about one in four would close by 2022. In 2015, The New York Times published its own photography of eerily empty buildings in Ohio and Maryland. The Guardian announced its death in 2014, in an article featuring Seph Lawless’s photography of abandoned malls, their once-lively atriums gone to seed. Response last updated by seekernym on Nov 20 2017.The American mall has supposedly been dying for years. The album is sometimes referred to as Skull and Roses Later, it was used as the cover for the album Grateful Dead (1971). Kelley and Mouse's design originally appeared on a poster for the September 16 Dead shows at the Avalon Ballroom. This was discontinued in the late 1960s when Valentine was removed from the Roman Catholic canon, along with other legendary saints whose lives and deeds could not be confirmed. Accordingly, in Rome, at the church dedicated to him, the observance of his feast day included the display of his skull surrounded by roses. The rose is an attribute of Saint Valentine, who according to one legend, was martyred by decapitation. Earlier antecedents include the custom of exhibiting the relic skulls of Christian martyrs decorated with roses on their feast days. Sullivan's drawing was an illustration for a 1913 edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The skull and roses design was composed by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse, who added lettering and color, respectively, to a black and white drawing by Edmund Joseph Sullivan. The original black & white drawing was by Edmund Joseph Sullivan for the 1913 "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam".