 This is the SF Productions podcast network. I guess it's not a mall world after all. From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mindy. And I'm Mark, you can check out our audio podcast, How I Got My Wife 3 Comics on iTunes, or on our website, sfpodcastnetwork.com. If you're anywhere near our age, you grew up in the era of the shopping mall. A place to hang out, meet your friends, maybe even buy something. Yeah. Unfortunately, they're going the way to the dodo, so what happened? We need to go back to the beginning. Depending upon who you talk to, the first shopping mall is the Lakeview Store in Minnesota in 1915, which was a three-story building with stores on each level. Or the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City in 1922, a group of stores put together that were only accessible via car, and that's still in operation. Or the Highland Park Shopping Village in Dallas in 1931, the first grouping of stores facing away from a street with a shared parking lot, also still in operation. Or the Valley Fair Shopping Center in San Jose, 1956, an anchored mall, which started as an outdoor plaza. Or Southdale Center in Minneapolis, 1956, the oldest fully-enclosed and climate-controlled mall. Or the Great Western Shopping Center in Columbus in 1956, a shopping plaza or strip mall. It opened with a massive Seven Wonders of the World display. My folks toured it at the time. So let's define a shopping mall as an enclosed, climate-controlled building exclusively for shopping with many stores and anchors, which are like the department stores on the ends or whatever. It was an outgrowth of the suburban movement. People wanted a secure, comfortable place they could park once, walk around and shop. The growth of the mall concept was astronomical. In 1960, there were 4,500 malls, which resulted in 14% of all retail sales. By 1975, 16,400 malls, 33% of all retail. 1987, 30,000 malls, over 50% of all retail. And malls also grew in size and complexity. The West Edmonton Mall is the largest in North America at 3.8 million square feet and 800 plus shops, although it only ties for 19th worldwide. Pennsylvania's King of Prussia mall, originally two buildings, was originally merged to become the U.S.'s largest at 2.79 million square feet, 400 plus shops, 27th largest worldwide. I've been to King of Prussia. Just saying. It dethroned Minnesota's Mall of America by 20,000 square feet, about 520 shops. You can argue that the indoor amusement park should be included, which would put that at nearly 4.2 million square feet and the 12th largest worldwide. Now, I went to Chicago's Woodfield Mall as a kid, which was the largest U.S. mall at the time, 1.8 million square feet, 189 shops, and the 10th largest in the U.S. today. It's now at 2.1 million square feet and 300 stores. It had and has a confusing ramp layout that makes it almost impossible to cover the whole mall without retracing some steps. Well, enough stats. Let's talk about the malls of our childhoods. Our local mall, where I grew up, was Brookfield Square. My mom worked at the Sears there, and my sisters and I would walk to the mall, which was about two and a half miles after school and meet her there for a coke on her break. Back then, there was a Walgreens, and it had a restaurant attached. You know, that was part of the Walgreens there, and you would sit, like, along the mall and just watch the people walk by while you're waiting for your mom to get off work or whatever. We'd hang out at the mall until mom got off work and ride home with her. There was also a Woolworths there that had a restaurant that we sometimes went to as well, but it was, you know, it's just weird to think of those stores with restaurants now. And the mall had a Joanne fabrics and a Lee Words crass, which is sort of like a Michaels without the floral, and a grocery store. Cole's grocery store was in the mall. Those are things you don't see in malls in the last 15, 20 years. No. In high school, I worked at the mall at the Breastlers 31 Flavors, which was an ice cream store. All the ice cream you could eat as long as the customers were taking care of. Best job ever. That whole wing of the mall is a Barnes & Noble mall. The anchors were Sears, which just got torn down. JC Penney and Boston store, which is closing or closed right now, but the square has stayed more relevant than a lot of malls by adding lots of things accessible from the outside. There's the Barnes & Noble and a ton of restaurants. And the plan is to replace the Sears store with an entertainment and convention center. Another mall we sometimes went to was Mayfair Mall, which has been through a bunch of changes over time. At one point, it had an ice rink in the center of the mall. According to Wikipedia, it is now the mall with the highest occupancy rate in the U.S., as well as way above average retail sales, but no ice rink anymore. Now, we lived a few miles from Belden Village Mall in Canton, Ohio, which was a very standard design. Three department store anchors, Sears, O'Neill's and Higby's, now Dillard's, in an X pattern. So you kind of had the anchors at each end of the X. And I remember when it first opened in 1970, and I spent, I'm sure, thousands of hours there. Many teenage weekends, I would go there with a friend or just alone, just wandering about. Some highlights. You went to Hickory Farms and stole samples. Well, it wasn't stealing if they were samples. Except, except you'd go and hit every single sample thing. I don't think they really hit 10 for that, but, you perused the gag gifts at Spencer's. There were long periods at Walden Books, of course, a chain that's gone, Camelot Music, another chain that's gone, and a hobby store. I don't even remember the name of it anymore. Playing video games at Aladdin's Castle. Not there anymore. Not there anymore, either. I worked at O'Neill's, which is now Macy's, during the Christmas season out of college and mostly sold luggage and electronics, where I got very familiar with the food court. Belden Village is seeing multiple renovations and facelifts and appears to be doing well today. Now, if I wanted to do something different back then, we could go to Rolling Eggers Mall in Akron, which is now a storage and recycling center. Chapel Hill Mall, also in Akron, now down to a single anchor, Pennies, which is always a bad sign. Well, that's what Brookfield Square Mall is, too. It's only got Pennies now. Yeah. Randall Park Mall in the Cleveland area was 2 million square feet and one of the largest malls of the time. It was demolished in 2014, although it actually closed five years earlier. So we just sat there empty. And then there are the malls local to us in Columbus either today or since we've lived here. Since we've lived here. Yeah. And when I first moved here, I lived in Viewing Distance to Northland, a standard mall which lost all three anchors to a new competitor, Polaris Fashion Place, which we'll talk about in a second, in 2001 and it closed a year later. The old Lazarus anchor was actually kept in place, but it was resurrected, get it, Lazarus, to the offices of the state tax agency. Westland also lost out to a new competitor, Tuttle Crossing Mall, just a few ex at North. By 2003, it had been turned into a bizarre mall where local businesses take store slots. It also was home to gun shows quite a bit. Yeah. It continued downward until the final tenant, this year's anchor, left last year. No idea if it will be torn down or not. Eastland, the third one in that trio is probably not far behind as their final anchor also sears closed last year. We also had the Continent, a trailblazing mixed-use indoor-outdoor shopping center which was built in 1972. It included upper floor apartments with a European design. I proposed a Mindy there. The Continent, not our marriage, was badly managed and is a faint shadow of its former self. There is also Columbus City Center, a downtown mall that lasted only 20 years from 1989 to 2009. When it opened and for quite some time, it was the place to take out-of-town guests and it was always jammed on the weekends. It was greatly helped by a local business. Limited brands filled many of the slots with the limited Victoria's Secret, Bath & Body Works, Henry Bendell. Due to poor management, it went from 144 tenants to 8 before giving up the ghost. Now it's a large park. Columbus Commons. Tunnel Crossing is a late addition of a traditional mall. It opened in 1997 with multiple anchors and they seem to be doing fairly well today. Polaris Fashion Place, we mentioned a moment ago, is, as the name suggests, a clothing-centric mall with 200 stores. It partly converted to an outdoor mall due to the impact of our next entry in 2007. Eastintown Center is the brainchild of Les Wexner, local billionaire and owner of L Brands. It is a mostly outdoor mall, first opened in 1999 and part of a massive shopping complex of over 1,300 acres. Wexner used his pull to get stores that had never been in the Midwest. It's still hard to get your big toe into the place on weekends and was named one of the five most innovative malls in the world in 2011. As you might guess, Eastintown was also responsible for all the lands northeast and west's downfalls. So that brings us to our main question. What happened to the shopping malls? Well, like most construction booms, there's a huge demand followed by a huge supply followed by collapse. The 1970s was the boom of the shopping mall, but by the 90s, several things were in play. Many malls did not keep up with the times and became virtual time machines to 70s design. Strip malls with various small stores had turned into accumulations of big box stores, each doing their own niche, toys, hardware crafts, which pulled sales from the malls. Macy's began their efforts to monopolize the department store segment, turning what were then local chains into their own brand. And this often left multiple Macy's as anchors in the same mall, which rarely worked, so Macy's would evacuate one or more of them. And since local chains were gone, those anchors were left vacant. Developers saw success, especially in warmer climates of outdoor shopping centers, some of which could be driven through. This became an epidemic of construction all over the U.S., including the local Eastintown and many indoor malls were partly converted into outdoor centers. Walmart's aggressive expansion and razor-thin margins killed a lot of retail business in general, which coupled with the housing crash of 2008, left many shopping malls vacant. You can find whole websites dedicated to urban spelunkers doing photo essays on closed and abandoned malls. The final nail in the coffin was Amazon, which turned many stores who generally did nothing to stop it in his showrooms where potential buyers could check out goods then turn around and buy them online. So today, depending on how you define it, there are about 1,500 traditional malls remaining, 2,525% of which are on the cusp of closing. Various projections point to as few as 250 malls remaining by 2025. So if you like malls, you should get out and visit them now. Yes. And if you don't, you can check out our audio podcast, How I Got My Wife Tweet Comics on iTunes or on our website asfpodcastnetwork.com. From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Nivy. And I'm Mark. Thanks for watching. Let's go shopping. Pa, pa, pa, pa, pa.