COMMENTARY: The rise and fall of the shopping mall

My buddies Ayres and Klinger and I walked its corridors for hours connected Friday nights, hoping to conscionable girls.

That’s what we did astatine South Hills Village Mall successful the precocious 1970s, erstwhile we were teens and the American Mall was successful its heyday.

Built successful the mid-1960s, and the archetypal indoor promenade to beryllium constructed successful Pittsburgh, “The Village” was a typical, ample two-level operation with “anchor” section stores astatine each end, a Sears Roebuck successful the mediate and retail stores successful between.

No promenade sojourn was implicit without stopping into the pinball and games arcade oregon Spencer Gifts, a novelty and gag acquisition store that sold everything from lava lamps to Farrah Fawcett’s celebrated poster. The promenade became the municipality quadrate for suburban kids. Our younger siblings spent truthful overmuch clip there, their procreation would gain the sanction “Mall Rats.”

We were clueless teenagers. We had nary thought wherefore oregon however the suburban promenade had evolved, but its commencement — and its caller accelerated diminution — is an absorbing American story.

According to a 2014 nonfiction successful Smithsonian magazine, the detonation of malls crossed America was fueled by municipality flight, suburban maturation and economical prosperity aft World War II. But that’s not the afloat explanation, the mag said. The unintended bully intentions of authorities argumentation and national taxation codes archer the remainder of the story.

Smithsonian said that successful 1954 Congress was anxious to stimulate concern successful manufacturing. To that end, it accelerated yearly depreciation rates for caller construction. Depreciation is simply a taxation conception that assumes that a portion of machinery oregon a gathering has a finite lifespan — that upon being built, it begins to suffer worth until it yet needs to beryllium replaced.

The Smithsonian’s nonfiction turned to The New Yorker magazine’s large writer, Malcolm Gladwell, to explicate however promenade developers were allowed to “ ‘deduct overmuch larger sums, which would beryllium counted, technically, arsenic depreciation nonaccomplishment — wholly tax-free money.’ ”

“ ‘Suddenly it was imaginable to marque overmuch much wealth investing successful things similar buying centers than buying stocks,’ Gladwell writes, “ ‘so wealth poured into real-estate concern companies.’ ”

More than 1,200 buying malls changeable up successful the United States aft the earliest examples were built successful the 1950s, according to World Market.

A monolithic magnitude of wealth was made by investors successful caller malls, but determination was an unintended societal cost. As millions of suburbanites switched their buying to the malls, ample retailers successful the downtown cores of large cities and tiny stores connected section main streets were devastated.

Malls had their Golden Age, but they’ve been successful diminution for years.

They’ve been bleeding shoppers and revenues due to the fact that of the maturation of online buying and now, aft being crushed by a twelvemonth and a fractional of COVID lockdowns, they’re being shuttered successful large numbers.

Some malls, specified arsenic my aged teenage stamping ground, look to beryllium hanging successful there. Sears is agelong gone, but Target and Dick’s look to beryllium doing well.

Some promenade owners are introducing innovative ideas to stay applicable — and viable. Others, says NPR, are remaking their vast, seldom engaged spaces into apartments, aesculapian facilities, bureau spaces and different important re-uses.

I privation each of them amended luck than Ayres, Klinger and I had 40-some years ago. We spent hundreds of hours walking up and down our mall’s crowded corridors, but ne'er erstwhile met immoderate girls!

Tom Purcell is an writer and wit columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Contact him astatine Tom@TomPurcell.com.