The enclosed mall arrived in 1956, but Chester's covered Rows beat it by centuries
Victor Gruen's Southdale Center near Minneapolis opened in 1956 as the first enclosed American mall. Yet the English city of Chester has run covered, multi-level shopping galleries since at least the 13th century, with traders storing goods and sleeping above their stalls. Individual rows specialised, earning names like Bakers Row.
Grouping shops together is ancient. Trajan's Market in Rome, probably designed by Apollodorus of Damascus around 100 to 110 AD, is often called the world's oldest shopping centre. Isfahan's largely covered Grand Bazaar dates from the 10th century, and Istanbul's Grand Bazaar, built in the 15th, still holds more than 4,000 shops along some 58 streets. Russia's trading rows grew into huge arcaded complexes: Gostiny Dvor in Saint Petersburg, opened in 1785 with over 100 shops, counts among the first purpose-built mall-style buildings, and Moscow's GUM moved into its present home in the 1890s.
Europe then went through an arcade craze. Paris gained about 150 covered passages between the late 18th century and 1850, and landmarks such as London's Burlington Arcade and Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II still trade today. In America the car reshaped everything. The 1920s brought the first centres built with parking, a few dozen shops each; from 1946 came larger open-air complexes anchored by department stores; then Southdale sealed the whole thing under a roof. The word mall originally meant a pedestrian promenade and only in the late 1960s came to mean a big enclosed centre.
Industry bodies sort centres by size. A superregional centre, over 800,000 square feet of leasable space with at least three anchor stores, dominates a region about 40 kilometres across. Strip malls, under 30,000 square feet, are not counted as malls in North America despite the name. Specialised forms include power centres built around big-box stores, upmarket lifestyle centres mixing shops with leisure, and outlet malls; the first multi-store outlet centre opened in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1974.
Fortunes now diverge. Many American malls have sunk into decline or closed, surviving mainly by adding entertainment, big-box anchors or niche formats, while European centres are still growing. Old buildings sometimes gain a second life as shopping destinations, from Amsterdam's former main post office, now Magna Plaza, to a Sears warehouse in Atlanta reborn as Ponce City Market.
Source: Shopping center
