A treetop view of the mall’s rise and fall

My husband witnessed one of the nation’s first shopping malls being built in the 1960s. But where can towns store their teens now?

When my husband, Dave, was a little fellow in 1960, he used to go across the street to the neighbor’s stand of Douglas fir trees and climb one of them to the tippy-top. There’s no evidence his mom knew that’s where he was, but he wouldn’t have been able to hear her from there anyway. In his experience, adults frowned on that sort of activity, particularly the adult whose Douglas fir it was. That guy was excitable. So mostly Dave was sneaky about it.

The coolest part was that from the top of the tree he could see 2 miles away where all the big cranes were set up building the brand-new Lloyd Center Mall, the largest* such shopping mall in America, or so it claimed. Little boys like watching things like that, especially from the top of a tree they aren’t supposed to be in.

We didn’t have a big mall where I grew up in northern Virginia, not that early. We did have a skinny little two-story job called Seven Corners Shopping Center with Garfinckel’s at one end – nobody in our family dressed well enough to walk in there – and Woodward & Lothrop at the other end. There was a Thom McAn where I got my annual pair of little brown shoes, Woolworth’s with its eternal popcorn fug, a Brentano’s bookstore, and a really cheap cafeteria in the basement. 

It all seemed plenty big to me and must have been astonishing to my parents, who grew up in Bisbee, Arizona, and Balfour, North Dakota, and if either of them had a general store nearby with a barrel of vinegar, some homespun, as well as a packet of pins and penny candy, they probably figured they were in high cotton. Seven Corners no doubt put a few mom and pop stores out of business, but that’s progress for you.

Then in 1968, just in time for me to care, they built Tysons Corner Center, a big covered mall with courts and fountains and an aviary and everything. I got a friend to drive me there. Wow! I got my ears pierced free of charge. The mall was a revelation. It proved to be a great place for the community to store all its teenagers, and you can’t put a price tag on that.

It probably wiped out the rest of the mom and pop stores, but that’s progress for you.

All over America, the big shopping mall was king, but things began to falter when the internet train came to town – and the rails for that ran everywhere. Now a lot of Main Street is boarded up, even the fancy stores, although there’s no shortage of places to drop a fiver on a cup of coffee. At the renowned Lloyd Center shopping mall, 55 years later, Nordstrom was the first to peel out. Sears hit the road. Nobody is lying in wait to spray you with perfume in Macy’s. These days you don’t have to get out of your pajamas to get what you need, or what you think you need. The world of commerce has pivoted hard. It is diffuse and ubiquitous, conducted on tiny devices that neatly provide supply and demand at the same time. Teenagers are harder to store now, but they can easily discover what their peers insist they must buy, and then they can buy it. The packaging industry is soaring. The mall is dead.

The Lloyd Center is going to be dismantled and replaced with something as soon as the people with money figure out what to place their bets on. It doesn’t seem like anything will ever replace the current model of consumption, but something will; something always does. Someday it will have to be something that doesn’t require fossil fuel. It will have to be largely local.

There might not be so many choices. There might not be so much pressure, or the tyranny of desire. Someday, kids might go outside again. There might even be trees again, and kids might climb them.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the national significance of the Lloyd Center Mall at the time of construction. It was the largest such mall in America.