The mall has been dying for a decade. Storefronts go dark, food courts thin out, fountains get drained and tiled over. What goes mostly unmentioned is that malls were doing two jobs the whole time, and only one of them was retail.
The other was walking.
In a lot of American towns, the enclosed mall was the only climate-controlled public space where you could walk a mile without crossing a road. Senior centers organized "mall walker" clubs that met at 7 a.m., before the stores opened — laps around the terrazzo, past the dark Auntie Anne's, past the dormant fountain. Knees got better. People learned each other's names. Heart attacks got caught early because someone noticed Ruth wasn't there on Tuesday.
This was not what the developers had in mind. The mall was sold as a temple of consumption. It became, by accident, a commons. A place to be a body in public, paid for by other people's purchases.
Now the leases collapse and the anchor stores leave. A distribution warehouse moves in, or a Target with its own entrance, and the long interior loop is broken into separate rooms with separate doors. The 7 a.m. group disperses. Some find a different mall that's still open. Most don't.
We talk about the mall as a failed retail experiment. We don't talk about what the failure took with it.