In George Romero’s famous 1978 movie, Dawn of the Dead, the mall is a home for humans and zombies alike. They’re loaded symbols within our culture, inspiring feelings of allegiance or contempt. Malls are fixtures of our physical and psychic landscapes, embedded with social and personal histories. Shopping is part of our daily lives, as are the spaces where we do it. The mall is “ubiquitous and underexamined and potentially a little bit embarrassing,” the design critic Alexandra Lange notes in the introduction to her new book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. When people asked where I was from, I’d answer, “a soulless suburb of New York City with no culture but lots of malls.” By the time I moved away for college, I was over the world I left behind. Once I was old enough to go to malls on my own, I met up with friends at the two main ones in White Plains, the New York City suburb where I grew up: the Galleria, where I got my ears pierced at Claire’s, and the Westchester, a shiny new beacon whose upscale nature was reflected in the fact that it had carpeting. You could tell the story of many suburban childhoods through a progression of visits to such anodyne shopping centers. There, my mom would peruse high-end stores that didn’t have locations in our hometown, while my dad would take us kids to buy cookies and eat them on the steps that formed the mall’s gathering spot. Fields cookie summons up a weekend in the early 1990s when my parents would pack me and my siblings into our Volvo station wagon and drive us half an hour over state lines to the mall in Stamford, Connecticut.
But getting a snack there was never about the quality of the food itself. Fields does not have the best cookies, especially in a city teeming with boutique bakeries. In the days before the pandemic, when I visited the Museum of Modern Art, I would stop at Mrs.