the.com/mall
A climate-controlled monument to the era when shopping was a day out, not a tab.
means A large building housing many shops under one roof, usually anchored by department stores and built for walking, browsing, and lingering.
from From 'pall-mall,' a 17th-century lawn game played with mallet and ball along a long alley; the alleys themselves came to be called 'malls,' and one in London — The Mall — gave its name to a fashionable tree-lined promenade. That sense of a sheltered walkway for strolling carried over in the 20th century to the enclosed shopping centers we know now, when the word shifted from a path you walked for pleasure to a building you walked for commerce.
- origin
- named after pall-mall, a lawn game alley
- peak year
- 1990s, roughly 1,500 US malls thrived
- decline
- over a third have closed since 2010
- afterlife
- dead malls often become churches or warehouses