Food Courts: Growth of the Mall

The first shopping centers, in the 1920s, were strip malls, stores in a line and fronted by parking spaces and containing groceries, restaurants, or sandwich shops. The modern mall emerged in the early 1950s, and Northgate (Seattle, Wash.) and Shoppers World (Framingham, Mass.) are early examples of an enclosed shopping area often anchored by department stores, which were the suburban branches of long established city center retailers. Paralleling the growth of the automobile, the new suburban model encouraged shopping close to home or in places other than in the traditional downtown model. Tea rooms, luncheonettes, and stand-alone restaurants had all long made consumers familiar with dining out as part of the shopping experience. Thus, the downtown dining and shopping experience was a rehearsal for when downtown was transplanted to the suburbs. The first enclosed shopping areas often included traditional restaurants or were colocated near the newly emergent supermarkets. During this time, architect Victor Gruen helped lead a revolution in retail design by bringing together both form and function; his minimalist influence and urban design vocabulary are still evident today. The 1960s and 1970s ushered in the modern mall movement, and as the suburbs grew, so did the number and variety of enclosed retail outlets once known as shopping centers and now renamed malls. Moving from a local to a regional model, these malls became a hallmark of the suburban experience and by 1972, there were more than thirteen thousand modern shopping malls in the United States. Most were fully enclosed multilevel units, including a new common usage term, the food court.