Walking Through an American Mall in 1987 — Store by Store

Walking Through an American Mall in 1987 — Store by Store Saturday, the 15th of August, 1987. Twenty past nine in the morning, in a parking lot with about four thousand spaces in it and eleven cars parked, all of them clustered by one set of doors at the far end. It is going to be ninety-one degrees today, and the humidity is already up, and the air coming out of those doors when somebody opens them is the coldest air that most of the people in this town will feel all weekend. In the middle of the building, under a skylight, there is a fountain. Tiled, maybe twenty feet across, with four jets and a ring of benches around it and a layer of coins across the bottom that nobody has touched in a month. Pennies mostly, and a good many dimes, and at least one Canadian quarter. This was where all of us spent our Saturdays. One building, two anchors, eighty stores, a food court, a six-screen theater and an arcade, under one roof, with the temperature held at seventy-two degrees from the first of June to the end of September. We are going to walk through it in the order you would actually have walked through it, starting in the parking lot and finishing back out at the car. We are not skipping a store.