America Had No Shopping Malls Until 1956 — Where Did Everyone Go Shopping?

America Had No Shopping Malls Until 1956 — Where Did Everyone Go Shopping? This is something that might truly surprise you. For the first 167 years of the history of the United States of America, there was not a single enclosed shopping mall anywhere on the entire territory of the nation. No food court, no air-conditioned corridors connecting dozens of stores, no video arcade flashing neon lights, no enormous parking lot stretching like a sea of asphalt surrounding glass buildings. And yet somehow clothes were still bought, household goods still filled homes, Christmas still had gifts under the tree, and the largest consumer economy on the planet still ran smoothly for nearly two centuries without anyone needing to set foot inside a shopping mall. The question is, where did 168 million Americans shop before 1956? And perhaps more importantly, what happened in 1956 that fundamentally restructured the way Americans shopped, socialized, and even formed teenage identity, never to go back to the way it was? The answer to those questions takes us deep into a story of dusty general stores on the Western frontier and magnificent 32-story department stores in the heart of the city, of mail-order catalogs thick as a handspan and Main Streets full of candy shops and drugstores, of the great postwar suburban migration that created a gigantic void in retail life that no existing format could fill, and of a Jewish refugee architect from Vienna who filled that void with an invention that changed America forever, then spent the last years of his life publicly regretting the very thing he had created. Because this is something most people do not realize.