When I was little my mom frequently took me to Mission Valley Center in San Diego. Bored the crap out of me, though there were some smooth, abstract, cement dinosaurs to play on. Mission Valley Center was a ‘shopping center’. When I was little, a place that was a collection of stores, that was not a bunch of storefronts on a street, was a ‘shopping center’. In the late-'70s/early-'80s I understood that an indoor collection of stores was called a ‘mall’. Sometime after that, outdoor collections of stores – ‘shopping centers’ – became ‘malls’.
They never did become malls. Shopping centers are still with us. They share a common parking lot but not a common entrance or interior. They’re typically anchored by a grocery store and a pharmacy, and have a bunch of smaller shops as well.
Malls are a whole 'nother thing. They came along after shopping centers, but don’t have much overlap with them. They have a common interior space. No grocery, usually no pharmacy (unless you count GNC-type places). They’re anchored by department stores like Sears, Macy’s, Penney’s, Nordstrom, etc.
The first factory outlet centers opened in the mid-70s, and IIRC they called themselves “malls” despite the fact the stores weren’t under a single roof.
I don’t know about other places, but around here, even real malls (a bunch of stores, including one or more large anchor stores, under one roof) don’t use the term, prefering to call themselves “(Name) Center” or “Plaza” or in the case of Westfield’s ill-fated attempt to come into this area,“Town.” The industry associations all use “shopping center” in their names, so I suspect it’s our own damn fault instead of blaming the marketers.
That’s a good question. I grew up in the industry, sort of, and the two “shopping centers” built in the early 1950s were called that in their very names. They were also open shopping plazas surrounded by stores, as were the other two “shopping centers” in town.
It was around 1970-72 that all four were considered old news and the process of closing them in to form “shopping malls” - the name change being a big part of the rebuilding and rebranding - started.
Strip mall is a back-formation from closed, plaza-centric malls. They were a strip, or highway strip, or strip stores. “Mall” gussied them up when it became a common term for desirable shopping destinations.
In Lincoln, ne, Westfield tried hard to rename Gateway Shopping Center “Westfield Shoppingtown”. I think they’ve given up, because it just didn’t stick (and sounds stupid).
In doing a little nostalgic digging, I came across another term of the era: breezeway. Breezeways were side or connecting corridors, usually covered but open at the ends, in open-sky shopping centers. They were typically just long enough for four to six facing stores, usually small things like barber shops, liquor stores, dry cleaners and the like. “Breezeway shops” was a unique identifier for the area.
Strip malls are not necessarily enclosed. They are not the same as indoor, climate controlled shopping areas.
To me, a shopping center might be a mall (enclosed), a strip mall (not enclosed), or just a group of shops associated somehow, with convenient, probably central, parking.
We have three malls in Tucson and all of them have the word “mall” as part of their official name. Park Place Mall, Tucson Mall, and Foothills Mall. There’s also a shopping center that used to be an enclosed mall and is still known as El Con Mall.
Some did, technically. A local shopping center got a roof and became a mall.
Also note the second and third definitions:
[qoute]
mall
[mawl; British also mal] Show IPA
noun
1.
Also called shopping mall. a large retail complex containing a variety of stores and often restaurants and other business establishments housed in a series of connected or adjacent buildings or in a single large building. Compare shopping center.
2.
a large area, usually lined with shade trees and shrubbery, used as a public walk or promenade.
3.
Chiefly Upstate New York. a strip of land, usually planted or paved, separating lanes of opposite traffic on highways, boulevards, etc.
4.
the game of pall-mall.
5.
the mallet used in the game of pall-mall.
[/quote]
I’ve noticed my local university streets are called malls.
There are at least five concatenations of stores in the Sacramento area that began as open-plaza “shopping centers” and evolved, in more or less the same time frame, into covered, sealed “malls.” There is also one very old-school “shopping village” that hasn’t changed since it was built in the late 1940s, a giant closed mall that was built that way around 1972, and a downtown project that started off as a street, was closed into a pedestrian mall, and in successive changes has grown covered, indoor and multi-layer spaces. I’d imagine that most towns have similar sites, but Sacramento always seemed especially fertile and varied in this respect. (I mean, it’s gotta have something to its credit…)
ETA: And a modern take on the shopping village, built around 1974, that has always been a semi-failure of boutique stores and inaccessibility. Only the megamall across the street kept it alive.
There are some changes afoot at the Circle K. The current desired designation is Lifestyle Center:
A lifestyle center is a shopping center or mixed-used commercial development that combines the traditional retail functions of a shopping mall with leisure amenities oriented towards upscale consumers.
Mission Valley, described in the OP, isn’t a strip mall, though. It’s huge, and there are no grocery stores. When I was a kid (at the same time in the same place), the anchors were department stores: Bullock’s, May Company, and I forget the third. We also called it a shopping center, never a mall. Fashion Valley and UTC were the same.
I think it’s now a Westfield Shopping Town, or possibly Towne. As far as I know no one is dumb enough to call it that except the signs at the entrance.
