# When did 'shopping centers' become 'malls'? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 20, 2014, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-shopping-centers-become-malls/688835 "2014-05-20T16:00:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2014, 4:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-shopping-centers-become-malls/688835/21 "2014-05-21T04:16:18Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > 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. Newberry’s I remember going to Newberry’s when I was a kid, but I’m not sure where. We’d have lunch there. (Mom took a long time to shop.) Somewhere, there was also a place called Worth’s. It had a free soda fountain, so I’d fill up on mixtures of the six choices while mom looked at clothes. > [@Siam\_Sam](#): > > In British, “mall” rhymes with “shall.” Like ‘mal’? Doesn’t ‘mal’ mean ‘bad’? 😛 (I went to high school with a guy whose surname was Malbon. We used to call him ‘Badbon’. Or ‘Badgood’.) ---
**Author:** ![Mr\_Downtown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Mr\_Downtown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr_Downtown)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2014, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-shopping-centers-become-malls/688835/22 "2014-05-21T04:43:46Z")
The _shopping center_ was originally a city district—usually a place where two important streetcar routes crossed—that was characterized by a couple of branch department stores and many surrounding shops and services. Chicago had a half-dozen in the 1920s, and a few still thrive in reduced form. This term got applied to the new purpose-built centers (under single ownership) of the 1920s and 30s, such as Dallas’s Highland Park Village, Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza, and Plaza del Lago on [Chicago’s] North Shore. Postwar suburban developers built all manner of suburban and outlying shopping centers, and a few began trying the all-enclosed model proposed by Victor Gruen and realized at Southdale and similar centers in Seattle and Detroit. One specialized form of shopping center was to have two lines of stores facing each other across a landscaped strip, or _mall_. This form had hardly caught on before the name was being used for a different form: the totally enclosed centers with cruciform plans and anchor stores on the extremities that were built in big numbers during the 1970s. Today, of course, there is a lot of sloppiness in the designations and there are lots of variants: the backformations _minimall_ and _strip mall, regional malls_(which may in fact be open-air), _power centers_ composed of _category killer_ tenants, and _lifestyle centers_ with lots of restaurants, fashion, home decor, and a cinema. ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2014, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-shopping-centers-become-malls/688835/23 "2014-05-21T05:38:30Z")
> [@burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](#): > > ^ Please don’t tell me Circle K isn’t what I think it is, because I’m too busy ROTF. 😃 What do you think Circle K is, because to me it’s that convenience store up the street where I buy gas. Or, if you saw _Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure_, it’s where strange things were afoot. ---
**Author:** ![actualliberalnotoneofthose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e79b87/32.png) [@actualliberalnotoneofthose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/actualliberalnotoneofthose)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2014, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-shopping-centers-become-malls/688835/24 "2014-05-21T13:38:55Z")
About 20 minutes from where I live, there is a sort of “town” that is a “mall.” In other words, it’s a bunch of mostly outdoor stores (some attached, some not, w/ many smaller “shopping centers” of multiple space), a series of shopping centers in one location. There is an enclosed main hub/mall with typical mall stores and movie theaters, but there are several anchor stores outside of the mall structure as well as other strip/shopping mall configurations w/ 3-4 stores, restaurants, etc. You have to walk (or drive) and cross streets to get to different sections. The first mall I remember was built in the 1970s and was dead by 1990. The entire thing was attached and enclosed. Then they built the “new mall” on the opposite side of town, and that was the same setup- except for having a few stores we’d never seen in the area (like The Gap) , and there were a few (all Darden, I think) restaurants around the outside. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2014, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-shopping-centers-become-malls/688835/25 "2014-05-21T13:52:44Z")
In my experience, the shopping facilities call themselves by all manner of names, without regard to whether they’re enclosed or not… But in actual usage, a “mall” is always an enclosed one with an indoor common area, and a facility without an indoor common area is a “shopping center”, “plaza”, or “strip mall”. Of those, a shopping center or plaza usually has a lot of stores surrounding a large parking lot and is usually anchored by a supermarket, while a strip mall usually only has smaller stores, paralleling a road with a small parking lot, but those terms are a bit more fluid. ---
**Author:** ![burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/burpo_the_wonder_mutt/32/365_2.png) [@burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/burpo_the_wonder_mutt)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2014, 1:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-shopping-centers-become-malls/688835/26 "2014-05-21T13:57:08Z")
> [@cochrane](#): > > What do you think Circle K is, because to me it’s that convenience store up the street where I buy gas. Or, if you saw _Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure_, it’s where strange things were afoot. Oh yeah, Circle K = 7-11. The thought of 7-11 considering itself an upscale shopping mall (“lifestyle center”) gave me a good chuckle. ---
**Author:** ![Isilder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/cc9497/32.png) [@Isilder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isilder)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2014, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-shopping-centers-become-malls/688835/27 "2014-05-21T14:25:26Z")
[The Original Mall - The Mall, London was for playing outside- PALL MALL](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mall_%28London%29) After the Pall Mall playing ended they still closed the road to traffic for pedestrian use very often… hence the name “mall” for “thoroughfare capable of vehicular use but for pedestrian use mainly” See also, [Pall Mall, London](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pall_Mall,_London) ---
**Author:** ![Grestarian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/grestarian/32/3227_2.png) [@Grestarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grestarian)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 12:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-shopping-centers-become-malls/688835/28 "2014-05-22T00:45:37Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > 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. Y’mean Monkey Wards? 😃 Montgomery Wards went bankrupt in the mid-1990’s; the space eventually got turned into a huge Target. Wasn’t The Broadway or Sears on the other end? To me, strip malls were a byproduct of the 1970’s real estate boom when speculators found they had chunks of land but no ideas what to do with it. They’d carve out a parking lot and put a few stores – maybe a dozen at most – on them. The stores were usually small (donut shops and florists, etc) and would otherwise have just lined a street and used curbside parking. Sometimes they were anchored by a grocery store or restaurant, but I never thought they did enough business on their own to need their own parking lot. –G! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-shopping-centers-become-malls/688835.md?page=1)