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Part memoir and part study of modern life, Shopping Mall examines the modern mythology of the shopping mall and the place it holds in our shared cultural history.

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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

The mall near Mat thew Newton´s childhood home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was one of the state´s first enclosed shopping malls. Like all malls in their heyday, this one was a climate-controlled pleasuredome where strangers converged. It boasted waterfalls, fish ponds, an indoor ice skating rink larger than Rockefeller Center´s, and a monolithic clock tower illuminated year-round beneath a canopy of interconnected skylights. It also became the backdrop for filmmaker George A. Romero´s zombie opus Dawn of the Dead.

Part memoir and part case study, Shopping Mall examines the modern mythology of the mall and shows that, more than a collection of stores, it is a place of curiosity, ritual, and fantasy.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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Prologue
Part One: Childhood
1. Eternal Spring
2. Paradise Unknown
3. Spaces Between
4. Shopping is a Feeling
Part Two: Adolescence
5. Little Boxes
6. White Denim
7. Mall Madness
8. Neon Hallways
9. Young Love
Part Three: Adulthood
10. Homecoming
11. Ghost Malls
12. Utopia Interrupted
13. New Futures

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

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A smart and empathetic look at this waning icon of 20th-century American consumer culture. Pittsburgh City Paper

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Matthew Newton is Associate Editor at the Carnegie Museum of Art, USA. He has written for, among others, The Oxford American, Esquire, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Rumpus, Guernica, and Spin.

Matthew Newton is Associate Editor at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work has been published by the Oxford American, the Atlantic´s CityLab, Forbes, the Rumpus, Guernica, and Spin.

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