History in Pictures of America’s First Mall — from its opening to eventual closing
The Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota paved the way for the construction of thousands of climate-controlled malls throughout the US that looked like it.
Source: History of Southdale Center, the first modern American shopping mall – Business Insider
The great American mall is struggling to say the least. The causes are many, but all retail analysts these days pretty much all agree that the shopping malls of today will need to significantly evolve in order to survive. That makes this piece on Business Insider so interesting tracking the Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota — the very first indoor shopping mall in America — from its opening to its recent struggles.
Maybe everyone should have listened to Frank Lloyd Wright when he first visited the Southdale Center in 1956 soon after it’s opening, remarking that it “had all the evils of the village street and none of its charms … You should have left downtown downtown.”
See the full set of pictures by clicking here.