The Mall's Shadow: A Review of Kate Black's Big Mall

Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning
Kate Black
Coach House
2024, 184 pp., $23.95

Like death and taxes, the existence of the mall feels all but inevitable. But as Kate Black demonstrates in Big Mall, the mall’s hold on Western culture was hardly guaranteed. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a relatively recent phenomenon, coinciding with both the end of World War II and the rise of the teenager as a consumer force.

The first indoor and climate-controlled mall in North America came from the mind of Victor Gruen, a Jewish architect who fled Nazi-occupied Austria for the United States. Gruen longed for a return to the elegant storefronts of his home country, where you could go from store to store by foot, without needing to get back in your car to drive to your next destination. Inside the mall, Gruen envisioned, “Shopping … would no longer be a chore, but a relaxing break from the necessities of life.”

He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Within ten years of its opening in 1956, his first venture, Minnesota’s Southdale Centre, spawned more than 250 imitators across the United States. The first malls followed a similar formula: they were usually located just outside a city’s core, accessible predominantly by car, and next to vast fields of land, which would eventually be clear-cut to make way for rows and rows of homes once the mall’s success inflated the land’s value.

Eventually, Gruen, like many who have tried to boldly go where no one has gone before, would come to despise the world he wrought, announcing in the years before his death that he refused “to pay alimony for those bastard developments” that “destroyed our cities,” absolving himself of responsibility.

Vancouver-based author Kate Black was born into a world irrevocably changed by Gruen’s vision. She grew up in the shadow of the West Edmonton Mall, which was destined to imprint itself on her young, impressionable mind. And how could it not! Just 20 minutes away from her childhood home was a place that had everything she could ever want—so long as she had the money to buy it.

Black’s Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning is a mix between memoir and essay, divided into four sections: Space, Youth, Animals, and Accidents. Among other things, Black covers the formation of the mall and its function in modern cities; the symbiotic relationship between the mall and the teenagers who nest there; the West Edmonton Mall’s inexplicable zoo, where dolphins were once held in captivity; and the disturbing reality that in most of the biggest malls, whether accidentally or on purpose, people have died there—such as the unlucky visitors who went flying to their deaths on the Mindbender, a roller coaster inside the West Edmonton Mall that crashed six months after Canada’s largest shopping centre first opened to the public in 1986.

As Black convincingly argues, the mall is a microcosm of the world writ large.

As Black convincingly argues, the mall is a microcosm of the world writ large. Like Disneyland, it promises safe streets, wholesome fun, and the possibility for a grand adventure. But it also replicates the same hierarchies that exist outside of it, prioritizing the shopping experience of the white and wealthy, while pathologizing the behaviour of people of colour and the poor. We may visit the mall to escape the world, but it’s only ever a matter of time before it rears its ugly head. 

In spite of this, as is typical in our post-imperial era, the mall has become something akin to the Best Worst Thing. Online, people lament the loss of “third places,” venues where they can hang out away from home and work. But we still have the mall. This grim reality sits at the heart of Black’s book. Whether we like it or not, we all live in the shadow of Big Mall. “When I go to the mall, I usually want to leave right away,” she writes. “When I go to the mall, I feel like I’m on the tip of becoming myself.”

As I got deeper into the book, I inevitably began to examine my own relationship to the mall. Without even realizing it, I’ve spent huge chunks of my life inside them. As a kid, I’d visit my mom at the Halifax Shopping Centre, where she worked at the Eaton’s department store, and I still associate this area of the mall with her smell, even though it’s long transformed from an Eaton’s into a Sears, and lately, a Simons. The scent brings me back to my early childhood, watching my mom take the curlers out of her hair, do her makeup in the mirror, and apply a fresh coat of polish to her nails, before spraying perfume on her neck as she dashed out the door. 

Later, as a teenager, I worked at this same mall as a sales rep for a phone company. I had few friends in high school, so I threw myself into this work, making the mall my escape, just as it has been for many other teenagers. Almost all of my coworkers were much older than me, and for better or worse, I looked up to them. They’d buy me booze from the liquor store, tease me, and treat me like a bit of a mascot, singling me out for my age in ways both good and bad.

At the end of each month, we’d get a flood of visitors coming in to pay their bills. This was known as cheque day—the time of the month when people on social assistance got paid—and my coworkers made no bones about how much they hated it. Aside from what, in retrospect, was an undeniable distaste for poverty, my colleagues were frustrated because they worked on commission and there was no money to be made in taking bill payments. It wasn’t until later, after complaining to my uncle at a family barbecue about how much I hated working cheque day, that I began to question this narrative. He told me to smarten up: “Who do you think you are?” And he was right: what right did I have to question their lives without knowing anything about them or where they came from?

Gruen claimed to have built his first mall to bring people together, but as Black demonstrates, the mall has mostly served to tear them apart, further hastening a move towards individualism that has become a scourge on our culture.

The mall is now one of the few places where wide swaths of the public from different demographics ever come into contact with one another. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that they ever interact. Gruen claimed to have built his first mall to bring people together, but as Black demonstrates, the mall has mostly served to tear them apart, further hastening a move towards individualism that has become a scourge on our culture. And yet, not unlike how a plant can sometimes manage to bloom inside of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, there are still moments when the physical structure of the mall acts as a conduit for connection. It’s this reality, Black explains, that offers some hope for the future: "The story of malls is the story of people—it tells us that whatever our conditions have tried to stamp out, a desire to do otherwise remains.”

About the author

Andrew Sampson is a writer and journalist living in Halifax. He is the co-founder of the Papercut Review of Books and is currently at work on a forthcoming biography of pioneering queer comedian Tommy Sexton for House of Anansi Press.