Some of these images take me back to the age when I was a child and my family used to visit the mall; the 1970s. Or better said, my mother and us children used to visit, as she was a mall fanatic who wouldn’t spend a weekend without going to one. But can I blame her? When malls appeared, they were quite the revolution in retail.
Admittedly, some of these are shopping centers and department stores. But the spirit is similar; a place to reach by driving, to check out the new to awaken your suburban senses. And buy something if so desired (or able to).
Just like many of these snapshots uploaded haphazardly online, there are no exact dates on most. However, the locations are generally easy to identify. About which, the lede image is the Fashion Square in Santa Ana, California.
Orange County Plaza, Garden Grove, CA.
Lord + Taylor, Bala Cynwyd, PA.
South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, CA.
Prospect Plaza, Orange, CA.
Century Square Shopping Center, Los Angeles.
Dadeland Mall, Miami, FL.
Bullock’s Store, Westwood, CA.
THANK YOU ! .
I don’t recall the first enclosed mall I went to, it was in the late 1950’s and for a young man was a real eye opener .
-Nate
“Jenkins Arcade” now “long, long gone”. (Pittsburgh PA)
You have to love the Cadillac towing the Airstream! I noticed in the first photo in California how the cars were parked one or two spaces apart-pride of ownership.
One has to wonder how our parents or grandparents backed those behemoths up without a camera!
Probably the Mrs out back directing him!
“One has to wonder how our parents or grandparents backed those behemoths up without a camera!”
By having some actual skill amplified by experience instead of relying on the technology-equivalent of training wheels compensating for incompetence.
ADAS should be illegal. The atrophying of driving skills is well underway and accelerating.
Last picture, the Bullocks in Westwood is a very familiar place. Stephanie worked there briefly, and then after we got married and had Emma, our daughter, she used to go there for lunch once a week, and I’d often join them. They made the most amazing popovers.
The huge building now houses a Ralphs and a Target. And the ramp to roof parking remains.
First picture with the white 1968 Buick Electra Limited (script on the roof panel says Limited) reminds me of the car in which I learned to drive in 1972. It was our 1967 Limited, white with a black top and interior. Pretty powerful and luxurious car and easy to spot in a crowded parking lot with the unique full width tailights.
Our ’68 Electra sedan was the first car I drove in traffic, on a crowded and narrow 4 lane thoroughfare. Those felt even wider than they were, but I managed. I wish I could have driven it some before it was so worn out.
Up to the late 1960s, at least, most mall parkers didn’t lock their car doors. They figured, no fumbling keys when returning to the car with bags or cartloads of stuff.
A more relaxed atmosphere.
I guess times have changed, heh?
Pre-mid 1970’s, large malls were still not the place where the teen mall rats hung out on Saturdays. Malls remained the domain of 30 to 50 year moms and dads. As they’d bring their little children along, for the weekly shopping. I never enjoyed it, because of the crowds, and packed parking lots. Malls were still the rage with grownups. Not kids.
Never really car spotted, as I was usually stressed because of all the people, and cars. The elevator muzak that filled the mall and department stores, remains my lasting memory of those experiences. Can’t say I have fond memories of those times, as I was into current Top 40 at the time! Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Joni Mitchell, not Mason Williams. lol
My local Sears loved to play this one, circa 1974. Made me want to get home to play baseball with my friends, even more. But my parents usually left the grocery shopping to the end, so I had hours in the mall to go yet!
Anyone in/ around “DC” area remember “WGAY FM”. “99.5”? (maybe “.7”)
The music was all like this. Was long time, popular, station.
Most all the music was like this. Even the “on air, personalities” spoke in “hushed tones”. lol
Every major market, had an ‘easy listening’ format station, from the 1960s through the early to mid ’80’s. They were extremely popular in the 1970’s. Some of it, made the Billboard Top 40 charts, as adult contemporary music was still mainstream through the late ’70s.
How many Chrysler Cordoba owner’s had the eight track of this, in their playlist?
Yes, I remember WGAY very well! Easy listening indeed!
I liked it at work. Not so much in the car. My aunt played it at home a lot.
This made me think of ‘Brass Bonanza’ of Hartford Whalers fame, which suits as I’m pretty sure their home ice was part of a shopping mall complex.
(My hometown mall, Fairlane Village Mall in Pottsville PA, was devoid of music.)
Forget the mall shopping! I’d love to go to a mall today and see all those lovely cars and do my shopping in the lot.
Now today all you see is SUV’s and trucks. Boring and more boring.
Isn’t it amazing how many SUVs there are?
(ps, and I own two!)
Very cool pictures. I was raised in Columbus Ohio where we had the Northland, Southland, Westland and Eastland malls! We were closest to the Northland mall and as a kid I remember as they enclosed it!
My youngest sister worked at a hair salon on an out parcel. One day, someone came in to tell the staff and customers that someone’s car was on fire.
It was her 1971 Buick Skylark!! She’d thrown a cigarette out the window that blew back in! Thankfully it was caught and put out fast so only the backseat burned!!
Let’s see a show of hands. How many of you got driving lessons from your parents In the mall parking lot (we never used the term mall, it was the “shopping center”)? Back when it was closed on Sundays, at least in the morning.
Great question. Ottawa also had Uplands and Rockcliffe air bases, which were both being decommissioned through the ’70’s and ’80’s. So, the largely empty parade squares, and personnel parking lots, were popular with the general public.
Nearby St. Laurent Shopping Centre, had expansive and well-maintained parking lots, for learning to drive. Pictured in 1967, while under construction.
That remind me back in the late 1970s-early 1980s when the Carrefour de l’Estrie, biggest shopping center in Sherbrooke looked back then when the main anchors was Eaton, Sears, Pascal hardware, Steinberg.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/70889946@N08/8664881800/in/photolist-ecFMtN
That area had changed a lot since then.
Sam Steinberg’s popular Montreal-based grocery stores, made a major expansion to Ottawa in the ’60’s and early ’70’s. There was a 24 hour Steinberg’s in Ottawa, by the early ’80’s.
When my niece was 16, on our holiday visit, I offered my auto-trans car for her to try first instead of her parents’ manual cars. She still didn’t have her learner’s permit and wasn’t interested. She doesn’t like bacon, either, so I wonder if she’s actually related. She finally got her license at 20 or so.
Her in Omaha back then Dad took us over to the *AK-SAR-BEN coliseum & horse race track on Sunday mornings–wide open, not another car or soul in sight.
(* It’s NEBRASKA spelled backwards) He would sip coffee on a bench by the building, and give me instructions what to do. I learned to drive in a butterscotch-colored `73 Plymouth Gran Fury 4dr. HT. with a 4bbl. 360. It would scoot!
In addition to the shopping center parking lot, we drove in the lot at our local horse track, Albany Fields. In fact my friend used it for full-throttle runs followed by killing the engine and reading the spark plugs, to check the jetting on his (unmuffled) two-stroke roadracing bikes. I later used it as a skid pad for dialing in tire pressure on my Showroom Stock racers.
For me, it was the local high school and also the office park where my mom worked. I think my folks thought the mall had too many crazy drivers.
Some. In my hometown it was the “HS” parking lot.
OMG. Dadeland Mall, Miami, FL. Think it was 1971, when I received my first traffic ticket. I turned left to enter the parking lot, no left turn. I did not see the no left turn sign. Think the fine was about $30 back then, a lot of money for a college student.
I haven’t thought about Lord & Taylor in a long time. The one near where I grew up looked very similar to this Bala Cynwyd example – it catered to an older, affluent clientele, and I remember thinking that just about every car in the parking lot (in the 1980s) was a Cadillac with a fake convertible top.
We had three “L&T’s” here in the “DC area. “Falls Church VA (aka “7 Corners”). Another in “Chevy Chase MD”. (Friendship Heights) A shorter lived one in “Rockville MD”. ((at the “no more, White Flint Mall”).
The one in “Chevy Chase”, I believe was to be demolished.
Have not been over that way in an age.
The Lord+Taylor at White Flint (in N. Bethesda MD bordering Rockville actually) was demolished a few years after the rest of the mall. The entire chain, nearly 200 years old, couldn’t keep afloat during the pandemic and folded. Lots of malls have failed in the 21st century for familiar reasons, but White Flint remains a puzzler. I was there when it opened in 1976; it was the swankiest place I’d ever seen. A curved cobblestone corridor on the lower floor was designed to look like Venice. Custom marble and granite floors and walls, even in the bathrooms. A food court with not a single chain restaurant, with a fancy-restaurant ambiance. Round glass capsule-shaped elevators, outdoors-y looking plants and fountains, shiny chrome railings, and a discotheque (did I mention it was 1976?). The other anchors were Bloomingdales and I.Magnin. It was in an upscale area on the major business thoroughfare with good access from the Beltway. So what happened? My only guess is that nearby Montgomery Mall was larger and had even better access (intersection of 12-lane-wide 270 and 495/Beltway). Slowly but surely starting in the early ’80s, White Flint became plainer and more ordinary in its decor and tenants, until there was little reason to go there.
Seven Corners and Landmark were the nearest malls when we moved back to Alexandria in ’70. Neither was originally fully enclosed; Landmark was open air, so it was rarely crowded (which I liked) until they completely rebuilt it in ’90, and now it’s gone. There were several attempts this century to convert it back to open air, but they failed. They’re moving the hospital that had been our neighbor to the site. You’d think affluent areas could have kept their malls, but fashion changes, as do demographics. Alexandria lost many of its young people due to the birth dearth and high rents.
A friend’s father’s company installed some of that fancy flooring at White Flint. He had two mid 70s Cadillacs at the time and a new house with pool.
Landmark Mall was an odd case because Sears actually owned its store’s real estate. So those redevelopment plans in the early 2000s stalled because they required closing Sears, which the parent company wouldn’t do. (I think that was one of the few profitable Sears stores in those years.)
Eventually the whole mall closed in 2017, but Sears still remained open, which was awkward. I’m not sure what eventually happened, but Sears at some point sold out to the master developer, and the entire place was demolished. I think its being rebuilt mostly as apartments.
Alexandria did lose much of its young people, but also important for the mall retailers is that it lost its middle class. The City now is an odd mix of extremely wealthy (Old Town, Del Ray, etc.), and lower-income areas (West End, Arlandria). The types of households who used to frequent Landmark Mall have been pushed further out, such as to Fredericksburg and environs, where they now shop at Central Park and other power centers.
Del Ray used to be the biggest poor area of the city (and wasn’t public housing like most of the others), but it’s so close to Crystal City and the Pentagon that the city govt finally allowed it to gentrify for the extra tax revenue. I left in ’92 partly because I could only afford a studio apt. with one income. Every time I’ve visited since, the traffic seems more unbearable.
I think I might have gone into that Lord & Taylor once in the mid 1980’s (and possibly in the 60’s or 70’s as a kid). My grandparents lived lived near Bala Cynwyd and this was probably the source of a few Christmas or birthday gifts over the years.
Amazing to see you had these giant commercial aggregates so long ago, but I guess that’s America for you.
Personally the enclosed space, so many people, so much movement, noise, competing music from each store, flashing lights etc. tips me over into sensory overload and I shut down. I function just enough to get outta there ASAP.
But the car parks are interesting. Especially the gorgeous forties Buicks in the second one. The absolute best US styling of those years.
1960 aerial photo of Billings Bridge Shopping Centre in Ottawa. Remarkably, all roads remain exactly the same. Mall never expanded. Anchor grocery store, retains the same corporate ownership. Large middle class middle-aged/retirees in area, have supported the mall for decades.
Only major changes from this photo, were the addition of two office towers in the 1970s, and a bus transit station, to the rear of the mall.
Caddy with an Airstream, cool. We were towing Airstreams from the early 60’s, my Dad was a Pro at Backing them. Sometimes he would see somebody having a hard time & would take over & back it for them. I backed my 31′ Airstream between a Skinny Gate the other day. The Shorter the trailer the Harder it is, I have trailers 10′ to 53′. Nice Pic’s!!!!
4th Photo – Sears:
That would be the end of the mall that Mom & Dad would park in with that ’64 Chevy wagon in the photo. Dad’s was a pretty blue (Azure Aqua), the one in the photo looks to be off white (Desert Beige). Rather fancy names for a Chevy wagon.
Dad would be looking at the tools, Mom looking for clothes for the kids, or both in major appliances looking for a replacement washer, drier, or fridge.
Sears owned most of their locations. The death toll for many malls was when anchor stores like Sears closed. The Sears near me opened in 1968. It finally shut down in 2019 and the building converted into a medical clinic. Many pairs of bluejeans from that store covered my rump thru my early life.
I never understood why Sears put so many of their later stores in malls. The whole point of Sears was that you could go to just one store and get everything you needed. But the mall itself serves that function, and you’ll get better variety in specialty stores.
Early Sears stores were in downtown cities; then after WW2 they put stores in nearby suburbs, often before the houses went up and the land was cheap. New housing developments often were built where they were because there was a Sears nearby. The local Sears where I grew up was a standalone store across the parking lot from a strip shopping center with a grocery store. We went to Sears all the time to buy clothes of all descriptions, get our hair cut, fit eyeglasses, buy appliances, buy auto parts (or get service), buy gasoline, plumbing and electrical fixtures, gardening supplies, event tickets, TV sets, chocolates, carpeting. We bought vinyl records, and guitars to make our own music. We didn’t have a nearby mall, but didn’t need one. We had Sears.
One by one this “department store” eliminated departments, and eventually sold little beyond clothing, tools, and appliances; and other stores did a better job at all three. The rise and fall of Sears, for decades the world’s largest retailer, is a fascinating, and cautionary, story.
The Michael’s market (which despite the similar logo appears unrelated to the current arts&crafts store of the same name) has the most interesting cars for me. Some off-the-beaten-path grocery-getters including a trio of small 4-door wagons, a 1959 Rambler, a 1960 Studebaker Lark, and a ’61-62 Pontiac Tempest, along with a batwing 1959 Chevrolet wagon. Also a sweet 1959 Coupe de Ville, with another older Cadillac parked in front of it. A couple of T-Birds of different generations, a ’64 Impala coupe (maybe ’63) and a ’65 (maybe ’66) Ford. I’m most curious about what looks like half an old truck to the right of the Chevy wagon.
Towson Plaza ca. 1966 … a 2 level strip now replaced by a huge mall w/ a Macy’s and more
Hutzler’s Towson (aka Ft Hutzler’s)their flagship store on the N side of the Towson Plaza lot. My wife worked at Hutzler’s at Christmas and summers of ’70 and ’69.
another view of Hutzler’s Towson.
My parents actually had the ’72 Caddy towing the Airstream! It was about 1979. The Airstream was a ’65, but was in excellent condition. My dad ended up selling the car and trailer as a unit around 1982.
Except for the other old cars, the Sears photo could have been me in the early 2000s when I frequently used my white ’63 Impala for daily tasks, like visiting Sears or getting groceries.
The first mall in the San Fernando Valley California was the Topanga Plaza, in Canoga. Park. That was probably around 1967. It was anchor by major department stores. We had The Broadway, Montgomery Ward, The.May Company and J. C. Penny. We would take the bus to get there. It cost 38 cents one way from where we lived. There was a really cool head shop that sold black light posters, incense, and other cool stuff that the hippies liked in the late 60s. I wish I could remember the name of the place. We had another head shop in Encino, California. It was an old house on Ventura Blvd at Louis Ave. that was converted to a store. That one was called “The Third Eye” it was a real pycadellic shop. There was always incense burning and really cool people hanging there. We would ride our bikes to that one. We were a little to young at the time for anyone to take us seriously. By the time the 70s rolled around, there were malls all over Southern California. In fact too many for them all to be successful which was too bad because they were all great buildings. Some of them had to close. They eventually had other major brands come in for some of them but some are still empty today, like 50 years later. Kinda creepy.
I saw the picture of the 1972 Cadillac pulling a 60s Airstream trailer. My parents had a 69 Chrysler 300, that they used to tow a 69 Aristocrat Land Commander. I was 14 at the time and I was infatuated by cars pulling trailers. I don’t know why, but I knew everything about travel trailers, all the brands, which ones were the best and which ones were the worst. There were so many brands to choose from back then. But Airstream was always the best. Now other than toy haulers the Airstreams are really the only ones still around. They were very well made, they were riveted together so that made them last. I never liked their interiors very much. They used white paneling on the walls to make them look space aged, but I liked the interiors that had wood panels better. After all we used them to camp in up in the mountains or other remote places, it just seemed more rustic with woodgrain panels inside.
Fresh out of Univ. with a BFA Interior Design degree I moved to Houston about 1977. Was hired in the store planning dept. as a draftsman, at Sakowitz. Sakowitz was a small department store chain, specializing in up-scale fashion. Texas family owned our nearest competitor was Neiman-Marcus. Texas family owned NM sold out and continued to expand but Sakowitz remained family owned and operated sticking to oil rich Texas, OK, & some expansion into AZ. I raised from lowly draftsman to Corporate Interior Designer in six months. I oversaw the interiors of all new stores & remodels plus new stand alone fashion designer boutiques. We also anchored a number of new high-end malls, of which I controlled the ‘look’ of the mall interiors. I only answered to the President and CEO Robert Sakowitz who was a wonderful person with excellent taste and vision. I once showed Robert a marble flooring sample I proposed for a new flagship store we were building across the street from a new NM. He bought the entire mountain with its marble so no one else could have it. I had an unlimited expense account and freely used it with travel around the US going to markets, fashion shows and checking out competitor stores. Our accountant hated me.
It was a dream job during a golden age of fashion retail when the money flowed like oil and the goal was out glamour everyone else. However, my partner who was an oil industry writer, forecasting the oil industry, told me the Texas oil boom was going to crash in the early 1980s, and it was time to get out. Sakowitiz had expanded mostly in oil rich locations so I resigned and we both moved to NYC where we both had contacts. Yes, the oil boom did go bust a short time later, family owned Sakowitz stores went bust.
Partner and I both landed on our feet in NYC, I oversaw the design & renovations of two major department stores, one in NYC, one in Atlanta. But I hated the deign firm that I worked for which specialized in retail design. The golden age a retail design was finished in the early 1980s, as far as I was concerned. My career in retail design was finished but I landed a job in hospitality design firm. I was not hired because I was a damn good interior designer or project coordinator (it helped), but I was hired because I was not intermediated by rich people (that is what I was told). The design account assigned to me was Trump properties. That is another story that does not have anything to do with this site.
Much later in life, I earned my graduate degree and started teaching university courses. For another 20 years I taught advanced level design studios in both retail and hospitality design.