What Happens to a Mall After It Dies?

Virtual RealityWhat Happens to a Shopping Mall After It Dies?Exploring the underworld of mall melancholia

By Wretched Flowers

February 9, 2022

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Graffiti on a pair of escalators in an abandoned shopping mall.Photo: Charles Donaldson/EyeEm via Getty Images

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At a certain point in the 21st century, society started rolling its eyes at the traditional American shopping mall. We could no longer ignore the environmental and humanitarian consequences of our predilections for fast food and fast fashion, and the mall represented the consumerist culture we sought to blame.

And yet, as we near the third year of a pandemic that makes aimlessly wandering around indoors for hours seem unnecessary at best, or deadly at worst, I find myself longing for the quintessential shopping mall experience. Closing my eyes, I can almost hear the gurgling churn of a chlorinated penny pool and savor the salty sweet taste of a warm Auntie Anne’s pretzel… two things that Amazon Prime can never deliver.

But what I really long for is not just the nearest mall, but the mall I worked at in my youth, the Rimrock Mall in Billings, Montana. Maybe you can relate. How many of us spent our formative years fishing arcade money out of the atrium fountain, sucking down an Orange Julius while gossiping about first kisses and school crushes, or slathering on the iconic cucumber melon lotion from Bath and Body Works? For many suburban kids growing up in the ’80s, ’90s, and early ’00s, the shopping mall was just about the only place to be seen in public.

Nostalgia can be a deeply powerful emotion, especially during times of uncertainty or unease. We tend to reminisce about our youth, about ‘simpler times,’” during these moments of turbulence. (What I wouldn’t give to be bored in a Spencer’s Gifts in 2002 right about now.) But nostalgia for the mall isn’t only about romanticizing our adolescence–because mall culture isn’t just a thing of the past for you; it’s essentially a thing of the past all together.

In the 1960s an average of at least three new shopping centers opened every single day in America. By 1975, malls and shopping centers accounted for a third of all retail sales in the U.S. The ’80s were the golden age of shopping malls, offering movie theaters and arcades, hosting beauty pageants and performances. And the ’90s gave us the megamall, replete with aquariums, roller coasters, and zip lines. But by the mid-aughts, the mall space was oversaturated. Landlords had come to rely on retailers like JCPenney, Nordstrom, Macy’s, and Sears—known in the industry as anchor stores—to sign long-term leases for multi-level spaces that would attract a broad cross section of the shopping public.

With multiple malls per town, there simply weren’t enough of these anchor stores to go around, making it very difficult for older malls to compete with newer ones to fill vacancies and sign leases. (The financial collapse certainly didn’t help, either.) In 2007, not a single new mall was built in the entire United States for the first time since malls were invented in 1956. By 2008, Newsweek had declared the indoor mall obsolete.

This all being said, successful malls do, in fact, still exist. But alongside them are a slew that have closed and remain standing. Termed “dead malls,” these gargantuan buildings are too expensive to repair, or knock down. And so, they sit, decay, and wait. They wait for someone to come along and film them. Allow me to escort you down the YouTube rabbit hole that I’ve crawled inside to satisfy my self-diagnosis of “mall melancholia.” A handful of adventurous creators invite us to trespass with them to tour the world’s dead malls in various stages of decay. 

There’s a channel called The Proper People that might offer the most cinematic and beautifully shot footage of abandoned spaces that you’ll find on the internet. The two guys that run it travel the world and document a variety of left-behind architecture, from a water park in China to a mural-studded Soviet military base in Russia. I find the slow and quiet pace of their videos to be almost meditative. In fact, they’re so relaxing that I’ve used them to help me fall asleep on particularly restless nights on more than one occasion. Their playlist of abandoned malls has eight video tours, most of them spanning about an hour in length.

Another great playlist is the Dead Mall series on the YouTube channel This is Dan Bell. The “Neon Dreams” episode is one of my personal favorites; it documents a night walk through a very ’80s mall that inexplicably still has the electricity turned on. Neon lights and wall-to-wall mirrors abound. A dark and empty Payless is strangely filled with cut tree limbs. The whole tour is bizarre and beautiful and grade A inspiration for a set designer or art director.

For the true crime junkies out there, the U.K.-based Dead Mall Walking has a short series called Murder at the Mall, in addition to regular dead mall tours. “The Star Court Killer” looks at the tragic case of Silling Man, whose body was found at Gwinnett Place Mall a few months before Stranger Things began filming season three there. Unfortunately, the filmmaker wasn’t able to get footage inside the building as it stands now, so he uses mainly found and borrowed footage instead, but it’s informative nonetheless.

For those of you who simply must catch a glimpse of the iconic Stranger Things mall, though, don’t fret. Ace’s Adventure is yet another YouTube channel offering a number of abandoned architecture tours, and the aforementioned Gwinnett Place Mall is on the list. Similar to Dead Mall Walking, this program adds quite a bit of context and backstory to each tour, incorporating found footage (like news coverage of the mall’s opening) at the beginning of each episode, along with a voice-over history of each establishment.

If there’s a particular dead mall you’d like to see, perhaps one you remember fondly from a past life, your best chances of finding it would be on the Expedition Log playlist of the YouTuber Sal. Over a hundred videos make up the series—the largest collection of dead mall tours I’ve come across yet. Beyond these YouTube channels, there are countless photographers who document dead malls with still images. (There are currently 30.9k posts on Instagram with the hashtag #deadmall.) 

But there’s something particularly gratifying about watching a video tour. It’s slow, methodical, quiet, and still. And yet there underlies an element of suspense: Will they get caught? What unexpected gold will we find around the next corner? More than anything, it somehow feels like getting a sense of closure. It’s like we’re all peering into an open casket; watching these videos feels both familiar and grotesque. It hurts to see the symbols of our youth lay underneath layers of dust and broken glass. But it feels cathartic, too.

A different version of this article first appeared on Wretched Flowers’ Instagram page, @wretched-flowers. Wretched Flowers shares research about plants and culture, creates sustainably foraged dried arrangements and handmade decor, and designs events and environments for special occasions.

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