Meet Me at the Fountain

Dolls of Our Lives

Allison Horrocks and Mary Mahoney

Society & Culture, History

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2024

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode, we're going to a place where the lights are bright, the music is dim, and everything smells vaguely like cookies, pretzels, and overpriced lotions. That's right, we're going to the mall. Despite many predictions of near death, the mall is alive and well in many parts of the USA (and parts of the world). For this episode, we discuss Alexandra Lange's 2022 book Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. Lange's architectural history takes us all the way back to the beginning, which in the case of malls, is not that long ago. Starting with early American malls in post-war America, Lange offers a sharp overview of how malls came to be and considers where they are still thriving now. We talk about our own relationships to malls and bigger questions raised by these American institutions. Is the mall a useful third space for communities? Or, are malls simply the best place to be wowed by build-a-bear operations and rollercoasters?

Original air date: January 29, 2024

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome everyone to dolls of our lives. This is the show where we're reliving the American Girl series book by book.
0:16.2	Except here on Patreon where we're taking on things you suggested or that we're into that we think live in the world of the show.
0:23.0	I'm Mary.
0:24.0	I'm Allison.
0:25.0	And today we've gathered to talk,
0:27.0	you know, in some ways I asked you to meet me by the fountain today
0:29.8	for this recording.
0:30.9	We will be talking about Alexandra Lange's Meet Me by the Fountain, which the subtitle
0:36.8	and Inside History of the Mall. Very exciting. Which is almost as clever as Taylor Swift saying meet me behind them all which can be meet me behind them all or meet me behind them all which is very clever.
0:50.0	Oh wow see I never that passed me by. I never even thought about that. Wow. There's all sorts of things that you can get up to at malls, which Alexandra Lang wants us to know all about and she takes kind of an insider's view as you know an expert on architecture as a student as a you know like lover of mall she kind of takes all different angles with this book and it's really interesting.
1:15.7	I was vibing on it. Yeah, so we're going to get into that and you know our own mall memories like you know cultural touchstone moments for malls greatest malls and pop
1:24.9	greatest mall moments in pop culture history perhaps we can count those down or
1:29.8	imagine those into being but first you, what's going on your life?
1:34.2	Like, what's going on in your pop culture life?
1:36.4	What's happening?
1:37.8	Yeah, we're already almost a full month into 2024.
1:42.4	And so part of my, limit I've set on myself
1:46.3	is one hour of Tik-Tak a day,
1:48.4	which I've actually been pretty successful with
1:51.0	except the time that I accidentally didn't override and fell asleep to an ASMR video.
1:56.0	But other than that, I've been pretty consistent.
1:59.0	So that's like freed up time for other things for sure.
	...

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