The Mall

Mall comes from pall-mall, an Italian ball game (palla a maglio — 'ball-mallet') popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The game was played on a long, smooth alley. Charles II had a pall-mall alley built in London in 1661, lined with trees. When the game fell out of fashion, the alley remained as a fashionable promenade. 'The Mall' became the name for the tree-lined walkway, and by extension, any pleasant walkway for strolling.

The American shopping mall was invented in the 1950s. Victor Gruen, an Austrian-born architect, designed Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, which opened in 1956 as the first enclosed, climate-controlled shopping center. Gruen called it a 'mall' because the internal walkway between stores resembled the tree-lined promenades of European cities. He imagined it as a community center. It became a temple of consumption.

Gruen later disowned his creation. He called the suburban strip malls that proliferated after Southdale 'ugly and useless' and returned to Vienna. The 'Gruen transfer' — the moment a purposeful shopper becomes a wandering browser — was named after him as a description of mall design's manipulative power. The architect hated what architects did with his idea.

The word mall now means a shopping center in American English so thoroughly that most Americans are surprised to learn that The Mall in Washington, D.C. — the strip of parkland between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial — is named after a promenade, not a store. The ball game disappeared. The promenade disappeared. The word stayed and found a new building to name.