The First Mall

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The Arcade in Cleveland, Ohio (built 1890), looking south toward Euclid Avenue: photo by Martin Linsey for Historic American Building Survey, 7 March 1966 (Library of Congress)

"In speaking of the inner boulevards," says the Illustrated Guide to Paris, a complete picture of the city on the Seine and its environs from the year 1852, 'we have made mention again and again of the arcades which open onto them. These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need. During sudden rainshowers, the arcades are a place of refuge for the unprepared, to whom they offer a secure, if restricted, promenade -- one from which the merchants also benefit.”

This passage is the locus classicus for the presentation of the arcades; for not only do the divagations on the flâneur and the weather develop out of it, but also, what there is to be said about the construction of the arcades, in an economic and architectural vein, would have a place here.

Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk / The Arcades Project, 1927-1940, ed. Rolf Tiedeman, 1982, trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin, 1999: Convolute A: Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautés, Sales Clerks

The covered shopping arcades of the nineteenth century were Benjamin's central image because they were the precise material replica of the internal consciousness, or rather, the unconscious of the dreaming collective. All the errors of bourgeois consciousness could be found there (commodity fetishism, reification, the world as "inwardness"), as well as (in fashion, prostitution, gambling) all of its utopian dreams. Moreover, the arcades were the first international style of modern architecture, hence part of the lived experience of a worldwide, metropolitan generation. By the end of the nineteenth century, arcades had become the hallmark of a "modern" metropolis (as well as of western imperial domination), and had been imitated throughout the world, from Cleveland to Istanbul, from Glasgow to Johannesburg, from Buenos Aires to Melbourne. And as Benjamin was well aware, they also could be found in each of the cities that had become points of his intellectual compass: Naples, Moscow, Paris, Berlin.

Susan Buck-Morss: The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, 1989

Cleveland Arcade, 401 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Ohio (built 1890), Euclid Avenue (South) facade: photo by Martin Linsey for Historic American Building Survey, 7 March 1966 (Library of Congress)



The Arcade -- enclosed shopping area in downtown Cleveland: photo by Frank John Aleksandrowicz for U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, June 1973 (National Archives and Records Administration)



The Arcade -- enclosed shopping area in downtown Cleveland: photo by Frank John Aleksandrowicz for U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, June 1973 (National Archives and Records Administration)



Cleveland Arcade: photochrome view by Detroit Photographic Company, c. 1901 (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University)



Passage Choiseul, Paris (built 1829): photo by Clicsouris, 15 August 2005



Kaisergalerie, Berlin (built 1869-1873): photo by Hermann Rückwardt, 1881; image by Beek100, 28 June 2009



Interno della Galleria Principe di Napoli (built 1877-1883): photo by High Contrast, 2002



Galleria Umberto I, Napoli (built 1887-1891): photo by Giorgio Sommer, c. 1900; image by G.dallorto, 11 January 2009



GUM, Moscow (Upper Trading Rows built between 1891 and 1893), interior, with elongated shop galleries bridged by metal-and-glass vaults, designed by Vladimir Shukov: photographer unknown, 1893; image by Gizmolechat, 29 May 2006



GUM, Moscow, structure of Upper Trading Rows, designed by Vladimir Shukov (1893): photo by Donskoy, 21 July 2007



Frescos in the cupola of Galerías Pacifico, Buenos Aires (built 1889): photo by Martin St.-Amant, 22 January 2010



Royal Arcade (built 1869), Melbourne (looking south toward Collins Street): photo by Biatch, 9 October 2006



The "Sevens" shopping mall, Düsseldorf, Germany: photo by Till Niermann, 4 August 2007



Toronto Eaton Centre, Toronto: photo by Christopher Woo, 20 July 2006



Tokyo shopping arcade: photo by Electroliner, July 2007



Cabot Circus mall, Bristol city centre, England: photo by Jongleur100, December 2008



Gallery in the souk of Wafi Mall, Dubai: photo by Diligent, March 2008



Belz Factory Outlet Mall, an abandoned shopping mall in Allen, Texas: photo by Justin Cozart, 28 March 2006