The Long Goodbye of the Shopping Mall

The Westgate Mall opened in 1974 with a fountain, a Sears, and a line out the door. It closes for good next month. On a recent weekday afternoon, its corridors held a few mall walkers, a teenager on a skateboard, and a security guard who greeted each of them by name.

Malls were built on the idea that shopping was a place you went. The internet made shopping a thing you did from anywhere, and the mall's reason for existing drained away store by store. What remains is a kind of civic ruin: a big, climate-controlled room that nobody quite knows what to do with.

Proposals for Westgate's future include apartments, a community college campus, and a medical center. The fountain, drained since 2016, will be removed. Several longtime residents have asked for a coin from it.