Shopping Mall

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The mall near Mat thew Newton`s childhood home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was one of the state`s first enclosed shopping malls. Like all malls in their heyday, this one was a climate-controlled pleasuredome where strangers converged. It boasted waterfalls, fish ponds, an indoor ice skating rink larger than Rockefeller Center`s, and a monolithic clock tower illuminated year-round beneath a canopy of interconnected skylights. It also became the backdrop for filmmaker George A. Romero`s zombie opus Dawn of the Dead. Part memoir and part case study, Shopping Mall examines the modern mythology of the mall and shows that, more than a collection of stores, it is a place of curiosity, ritual, and fantasy.