Part of the story of the American shopping mall included in Meet Me at the Fountain is the rise and fall of the pedestrian mall in cities:

From 1959 through the early 1980s, more than two hundred American cities closed blocks of their downtowns to car traffic. B 2000, fewer than twenty-four of those original malls remained. (89-90)

As people and shopping moved to the suburbs, larger cities responded by trying to create something like an outdoor mall on busy urban shopping streets. But the experiment did not work:

By 2000, fewer than twenty-four of these original malls remained. The design intervention that was supposed to bring people back from the suburban mall had, instead, exacerbated the very problem it was trying to solve, turning downtown into car-centric, retail-first monocultures rather than pedestrian-first, mixed-use places. (90)

Many cities thought this was the answer but it turned out not to be; few of the pedestrian malls survived even a few decades.

Two thoughts hearing this account:

1. Cities did not know what to do regarding the millions of Americans who moved out of big cities and to the suburbs after World War Two. Were they moving out of cities in part because of shopping opportunities? This was not the biggest issue but cities hoped they could at least attract more visitors with pedestrian malls.
2. The copycat nature of retail development across places is interesting to consider. As malls proliferated, often borrowing architecture and techniques regardless of location, many communities also jumped on the pedestrian mall bandwagon. And then when they did not bring about the desired changes, they disappeared en masse as well. It makes sense that cities and developers would look to each other to see what works but it also seems like it can lead to fads and trying to shoehorn generic solutions to what can be complex local settings.