The Mall of America outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, is the largest enclosed mall in the United States. It is also the nation's most popular tourist destination, visited by
42.5 million people in 2009.
This mall, like many others, was also once a popular hangout for young people. On Friday and Saturday nights, as many as 10,000 teenagers would gather there. But this practice ended in 1996, when the Mall of America instituted a 6:00 pm weekend curfew for teenagers under sixteen unless accompanied by an adult. Since then, hundreds of malls have adopted similar curfews.
Teenagers, who in 2009 bought $170 billion in merchandise, spend much of their free time in malls—over fifty minutes a day on the average. Many resent the curfews. "We just want to be able to hang out at the mall," complains Kimberly Flanagan, sixteen, of Charlotte, North Carolina. Kary Ross, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, sides with the teenagers: "We're opposed to curfews that treat all minors as if they're criminals."
Malls insist that as privately owned enterprises, they are exempt from First Amendment protections, such as
¦ Lewis Mine's 1910 photograph shows a tenement alley in New York City. More famous for his "unsettling” photographs of the ills of the cities, Hine sought to depict urban life in all its fullness.
Freedom of speech and the right to assemble. Malls are not public property.
Yet recent malls have been designed to evoke the public spaces of the nineteenth-century city. The Mall of America includes an exhibition gallery, amusement park, wedding chapel, assembly hall, school, medical clinic, and a central "Rotunda" for staging "public events" ranging from gardening shows to Hulk Hogan wrestling matches.
In the late nineteenth century, city life was played out in spaces that really were public. Factory workers walked to work along crowded streets or jammed into streetcars or subways. Courting couples strolled through shopping districts or public parks. Children played in streets. "Little
Italy" or "Chinatown" provided exotic attractions for all. Amusement parks and sporting events drew huge throngs. In New York City, a journalist reported in 1883, a "huge conglomerate mass" came together in public spaces to form a "vague and vast harmony."
But city life was not for all. In 1900, 50 percent more Americans lived in rural areas than in urban areas—even when "urban" was generously defined as holding more than 2,500 people. Why, asked sociologist Henry Fletcher in 1895, do "large masses of people, apparently against their own interests," abandon the nation's healthful and sociable rural areas and crowd into the nation's disease-ridden, anonymous cities?
Nineteenth-century cities, though noisy, chaotic, and often ill-governed, exerted a peculiar fascination. In cities, workers, even immigrants and young women, could more easily find jobs. Housing was cheap. Urban problems were daunting, but the immense aggregation of peoples and their resources constituted a limitless potential for uplift and reform. City life was a great spectacle, played out mostly in public spaces. ¦
World History
