Jim Harding

@PirateWires Great history I didn't know. I was expecting something else--ecommerce. Perhaps the overbuilding and the changed tax laws were crevice-sized cracks in the foundation of the malls, but ecommerce was the sinkhole lurking below, waiting for the Internet.

NEW IN PIRATE WIRES: A few years ago, a high-school student fell through the roof of an abandoned mall outside Pittsburgh. By all accounts he may have been filming a “dead mall” video, the type that’s become a meme over the last decade. It wasn’t always like this. 30 years ago, malls were the pinnacle of American culture. And while they still exist, they’re not destinations. At least, not in the same way. One man designed basically every mall in America — a socialist who fled Vienna after the Nazis invaded. He actually wanted to build new American cities, and his blueprint for the first mall featured homes, schools, hospitals, a supermarket, and a manmade lake. (That vision even inspired Disney’s EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.) “It’s the merchants who will save our urban civilization,” the man liked to say. His goal wasn’t just to sell stuff, but to solve a core tension in American life: that freedom must be balanced by shared reality. But we’ve lost that idea... along with malls themselves. Read the full story from @HarrisSockel on the rise and fall of America’s capitalist cathedrals, and why we need more imaginative, beautiful places to exist together in public. 👇