Mall

Mall (pronounced mal or mawl)

(1) A clipping of shopping mall, a (usually) large retail complex containing a variety of stores and often restaurants and other business establishments housed in a series of connected or adjacent buildings or in a single large building.  Shopping centre is the usual alternative descriptor but market, plaza, marketplace & mart are also used.

(2) A large area, sometimes lined with shade trees and shrubbery, used as a public walk or promenade (in some places called boulevard, boardwalk, esplanade, alameda, parade or walk).

(3) In urban business districts, a street from which motor-traffic has been excluded and given over entirely to pedestrians.

(4) A strip of land, usually planted or paved, separating lanes of opposite traffic on highways, boulevards etc (use restricted to certain US states).

(5) In the game of pall-mall, either (1) the game itself, (2) the mallet used in the game or (3) the place or alley where pall-mall was played.

(6) The game of polo (obsolete since the late seventeenth century).

(7) To beat with a mall, or mallet; to beat with something heavy; to bruise.

(8) In the jargon of US property development, to build up an area with the development of shopping malls

(9) In slang, (often as malling), to shop at the mall (the “mall rat” being one who frequents such places (usually in a pack) without necessarily intending to shop.

1737: From The Mall, a fashionable tree-lined promenade (then thought of as a “pall-mall alley”) in St James's Park, London where originally the game pall-mall was played.  The name of the game was also spelled palle-malle, paille-maille, pel-mell & palle-maille, pell-mell.  The noun plural is malls.

Eighteenth century woodcut of men playing pall mall.

The use to describe a "shaded walk serving as a promenade" was generalized from The Mall, the name of a broad, tree-lined promenade in St. James's Park, London (the name dating from the 1670s and an evolution of the earlier (1640s) maill), so-called because it operated as open alley used to play the game of pall-mall, an ancestor of the modern croquet.  Pall-mall (although described as a “lawn game”) was played on a surface of compacted & leveled soil, boarded in at each side, using a wooden ball which was struck with a mallet to send it through an iron arch placed at the end of the alley, the winner the one who managed to do so with the fewest shots.  The game's name is from the French pallemaille, from the Italian pallamaglio, the construct being palla (ball) + maglio (mallet), from the Latin malleus (hammer, mallet), from the primitive Indo-European root mele- (to crush, grind).  The French and Italian forms (like the English pall-mall) both refer to a game something like croquet, played in Europe after the sixteenth century.

A View of St James Palace, Pall Mall (1763), oil on canvas by Thomas Bowles (1712-1791).

The mall in the sense of a street in an urban business district from which motor-traffic has been excluded and given over entirely to pedestrians dates from 1951.  The sense of an "enclosed shopping gallery" is from 1962 (although such structures in the US pre-date the descriptor and the mall rat (one who frequents a mall) wasn’t labeled as such until 1985.  Mall is the common term in North America but in many countries they’re called shopping centres, markets, plazas, marketplaces, marts or blends of these words.  Mall is still used in the original sense of a shaded walk but is now rare, plaza, esplanade (especially if riparian, costal etc) or boardwalk tending to be preferred whereas mall is most associated with suburban shopping centres or urban streets given over to pedestrians.  The strip mall is a smaller array of shops, assembled usually in a single line parallel with a major arterial road with parking for cars directly in front.  The Pavilion on the Mali in New York’s Central Park was used in the nineteenth century by the “Park Band:, the mali a paved path lined with trees.

Lindsay Lohan enjoying Wetzel's Pretzels, Americana Mall, Los Angeles, June 2009.

The concept of a large structure or area containing the outlets of many traders wasn’t new, recognizable forms identified in the archeological record of many cultures across millennia.  What distinguished the modern mall was that it was inherently (1) suburban and (2) dependent on customers using private motor vehicles rather than walking or public transport.  It was these factors which enabled malls to develop at scale; the land being bar from city centres was cheap and the customer catchment was vast, needing only to be in driving range so thus could service an area of a hundreds square miles or more, something which explains why malls always had vast, often multi-layered car parks.  Urban geographers regard the Northland Center in Southfield, Michigan (which opened in 1954) as the first mall in the modern sense.  Immediately successful, it spawned imitators, immediately in the US and within a decade around the world, the building of malls tracking the development of road systems and the growth in car ownership.  One effect was the decline of commercial activity in city centres as traders followed their customers’ migration to the suburbs, a trend which really didn’t decline until the 1990s when the fashion for inner-city living returned.  This affected both the viability of malls and interest in developing new ones, something exacerbated by the arrival of the “big box” operations which were either single outlets at scale or thematic clusters of traders within the one geographical space.  For many customers, the clusters were attractive because, unlike the malls which tended to limit the number of similar businesses which could lease space, in a cluster one could find many shops servicing the same market centre, typically specialties such as home improvement or decorating.  Consequently, many malls had during the last quarter century been abandoned, demolished or re-purposed, the twenty-first century growth in on-line shopping accelerating the decline.

Pall Mall “Girl Watching” cigarette advertising, circa 1962.

Pall Mall menthol cigarette advertising, 1969.  By then called “the black demographic”, one of the first widespread uses of African-Americans in advertising published in mainstream media was for menthol cigarettes, reflecting the high market penetration of the product in that group.

The game Pall Mall was the subject of a number of contemporary paintings and sketches and Samuel Pepys (1633–1703; noted English diarist & Admiralty administrator) who had mentioned the game as early as 1661, in May 1663 noted in his diary: “I walked in the park… discoursing with the keeper of Pell Mell who was speaking of it; who told me of what the earth is mixed that do floor the Mall and that over all there is cockel-shells powdered.”  In an entry in 1665, Pepys referred to both street and game as Pell Mell.  There were many “Pall Mall” alleys in London and one of them became the street well known variously as a centre of artistic life, the home of many London clubs, the location of the War Office (when war offices were a thing) and a place on the Monopoly board.  Mall tends to be pronounced mawl in most of the world except in England where Pall Mall is pel mal although, even then, the phonetic influence of the US is such that mawl is often heard for uses other than the street.  In Australia, when the Queen Street Mall was in 1982 opened by Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen (1911–2005; Country Party premier of Queensland, 1968-1987), he insisted it must be pronounced mawl because he had no wish to be reminded of Malcolm Fraser (1930–2015; Liberal Party prime minister of Australia 1975-1983).