American malls are dying a slow, sad death, as evidenced by those gloomy photos of abandoned and decaying shopping malls.
But it's also nice to reminisce about the golden days when teens would loiter away their Saturdays shopping and families would eat together at the resident The Cheesecake Factory.
Sravani Vadlamani, a doctoral student in transportation engineering at Arizona State, has created an animated map (first found via The Washington Post) that shows the boom of retail hubs throughout the 20th century.
Her MapStory includes every kind of mall, including strip, outlet, indoor, and outdoors. All the information is obtained from ASU GIS Spatial Data Repository, which includes data from the Directory of Major Malls.
Check out the map below (move it to the left or zoom out to see the East Coast):
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