Malls of a certain age the shopping mall: a look back.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Columns - Viewpoint essay

IN THE 1980S AND '90S, enclosed malls were the supermodels of American commerce: youthful, gorgeous, and incredibly seductive, the people's choice for Best Place to Spend Disposable Income on Candlesticks. In 2011 they're America's retail cougars, doing everything they can to stay sexy while competing with younger, fresher shopping paradigms. In Cleveland the Galleria at Erieview now features a tomato garden in its food court--or as the mall describes it, with a touch of hopeful pathos, a "resource center for sustainability education." Others resort to more radical facelifts and tummy tucks. Nearly 40 percent of the square footage in the Highland Mall in Austin, Texas, is now owned by Austin Community College. The Tri-County Mall in Oliver Springs, Tennessee, is now home to the Beech Park Baptist Church.

It has been five years since a new enclosed mall opened in the United States. Green Street Advisors, a real estate research firm, estimates that 10 percent of the nation's 1,006 malls are on the verge of failure. The genre's last great hope, the Meadowlands Xanadu Mall in New Jersey, sits unfinished after eight years of development, a poignant, 2.4-million-square-foot monument to cost overruns, a bad economy, and investors' waning faith in the idea that the best way to beguile shoppers is to stuff movie theaters, bowling alleys, and as many Hot Topics and Capezios as you can fit into a massive, windowless container.

Today the enclosed mall's DNA lives on in "lifestyle centers" and "vertical power centers." The former typically combine upscale retail, office space, and residential units in village-like developments that feature curbside parking directly in front of single-level shops and fieldstone walking paths lined with palm trees and trophy lakes. The latter stack Targets and Best Buys and Home Depots on top of each other in an almost parodic fashion, the KFC Double Down of retail.

The enclosed mall itself, though, is as dead as your average big-city newspaper. Which is to say: not dead yet, exactly, but no one's betting on its future. Except for a few real estate developers, no one seems all that sad to see the Galleria in such a beleaguered state. The old-fashioned enclosed mall exists most powerfully now as a symbol of tasteless consumerism, ugly architecture, and bland corporate hegemony, revealing our recent past as unsophisticated suburban rubes. Yes, we were once dazzled by indoor fountains and Sunglass Huts.

Even Victor Gruen...