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Shopping Mall (Object Lessons) - Monroeville Mall Admin - 08-05-2026
Archive artifact discussion
Artifact: Shopping Mall (Object Lessons)
Type: Book
Year: 2017
Submitted by: Monroeville Mall Admin
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31848144-shopping-mall
Archive page: View artifact details
Article summary
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
The mall near Matthew Newton's childhood home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was one of the state's first enclosed shopping malls. Like all malls in their heyday, this one was a climate-controlled pleasuredome where strangers converged. It boasted waterfalls, fish ponds, an indoor ice skating rink larger than Rockefeller Center's, and a monolithic clock tower illuminated year-round beneath a canopy of interconnected skylights. It also became the backdrop for filmmaker George A. Romero's zombie opus Dawn of the Dead .
Shopping Mall is part cultural history, part memoir, and part elegy for a distinctly American institution. Newton uses the mall not just as a retail space, but as a lens for examining suburbia, consumer desire, family life, adolescence, memory, mental health, violence,...
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