The Sad Evolution of the Strip Mall

A group of schoolchildren, about six or seven years old, stand in front of a display at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, listening to a docent explaining what they're looking at. This was an old-fashioned strip mall, he told them, recreated just as it would have been in the 1920s or '30s, with wax figures standing in for the merchants and shoppers who would have been there.

It didn’t look like what we think of as a strip mall today. The fronts of the stores were open to the street. There was a produce stand with neat rows of fruits and vegetables, and a butcher shop with a glass case. Behind it stood the butcher himself, hands raised over his head, holding a fish and a knife. He would have called out to the people in their cars out front, explained the docent, trying to lure them in to buy some of his choice offerings.