“They float on the landscape like pyramids to the boom years, all those Plazas and Malls and Esplanades,” writes Joan Didion of the American mall. Shopping centers— those strange, in-between spaces that are at once odes to consumerism, pulses on the latest fashion trends, gathering places, dining locales, and otherwise— are, in many ways, architectures of a bygone era. 

But on the Peninsula, they continue to be live sites of inadvertent gathering and deliberate consumption, places that we can close-read to uncover our culture’s shared values and desires. Join us on September 13th for a walk through the Stanford Shopping Center accompanied by a set of readings: we’ll read Joan Didion’s nonfiction essay “On the Mall” (1975) alongside archival documents that reveal the history of the Stanford Shopping Center. As we historicize this site of shopping and gathering on the Peninsula, we will also turn a historian and critic’s eye to the mall as a marker of contemporary American consumerism and identity. 

Text: On the Mall by Joan Didion (1975), historical photographs and newspaper articles about the Stanford Shopping Center (1950s-60s)
Date: September 13th, 1:00 - 3:30pm
Location: Blue Bottle Coffee @ the Stanford Shopping Center

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