outdoor mall

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

caught on the "international male" page (about shopping opportunities
for gay men, all over the world) in the March 2005 issue of Instinct,
p. 38:
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Another recent addition to L.A. is the Grove, and outdoor mall, which
has your basics (Banana Republic) as well as department stores and more
boutiquey shops.
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surely "outdoor (shopping) mall" has come past my eyes thousands of
times, but this was the first time i reflected on it.  its meaning is
(almost) transparent, so it's unlikely to find a place in dictionaries
(and, indeed, it's not in the OED Online).  still, it's not without
some interest semantically.

first, it has the form of a marked, special case: your classic
(shopping) mall -- the Galleria, the Mall of America -- is indoors,
under a roof.  outdoor malls are, well, outdoors and open to the sky.

but an outdoor mall isn't just a place to shop that happens to be open
to the elements.  it shares one crucial element with indoor malls: easy
pedestrian access from one store to another, without interference from
traffic.

so your ordinary "shopping street", like Fifth Avenue, doesn't count as
a mall, because of the traffic on the avenue and the side streets.
more generally, city "shopping districts" don't count as malls.  if,
however, the shopping street or district is closed to traffic, then we
have a species of outdoor mall, sometimes described as an "outdoor
pedestrian mall".  (i draw here from some of the 46,900 sites that
Google provides for "outdoor mall".)

and your ordinary "shopping center", with clusters of stores sprinkled
around a gigantic parking lot, doesn't count as a mall, because
pedestrian access from one store to another is not, in general, easy.
at the San Antonio Center, a few  miles south of me, it borders on the
harrowing, in fact, and i don't recall anyone ever referring to the
place as a "mall".  if, however, you clump all the stores together in a
central core, with the parking all around it, then you have an outdoor
mall.  so the Stanford Shopping Center, a mile north of me, which has
this arrangement, is commonly referred to as a "mall".  in fact, the
center's literature refers to it as a "mall", a "shopping mall", an
"outdoor mall", and an "outdoor shopping mall".

a subtype of this sort of outdoor mall is the "shopping village", which
resembles an apartment or condo complex (often on several levels), and
indeed not infrequently has housing mixed in with the stores and
restaurants and health clubs and barber shops and whatever.

(note that all sorts of non-shopping establishments can be located in
malls, but if there isn't a significant opportunity for shopping, it's
not a mall, but merely some kind of "center".  it's like drugstores:
you can sell all sorts of things in a drugstore that aren't in any way
describable as "drugs", but there has to be a significant presence of
things that are.)

outdoor malls can be permanent fixtures or temporary events.  so, when
the main street of Elmira (NY) is closed for the annual Maple Syrup
Festival, with booths selling all sorts of things on the street, the
event is described as an "outdoor mall".

a further subtlety: malls, both indoor and outdoor, are designed to
foster not mere shopping, but a "shopping experience".  it's expected
that visitors to the mall will window-shop, socialize in the common
areas, and enter more than one establishment.  if a high percentage of
visitors do business at just one establishment, you have something that
is technically a mall, but not a very good example of one -- the mall
equivalent of the penguin in the bird world.  such malls are actually
very common in the u.s.: this is the ubiquitous (outdoor) "strip mall",
where the establishments are arrayed in a row, making access to any one
of them easy from the parking area, without inviting walking from one
to another (though this is possible).

two footnotes.  (1) in addition to malls in the real world, there are
virtual malls, "web malls" (53,200 raw Google web hits).  (2) the hits
for "outdoor mall" take in not only uses of this sequence of words
parsed as adjectival "outdoor" plus head noun "mall" (as above), but
also some parsed as a noun-noun compound meaning 'mall related to the
outdoors'; these are malls, real or virtual, devoted to outdoor
equipment (for hiking, climbing, barbecuing, etc.) or activities.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), not a mall rat