The rise and fall of the shopping mall

My buddies Ayres and Klinger and I walked its crowded corridors for hours on Friday nights, hoping to meet girls.

That's what we did at South Hills Village Mall in the late 1970s, when we were teens and the American Mall was in its heyday.

Built in the mid-1960s, and the very first indoor mall to be constructed in Pittsburgh, "The Village" was a typical, large two-level structure with "anchor" dep...