“Malls in the late forties and early fifties were risky. Suburban customers still believed in making major purchases in the central business districts of cities and towns, where they expected to find the greatest selection of merchandise and the most competitive prices. After the tax laws of 1954, this changed. Shopping mall developers were among the biggest beneficiaries of accelerated depreciation, and they most often located projects where the older strips met the new interchanges of major projects. With the new tax write-offs, over 98 percent of malls made money for their investors.”

“In the 1954 Internal Revenue Code, a Republican Congress changed forty-year, straight-line depreciation for buildings to permit 'accelerated depreciation' of greenfield income-producing property in seven years. By enabling owners to depreciate or write off the value of a building in such a short time, the law created a gigantic hidden subsidy for the developers of cheap new commercial buildings located on strips. Accelerated depreciation not only encouraged poor construction, it also discouraged maintenance...After time, the result was abandonment.”

“In the wake of the tax bonanzas for new commercial projects, roadside strips boomed. Private developers responded to the lack of planned centers, public space, and public facilities in suburbs by building malls, office parks, and industrial parks as well as fast-food restaurants and motels.”

“I was in the shopping mall because that's where I go lately. For the last couple of weeks, I've been going there every day, trying to figure out why people go there. It's kind of a personal project.”

“But perhaps we see a different set of sins in our own time: a reluctance to take on any new Great National Projects, a general self-indulgence, a culture built on consumption, whole generations raised in an environment where dreams are purchased at the mall. If we could somehow select the virtues of early Americans from amid their failings, we might choose their optimism, their endurance, their inventiveness, their willingness to do something big and difficult--like dig a canal across the mountains or build a new kind of road on rails. These people took on challenges that a more sober and settled population might consider too ambitious, if not downright insane.”

“A new lover. Fresh knowledge and a virgin body to paw. Shopping together for wicker furniture in the mall. Visiting the lingerie store. Picking out matching shotguns.”