Mall of America

Based on Wikipedia: Mall of America

Somewhere in a shopping mall in Minnesota, there's a single red stadium seat bolted to a wall. It marks the exact spot where, on June 3, 1967, a baseball soared 520 feet through the air—the longest home run ever hit at Metropolitan Stadium. The player who swung that bat was Harmon Killebrew, a Hall of Famer for the Minnesota Twins. The stadium is long gone now, demolished in the 1980s. But that seat remains, suspended in its original position, now overlooking not a baseball diamond but an indoor amusement park with roller coasters named after SpongeBob SquarePants.

This is the Mall of America.

The Megamall Rises

When the Mall of America opened its doors on August 11, 1992, it wasn't just another shopping center. It was, and still is, the largest mall in the United States. The largest in the entire Western Hemisphere. The twelfth largest shopping mall in the world. Spread across 5.6 million square feet—that's 129 acres, or roughly the size of 88 American football fields—it contains more than 500 stores arranged along three levels of pedestrian walkways, with a fourth level on two sides.

Before they'd even finished building it, people were already making up names for the place. "The Megamall" was the obvious one. "Sprawl of America" had a nice ring to it. But my favorite is "Hugedale"—a play on the Twin Cities' constellation of shopping malls: Rosedale, Southdale, Ridgedale, and the now-defunct Brookdale. Each of those older malls seemed impossibly vast to a previous generation. The Mall of America made them all look quaint.

About 32 million people visit annually. To put that in perspective, the entire population of Minnesota is only around 5.7 million. The mall's annual visitor count equals roughly eight times the state's population. Of those visitors, about 80 percent come from a broad swath of the upper Midwest—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Illinois, and Ohio. For many families in that region, a trip to the Mall of America is something like a pilgrimage, a secular destination that appears on vacation itineraries alongside the Grand Canyon and Disney World.

The Ghost of Metropolitan Stadium

The site's history predates shopping by several decades. Metropolitan Stadium—"the Met," as locals called it—opened in 1956 in Bloomington, Minnesota, just southeast of the junction of Interstate 494 and Minnesota State Highway 77. For 26 years, it served as home to the Minnesota Twins baseball team and the Minnesota Vikings football team. The stadium could hold more than 48,000 fans for baseball and even more for football, and it hosted some genuinely historic moments.

Then came the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis. The dome was climate-controlled—no small thing in Minnesota, where winter temperatures regularly drop below zero—and when it opened in 1982, both the Twins and the Vikings packed up and moved. Metropolitan Stadium sat empty and abandoned for a few years before being demolished entirely.

The Ghermezian brothers saw opportunity in all that vacant land.

The Ghermezians: Masters of the Mega-Mall

The Ghermezian family emigrated from Iran to Canada in the 1960s. By the 1980s, the four brothers—Eskander, Nader, Raphael, and Bahman—had made themselves masters of a peculiar real estate specialty: the destination mega-mall. Their first major success was the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, which opened in phases between 1981 and 1985. When fully complete, it was the largest shopping mall in the world, featuring not just stores but an indoor waterpark, an ice rink, a replica of Christopher Columbus's ship the Santa María, and a hotel.

The philosophy was simple, if ambitious: make the mall a destination in itself, not just a place to buy things. Give people reasons to spend an entire day—or a weekend—wandering around. Include entertainment that you couldn't find anywhere else.

The Mall of America was designed with this philosophy in mind. The Ghermezians worked with the global design firm DLR Group, and the architect Jon Jerde contributed to the project. The Bloomington Port Authority signed an agreement with the Ghermezian organization in 1986, and groundbreaking took place on June 14, 1989. Other partners included Melvin Simon and Associates (a major mall developer) and Teachers Insurance and Annuity, which provided financing.

This partnership would later become the source of considerable legal drama.

The Battle for Control

For six years, starting in the late 1990s, a fierce legal battle raged over who actually owned the Mall of America. On one side stood Simon Property Group, the managing general partner. On the other, the Ghermezians and their Triple Five Group.

The dispute began in 1999, when Simon Properties purchased a 27.5 percent equity stake from Teachers Insurance. Combined with their existing shares, this gave Simon majority ownership of the mall. The Ghermezians were furious. They claimed they had never been told about the deal and sued Simon, arguing that Simon had violated its fiduciary responsibility—its legal obligation to act in the best interests of all partners, not just itself.

The case wound through the courts until 2003, when a federal appeals court ruled in favor of the Ghermezians. Control and planning authority returned to the creators of the concept. Then, on November 3, 2006, the Ghermezians settled things conclusively: they paid approximately one billion dollars to gain full control of the Mall of America.

The Triple Five Group, still owned by the Ghermezian family, continues to own the mall today. They also own the West Edmonton Mall in Canada and the American Dream mall in New Jersey—giving them a portfolio of three of North America's most enormous shopping complexes.

What's Inside: A City Under One Roof

The Mall of America is organized into four zones, arranged around a roughly rectangular floor plan. At each corner, an anchor department store was meant to draw shoppers deep into the mall. When it first opened, those anchors were Nordstrom, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and Sears—four of the most recognizable names in American retail.

The landscape has shifted since then. Bloomingdale's announced its closure in 2012, ending a nearly two-decade run. Sears held on until 2018, finally closing as part of the company's nationwide collapse. Today, the anchors include Macy's, Nordstrom, L.L. Bean, and the Crayola Experience—yes, the crayon company now occupies anchor space in America's largest mall. The former Sears location remains vacant, a cavernous reminder of retail's ongoing transformation.

Surrounding these anchors are hundreds of smaller stores, including what retail professionals call "junior anchors"—large stores that aren't quite big enough to anchor a corner but still draw significant traffic. These include Toys "R" Us (which survived at Mall of America even as most other locations closed), H&M, Barnes & Noble, Nordstrom Rack, and DSW. The American Girl store, once a major draw for families with young daughters, was replaced in late 2020 with a 24,000-square-foot M&M's retail store.

Two hotels now operate on the mall's property: a JW Marriott and a Radisson Blu. The JW Marriott is a 14-story tower that opened after a $104 million investment, financed by an unexpected source—the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, a Native American tribe whose casino operations have made them one of the wealthiest tribal nations in the United States.

The Amusement Park in the Middle

At the heart of the Mall of America sits Nickelodeon Universe, the largest indoor theme park in the United States. It wasn't always called that. When the mall opened in 1992, the park was named Camp Snoopy, themed around the Peanuts comic strip characters created by Minnesota native Charles Schulz. In 2008, after the licensing agreement ended, Nickelodeon took over, and the park was rebranded with characters like SpongeBob SquarePants and the kids from The Fairly OddParents.

The park occupies the central atrium of the mall, seven acres of rides and attractions under a massive skylight. Unlike most indoor amusement parks, which tend to feel artificial and cramped, Nickelodeon Universe contains a surprising amount of natural foliage—real trees and plants scattered throughout. The floor itself varies dramatically in height, with the highest ground level sitting 15 feet above the lowest, creating a sense of terrain and topography that's unusual for an indoor space.

The rides include several roller coasters: SpongeBob SquarePants Rock Bottom Plunge, the Fairly Odd Coaster, Back at the Barnyard Hayride, and Avatar Airbender. There's a thrill ride called BrainSurge and a miniature golf course called Moose Mountain, featuring eighteen holes on fast astroturf. For visitors who remember the original Camp Snoopy, the transformation can feel jarring—Snoopy and Charlie Brown replaced by Patrick Star and Timmy Turner. But the rides remain genuinely thrilling, the kind of attractions that draw families from hundreds of miles away.

The Aquarium Beneath Your Feet

Below the mall, you can walk through a 300-foot curved tunnel with 14 feet of water over your head. This is the Sea Life Minnesota Aquarium, home to more than 4,500 sea creatures. Sharks glide overhead. Stingrays drift past. Sea turtles paddle slowly through the blue.

The aquarium offers experiences beyond simple viewing. You can arrange sleepovers, spending the night surrounded by fish. Certified scuba divers can actually swim in the tanks. Children's birthday parties take place amid the marine life. It's the kind of attraction that transforms a shopping trip into something more memorable—which is, of course, exactly the point.

How Do You Heat This Thing?

Minnesota winters are brutal. Temperatures drop well below zero. Snowstorms can dump feet of snow in a single day. So how does a 5.6-million-square-foot building stay warm?

The surprising answer: mostly, it doesn't try.

Despite the cold winters, only the mall's entrances and some below-ground areas are actually heated. The vast majority of the common spaces—the walkways, the atrium, the areas around the amusement park—rely on passive heating. Skylights above the central area allow solar radiation to enter. The lighting fixtures, electronic devices, and sheer body heat of thousands of shoppers generate warmth. Even in winter, the air conditioning systems sometimes run during peak hours to prevent the building from becoming uncomfortably warm.

The individual stores, of course, have their own heating systems. But the communal spaces exist in a thermal equilibrium created largely by the presence of people and electricity. It's a clever piece of engineering, reducing energy costs while taking advantage of the very crowds the mall was designed to attract.

Getting There: Trains, Buses, and Very Large Parking Ramps

Two seven-story parking ramps flank the east and west sides of the mall, providing 12,287 parking spaces. Overflow parking to the north adds another 1,200 to 1,500 spaces. When IKEA opened nearby in 2004, it added 1,407 more spaces to the area's parking capacity.

But not everyone drives. In the lower level of the eastern parking ramp sits the Mall of America transit station, the busiest transit hub in Minnesota. Two lines of the Metro network terminate here: the METRO Blue Line, a light rail connection that runs north to downtown Minneapolis via the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, and the METRO Red Line, a bus rapid transit route that heads south to Apple Valley.

The transit station underwent a $25 million upgrade, completed in October 2019. The indoor waiting area opens daily from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Various hotels in the area, along with the Mystic Lake Casino, offer free shuttle service to and from the mall.

One thing you cannot do, however, is use the mall as a park-and-ride facility. Overnight parking is banned. If you're thinking of leaving your car at the mall and taking the light rail to the airport for a week-long vacation, think again. Commuters are required to use the nearby 30th Avenue station's parking ramp instead.

Security: Lessons from Israel

The Mall of America takes security seriously—perhaps more seriously than any other shopping center in the United States. The mall employs Behavior Detection Officers, known as BDOs, who have undergone training in Israel. Each officer completes at least 240 hours of specialized instruction.

The methodology focuses on intent rather than means. As Doug Reynolds, the former Security Director, explained in congressional testimony in 2008, BDOs are taught to look for suspicious indicators across three categories: people, vehicles, and unattended items like backpacks, shopping bags, and suitcases. The goal is to identify potential threats before they materialize, whether from terrorists or ordinary criminals.

This approach has not been without controversy. In 2010, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported that mall security officials were instructed to question or detain individuals exhibiting what they deemed "suspicious behavior." Signs of such behavior could include photographing air-conditioning ducts or appearing to hide something. Some officials within the Bloomington Police Department worried that these methods might infringe on people's rights.

In 2011, both NPR and PBS aired programs documenting what they characterized as security abuses by mall personnel. The mall has faced criticism for how it handles protests and demonstrations, as well as for incidents involving religious expression. In January 2023, a video went viral showing a man being asked to remove or cover a T-shirt with the slogan "Jesus saves" and a crossed-out Coexist logo. A security guard told him that "Jesus is associated with religion and it is offending people."

Protests, Politics, and the Public Square

The Mall of America occupies an unusual position in American civic life. It functions, in many ways, like a public square—a place where tens of millions of people gather annually, where ideas circulate, where community happens. But it is not a public square. It is private property, owned by a Canadian company, and its owners can set rules about what happens inside.

This tension has produced several notable confrontations.

On December 21, 2014, thousands of protesters gathered in the mall's rotunda for an unauthorized demonstration organized by Black Lives Matter. The protest responded to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the decision not to prosecute the officer involved, as well as to the death of Eric Garner in New York. The mall closed the areas around the rotunda. Police arrested 25 demonstrators. The Bloomington City Attorney pursued charges against the organizers and sought compensatory damages for overtime paid to additional security.

A year later, when Black Lives Matter announced plans for another demonstration on December 23, 2015, mall officials filed a restraining order against the movement's activists. Eight individuals were sued in Hennepin County District Court. The mall's lawsuit sought not only to prohibit the demonstration but to require the defendants to delete all social media posts about it. The lawsuit additionally asked the court to jail the activists unless they publicly announced the demonstration's cancellation on social media. The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota called this an "improper prior restraint on speech" and an unconstitutional overreach.

In 2013, members of the First Nations protest movement Idle No More attempted to hold a Native American round dance at the mall, hoping to repeat a successful event from the previous year. Mall security stopped them. Two organizers from Duluth were arrested on site for trespassing.

Threats and Responses

In February 2015, the al-Shabaab militant group—a Somalia-based organization affiliated with al-Qaeda—released a propaganda video calling for attacks on the Mall of America and other Western shopping centers. Although al-Shabaab had never launched attacks in North America, security at the mall was tightened in response. The Department of Homeland Security issued a one-day alert urging shoppers to remain vigilant.

The mall's most violent incident, however, had nothing to do with terrorism. On April 12, 2019, a five-year-old boy was thrown from the third-story balcony by a 24-year-old man named Emmanuel Deshawn Aranda. The child landed near the Michael Kors store, outside the Rainforest Cafe. He was hospitalized for more than five months with severe injuries but eventually recovered. Aranda was sentenced to 19 years in prison that June.

The Pandemic and Beyond

On March 17, 2020, the Mall of America closed its doors for the first time since opening. The COVID-19 pandemic had arrived, and like shopping centers across the country, the mall went dark. It remained closed for twelve weeks.

The reopening was originally scheduled for June 1, 2020. But civil unrest swept through the Twin Cities following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25. The mall postponed its reopening until June 10. When it finally welcomed visitors again, only 150 of its more than 500 tenants were open for business.

The pandemic accelerated trends that had been building for years. Department stores continued to struggle. Online shopping captured an ever-larger share of retail spending. The movie theater on the mall's fourth floor, which had operated since three days after the mall's grand opening, went through multiple ownership changes—from General Cinema to AMC to mall management to CMX Cinemas—before CMX's bankruptcy led to its replacement by B&B Theatres in 2021.

Expansion: Because Bigger Is Always Better

Despite the challenges facing retail, the Mall of America continues to expand. In 2008, the mall received a tax break for a proposed $2 billion expansion. The legislation gave the city of Bloomington authority to increase taxes on sales, lodging, food, and beverages to finance a parking ramp at the mall.

In 2012, the Triple Five Group announced a $200 million expansion into the north parking lot. The project broke ground in fall 2013 and began opening in stages in summer 2015, adding a hotel and 200,000 square feet of retail space.

In 2018, the mall proposed an indoor waterpark, with costs estimated between $150 and $200 million. The Bloomington City Council approved the plan in March 2022. If built, the waterpark would make the Mall of America even more of a destination resort—a place where families could spend entire weekends without ever stepping outside.

The Seat on the Wall

And so we return to that red stadium seat, bolted to a wall in a shopping mall, marking where a baseball once flew.

There are other memorials to Metropolitan Stadium scattered through the Mall of America. A plaque embedded in the floor of Nickelodeon Universe marks where home plate once sat. Another plaque, added in 2018, marks the 50-yard line where every Minnesota Vikings game began with a coin toss. On the west side of the first floor, near Nordstrom, stands a bust of Tom Burnett, a Bloomington native who died aboard United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, helping to storm the cockpit and prevent the hijackers from reaching their target.

These markers sit within a building devoted largely to commerce, to entertainment, to the circulation of goods and money and people. Thirty-two million visitors pass through each year. Most are there to shop, to ride roller coasters, to walk through an underwater tunnel and watch sharks glide overhead.

But some of them pause at that red seat. They read the plaque explaining who Harmon Killebrew was and what he did on June 3, 1967. They try to imagine a baseball sailing 520 feet through the air, higher and farther than anyone thought possible.

Then they walk on, into the sprawl of America, where you can buy almost anything, eat almost anything, experience almost anything—all under one roof, on the bones of what used to be a ballpark.