The holiday shopping season came and went, and there is a reason for the season. That reason begins with a C: Capitalism. And where better to observe the civic religion of Capitalism (or Crapitalism, if you prefer) than the American shopping mall. Often left abandoned or derelict in today’s world, the mall is in many places seen as a symptom of excessive, cancerous commercial growth. However, the aesthetics of the shopping mall are also the aesthetics of nostalgia. I had just read Alexandra Lange’s brief, seminal study of the mall, Meet Me By the Fountain, and wanted to see how the Greater Pittsburgh Area’s socio-economic ecosystem played out in relation to its most famous shopping center: the Monroeville Mall.
So, naturally, with this line of thought coursing through my mind, I decided on a visit. Would it be, I wondered, like visiting an ailing grandparent at a nursing home, the mall in a state of slow, terminal decline? Or would it be more like a visit to Pemberley, that palatial, bucolic estate that has long captured imaginations around the world?
The Monroeville Mall, out in the boonies beyond Pittsburgh proper, infamously served as the setting of Pittsburgh horror auteur George A. Romero’s 1979 film Dawn of the Dead (Romero is survived by his protege, Tom Savini – the latter of whom was the mind behind another locally-relevant cult classic, Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh). George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was at once timely and prescient. The film was made at the peak of the American shopping mall’s popularity, and the mall as a base of operations for mindless living dead was clear commentary on the draw of conspicuous consumption.
Fittingly, the Monroeville Mall features a small museum dedicated to the films of George A. Romero, and zombie movies more generally. Upon entering the mall after a lengthy bus journey on route P68 through the suburban countryside (sometimes picturesque and other times a newspaper-worthy image of economic depression), I asked for directions from the first person I figured would know where to find anything zombie or horror-related: a cashier at the mall’s Hot Topic store. I was pleased to see that, unlike Hot Topic locations that have veered into selling exclusively colorful anime and internet meme merch, the Monroeville location kept some of that legendary chain’s old edge. This one continued to sell spiked leather bracelets, trousers with gratuitous bondage straps, and t-shirts advertising classic Gothic Rock and Industrial bands. After treating myself to a brief shopping spree there, I headed upstairs to the main attraction: the Museum of the Dead.
After being greeted by a listless desk clerk, I walked past the museum’s gift shop and into the Museum of the Dead. Despite its small size, the museum felt appropriately labyrinthine on a first visit. I ran into several mannequins of zombies and other undead – and, my imagination running wild, I occasionally jumped at the sight. The uncanny valley effect of the mannequins was strong, and I could easily picture myself as the Final Girl of a horror film fending off hordes of once-human monsters descending upon me all at once.
It was not only cinematic portrayals of the undead that the museum boasted. The museum also contained time capsules to the time of Dawn of the Dead’s filming. This included a piece of the escalators used at the Monroeville Mall in 1978, as well as a mannequin wearing a mall security uniform from the era. The museum also featured a map of the mall’s floor plan in 1978. This detail was particularly intriguing: almost none of the stores that occupied the mall at the time remained present in 2023.
The entire time, I kept thinking back to Meet Me By the Fountain. Lange describes the history of the mall as an entity that developers used to displace downtown shopping districts, moving commercial activity to outer-ring suburbs. The Greater Pittsburgh area’s dynamic, however, proved immune to this pattern. Most residents of the city proper do not live all that far from commerce. Nearly every neighborhood is within a block of quick access to groceries, restaurants, novelty stores, technology, and fast fashion. Ironically, it was Pittsburgh’s immunity to this pattern that allowed the Monroeville Mall to survive as an active mall into the present.
The Monroeville Mall has saved the residents of Monroeville and neighboring municipalities a lengthy trip into the city of Pittsburgh for their shopping needs. These small towns on the city’s outskirts reflect a pattern common to small towns: of remaining frozen in time. It was with the Living Dead in mind that I visited the Monroeville Mall, wondering what I would find. A living mall? A dead mall? A living dead mall? Instead, the mall – including the Museum of the Dead – proved to be a comfortably quaint and nostalgic throwback.
Adam Arthur holds a graduate degree from Florida State University. He is the author of two poetry collections, Levers of Power and Sound and Substance. A transplant to Pittsburgh, he has lived in the area for three years and takes inspiration from his surroundings in his written work.
PETRICHOR 
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