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60 free Shopping Malls trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The enclosed shopping mall was invented by a socialist Viennese architect who wanted to give American suburbs a town square and spent his last years disowning what developers did with it. This quiz starts with the ancestors: the Passage du Caire in Paris, the Burlington Arcade, the Galleria in Milan, Kansas City's Country Club Plaza, and the world's first fully enclosed mall in Lulea, Sweden. Then Victor Gruen, Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, Frank Lloyd Wright's sniffy review, the Bergen Mall, the Gruen transfer, Taubman's carpet-free floors and the first food courts. The second half is the giants and the ghosts: Mall of America and its indoor theme park, West Edmonton Mall's wave pool and roller coaster, Dubai Mall's 105 million visitors, Iran Mall's record concrete pour, King of Prussia, Gateshead's Metrocentre and the Trafford Centre, the retail apocalypse and dead malls, the mall that inspired Dawn of the Dead, and the free-speech case that reached the US Supreme Court. Easy questions ask what a food court is; the expert tier asks for dates, square footage and architects. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on shopping malls, Victor Gruen, Southdale Center, Mall of America, West Edmonton Mall, Dubai Mall and related pages, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on architecture, retail brands and the 1980s.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What kind of retailer traditionally anchors a shopping mall?
Department stores
Anchors are placed as far apart as possible so shoppers walk past the smaller stores between them.
Q 02What did the word "mall" originally mean before it was applied to enclosed shopping centres in the late 1960s?
A pedestrian promenade with shops
Bergen Mall used the name in 1957, but such places were still called shopping centers for another decade.
Q 03A shopping centre that has lost its anchor stores and most of its shoppers is popularly known as what?
A dead mall
Ghost mall and zombie mall are the alternatives.
Q 04According to the International Council of Shopping Centers, how much gross leasable area makes a mall "super-regional"?
Over 800,000 square feet
A regional mall runs 400,000 to 800,000 square feet with at least two anchors.
Q 05The first covered shopping passage, built in 1798, was in which city?
Paris
The Passage du Caire came two decades before London's Burlington Arcade.
Q 06Which famous covered London shopping passage opened in 1819?
Burlington Arcade
The Royal Opera Arcade beat it by three years, in 1816.
Q 07The Galleria that opened in 1877 and gave its name to malls worldwide is in which city?
Milan
It is named after Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of Italy, and was built by Giuseppe Mengoni.
Q 08The Arcade, built in 1828 and claiming to be America's first shopping arcade, is in which US city?
Providence
It survives as a downtown landmark.
Q 09Country Club Plaza, considered the first planned suburban shopping centre for car-borne shoppers, opened in 1923 where?
Kansas City
J. C. Nichols styled it after the architecture of Seville, Spain.
Q 10The world's first fully enclosed shopping mall opened in 1955 in Lulea, in which country?
Sweden
Ralph Erskine designed it and it was simply named Shopping.
Q 11Which Austrian-born architect pioneered the regionally sized, fully enclosed shopping mall in 1956?
Victor Gruen
Malcolm Gladwell has called him the most influential architect of the twentieth century.
Q 12Gruen's Southdale Center, the first enclosed climate-controlled mall in the US, opened in 1956 in which Minnesota suburb?
Edina
The Dayton family, who owned the department store, financed it.
Q 13Which famous architect visited Southdale in 1956 and said Gruen "should have left downtown, downtown"?
Frank Lloyd Wright
He said its garden court had "all the evils of the village street and none of its charm".
Q 21Which mall-building firm created the first food courts, after a failed 1971 attempt at Plymouth Meeting Mall?
The Rouse Company
The Plymouth Meeting version was judged too small and insufficiently varied.
Q 22Which 1975 Chicago skyscraper on the Magnificent Mile pioneered the "vertical mall" with an eight-level atrium?
Water Tower Place
The concept was conceived in the late 1960s by Marshall Field's development arm.
Q 23In the mid-1990s, how many malls a year were still being built in the United States?
About 140
By 2007, for the first time in 50 years, none were built at all.
Q 14Gruen arrived in New York from Vienna in 1938 with, in his words, an architect's degree, no English and how much money?
Eight dollars
His first hit was the Lederer leather-goods boutique on Fifth Avenue.
Q 15Gruen also designed the first outdoor pedestrian mall in the United States, opened in 1959 in which Michigan city?
Kalamazoo
He was an advocate of putting pedestrians before cars in city centres.
Q 16How did Gruen come to feel about the suburban malls his design spawned?
He abhorred them and their "land wasting seas of parking"
In 1978 he said, "I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments."
Q 17What is the "Gruen transfer"?
The moment shoppers lose track of their intentions in a confusing layout and start impulse buying
Gruen himself disapproved of such manipulative techniques.
Q 18The first retail complex promoted as a "mall", Bergen Mall, opened in 1957 in which New Jersey town?
Paramus
It was open-air until 1973; Paramus Park later hosted a pioneering food court too.
Q 19Developer A. Alfred Taubman removed carpeting from his malls in 1980 because he believed it did what?
Increased friction and slowed shoppers down
He also used dimming daylight and rising electric light to make the afternoon seem to last longer.
Q 20Which mall's second-floor food court, opened in 1974, is credited as the first successful one in the United States?
Paramus Park
Toronto's Sherway Gardens had built one three years earlier.
Q 24What was notable about 2007 in American mall history?
No new malls were built for the first time in 50 years
City Creek Center in Salt Lake City, opened in 2012, was the first built after the recession.
Q 25Roughly how many shopping centres did the United States have by 2010, up from 4,500 in 1960?
About 108,000
Experts describe the market as "extremely over-retailed".
Q 26By 2022 how much retail space per person did the US have, against about 4.5 sq ft in Europe?
24.5 sq ft
That glut is why operator Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield decided to quit the American market.
Q 27Real estate experts label a mall "dying" when its vacancy rate reaches at least what?
40%
In 2014 nearly 3 percent of US malls were in that category.
Q 28The 1980 Supreme Court case Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins concerned what issue inside a California mall?
Free speech
California expanded speech rights so campaigners could reach shoppers on private property.
Q 29Mall of America opened in 1992 on the former site of which sports venue?
Metropolitan Stadium
The Minnesota Vikings and Twins had played there until 1982.
Q 30Mall of America is in which Minnesota city?
Bloomington
It sits across the interstate from Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport.