This Day in American History: The Mall of America Opens
- ForAmerica
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
On this day in 1992, a dead baseball stadium in Minnesota came back to life as the largest shopping mall in America -- complete with its own indoor amusement park.
When the Minnesota Twins and Vikings left Bloomington's Metropolitan Stadium for the new Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis in 1982, the city was left holding 78 acres of prime real estate and no obvious use for it. After the stadium was demolished in 1985, the Bloomington Port Authority fielded proposals for office buildings, housing, and convention space before settling on something far more ambitious: a partnership with Alberta's Ghermezian family, developers of the record-setting West Edmonton Mall, to build the largest retail and entertainment complex in the country.
Ground broke on June 14, 1989, and three years of fast-track construction followed -- so fast, in fact, that a later investigation found Bloomington hadn't properly monitored building codes because parts of the mall were being built while other sections were still being designed. Local retailers panicked, and competing malls across the Twin Cities rushed to renovate and expand before the giant could open its doors.
The Mall of America opened on August 11, 1992, with crowds gathering before dawn to be among the first inside. At 4.2 million square feet across four levels, it launched with 330 stores anchored by Nordstrom, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and Sears, plus something no American mall had ever attempted at that scale: a full seven-acre indoor amusement park, now known as Nickelodeon Universe, built right into the center of the building. It opened during a national recession, which made the gamble even bigger -- and it paid off anyway.
More than three decades later, the Mall of America remains the largest shopping mall in the United States, drawing an estimated 40 million visitors a year -- more than seven times the population of Minnesota itself. It has weathered lawsuits between its own developers, a $200 million expansion, and the entire rise of online retail that killed off countless smaller American malls, and it's still standing on the same 78 acres where the Twins and Vikings used to play.
Also on this day:
1919 -- Germany's Weimar Constitution is signed, establishing the Weimar Republic.
1949 -- President Truman nominates Gen. Omar Bradley to become the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
1965 -- Rioting breaks out in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, lasting six days.
1994 -- Major League Baseball players begin a strike that ultimately cancels the World Series.
A dead ballpark and an empty lot became the biggest mall in the country -- and 40 million people a year still show up to see it for themselves.
Source: Britannica, Mall of America, MinnPost
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