Monroeville, Pennsylvania

Monroeville is a Pittsburgh suburb that grew almost overnight from farmland into a commercial boomtown after the Pennsylvania Turnpike arrived and postwar prosperity sent families east out of the city. The municipality adopted a home rule charter in nineteen seventy-four. Its Monroeville Mall, which opened in nineteen sixty-nine and expanded through the nineteen seventies, became one of the largest shopping centers in western Pennsylvania.

But Monroeville Mall earned a different kind of fame in nineteen seventy-eight when filmmaker George Romero shot his horror sequel Dawn of the Dead entirely inside it, turning the consumer temple into a zombie apocalypse. The mall became a cult pilgrimage site for horror fans worldwide, even as stores came and went over the decades. Today Monroeville is home to roughly twenty-eight thousand people and a quietly proud piece of American pop-culture geography.