The Oldest Mall in America

The building at the corner of Westminster and Weybosset Streets is a Greek Revival structure with six Ionic columns on each of its two facades, each column forty-five feet tall. It was built in eighteen twenty-eight, which makes it the oldest enclosed shopping mall in the United States by a margin of decades. The architects were Russell Warren and the firm of Tallman and Bucklin, working from the vocabulary of ancient Greek temples and applying it to retail commerce in a young American city.

The Arcade, as it has always been called, was not immediately a success. It sat far enough from the established retail district that early merchants struggled to draw customers, and it acquired the nickname "Butler's Folly." What saved it was a fashionable hat shop that drew wealthy women to Westminster Street, which gradually became the city's main commercial corridor.

The building closed in two thousand and eight when its retail tenants could not hold on, and reopened in October of two thousand and thirteen as something its original builders would not have recognized: a mixed-use building with ground-floor shops and dozens of micro-loft apartments on the upper floors, each only a few hundred square feet. The National Historic Landmark designation it earned in nineteen seventy-six did not specify what had to happen inside.

Walk through it now and the skylit arcade still does what it was designed to do: pull light down into the center of a city block and invite you to slow down.