In Paris, the Birthplace of the Mall Attracts New Visitors

"Diminutive cathedrals to commerce and leisure, the arcades offered unheard of amenities to the emerging class of bourgeois consumers. Gas lighting, heated shelter from rain and mud, a panoply of goods and services in a contained space, cafes and restaurants where you could rest and observe fellow lingerers — these were a decided plus over the shopping experience of hunting and gathering all around town." Later in the 1800s, the department store in Paris signaled an end to the arcades' success. However, several arcades have been recently restored featuring a variety of retailers from the stamp and postcard stores and immigrant retailers of The Passage des Panoramas to chic boutiques of The Passage Jouffroy.

"The German literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin spent the final 13 years of his life (he died in 1940, running from the Nazis) trying to fashion a theory of modernity based on the arcades. In their spatial ambiguity — visitors are both indoors and walking on an extension of the street — and in the bright scattering of impressions they presented to consumers, he thought he had found a secret history of the 19th century."