Valley Fair Mall on 3500 South in West Valley City, Utah, is 56 years old and still open. It opened in Granger in the summer of 1970, when that part of Salt Lake County was outside any city.
That first mall was one enclosed building with two department stores and a four-screen cinema. By 2015 it had spread onto its own parking fields and reached about 1 million square feet.
Getting bigger didn’t hold on to the department stores. Mervyn’s closed in 2008. The Macy’s in the old ZCMI store closed in 2016, and the mall’s own nine-screen cinema shut a year later…