That was then

The front entrance to a mall in Milford, Conn.

— Photo by JJBers 

"When I was growing up, in the 1950s, my grandparents had a farm outside Hartford, {on} one of the four corners of a crossroads. The farm was surrounded by orchards, and there was a skating pond for the winter and blueberry bushes for July and August picking. By the time I was a teenager, the three other corners were being filled in, and there were supermarkets and gas stations standing on old farmland. By the time I got out of college, my grandparents’ farm had become a regional shopping mall.’’

-- Robert Yaro, as quoted in Tony Hiss's The Experience of Place (1990).

Population density in the Northeast megalopolis.