Benzinga | Aug 11, 2021 10:23AM EDT

This Day In Market History: Mall Of America Opens

Each day, Benzinga takes a look back at a notable market-related moment that occurred on this date.

What Happened? On this day in 1992, the Mall of America opened in Bloomington, Minnesota.

Where The Market Was: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 3,331.10 and the S&P 500 traded at 418.90.

What Else Was Going On In The World? In 1992, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) released Windows 3.1. U.S. President George H.W. Bush signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. Median U.S. household income was $30,636.

Mall Of America Opens: The Mall of America is the largest shopping mall in the Western Hemisphere and the seventh largest shopping mall in the world. The mall has 520 total stores and more than 8.2 million square feet of floor space.

The mall was designed, constructed and owned by Triple Five Group, a private company owned by the Ghermezian brothers that specializes in shopping malls. Groundbreaking for the Mall of America took place in June 1989, and the mall officially opened its doors to the public a little more than three years later.

At the time of its opening, the mall's four anchor stores were Nordstrom, Inc. (NYSE:JWN), Macy's Inc (NYSE:M), Bloomingdale's and Sears.

Triple Five Group added an additional 200,000 square feet of retail space to the original Mall of America as part of a $200 million expansion that began opening in phases starting in the summer of 2015.

In a typical year, roughly 40 million people visit the mall annually, more than seven times the entire population of the state of Minnesota.

Photo: Farragutful, Wikimedia