Dubai Mall

This guide to Dubai Mall traces the morning in February 2010 when a crack appeared in the world's largest acrylic aquarium panel and water began sheeting across the shopping floor, and what the mall built back around it afterward. It follows the mall's improbable timing too, opening in November 2008 just as the global financial crisis hit, and the collection of oddities gathered inside, from a fiberglass pearl-diver waterfall to a Wyoming-excavated dinosaur skeleton in the Grand Atrium. Start at the Grand Atrium, where several of these threads meet at once.