The Economist looks at Birth, death and shopping, and the evolution of the modern shopping mall, which started with the Southdale shopping center in Minnesota:
Southdale’s creator arrived in America as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Vienna. Victor Gruen was a Jewish bohemian who began to design shops for fellow immigrants in New York after failing in cabaret theatre. His work was admired partly for its uncluttered, modernist look, which seemed revolutionary in 1930s America. But Gruen’s secret was the way he used arcades and eye-level display cases to lure customers into stores almost against their will. As a critic complained, his shops were like mousetraps. A few years later the same would be said of his shopping malls.
By the 1940s department stores were already moving to the suburbs. Some had begun to build adjacent strips of shops, which they filled with boutiques in an attempt to re-create urban shopping districts. In 1947 a shopping centre opened in Los Angeles featuring two department stores, a cluster of small shops and a large car park. It was, in effect, an outdoor shopping mall. Fine for balmy southern California, perhaps, but not for Minnesota’s harsh climate. Commissioned to build a shopping centre at Southdale in 1956, Gruen threw a roof over the structure and installed an air-conditioning system to keep the temperature at 75°F (24°C) — which a contemporary press release called “Eternal Spring”. The mall was born.
Gruen got an extraordinary number of things right first time. He built a sloping road around the perimeter of the mall, so that half of the shoppers entered on the ground floor and half on the first floor — something that became a standard feature of malls. Southdale’s balconies were low, so that shoppers could see the shops on the floor above or below them. The car park had animal signs to help shoppers remember the way back to their vehicles. It was as though Orville and Wilbur Wright had not just discovered powered flight but had built a plane with tray tables and a duty-free service.
Oddly, this most suburban American invention was supposed to evoke a European city centre. Hence Southdale’s density and its atrium, where shoppers were expected to sit and debate over cups of coffee, just as they do in the Piazza San Marco or the Place Dauphine. Gruen exiled cars, which he thought noisy and anti-social, to the outside of his mall. Most contemporary critics thought Gruen had succeeded in bringing urbanity to the suburbs. Southdale was “more like downtown than downtown itself”, claimed the Architectural Record. Another asserted, in a rare example of journalistic hyperbole that turned out to be absolutely right, that the indoor shopping mall was henceforth “part of the American way”.
In the US, two developments boosted their growth:
The first was a change in the tax code which allowed investors to write down a large proportion of a new building’s cost as a loss. That made malls much more profitable. The second was a widespread property-tax revolt that deprived local governments of their most reliable source of income. Desperate, they tried to lure businesses that they could milk for taxes. They were particularly keen on shopping malls.
Now, of course, we’ve moved on to outdoor malls — or lifestyle centers, in the jargon of real-estate developers.
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