Shopping Centers and Malls

Shopping Centers and Malls. Modern shopping centers are responses to automobility. As the old pedestrian downtown yielded in the 1920s to the demands of impatient drivers seeking quick access to merchandise, strips of shops began to open adjacent to curbside parking slots. By the mid‐1920s this new relationship between car and store had made leisurely strolling a kind of luxury item in its own right. On the suburban fringes of Kansas City, Missouri, in 1923, the developer J.C. Nichols offered motorists the chance to park and walk through an ersatz Spanish city embellished with imported mosaics and fountains. Nichols maintained the illusion that this was Old Seville with parking ramps concealed behind adobe walls. In this Country Club Plaza, shopping became an adventure straight out of a movie matinee.

World's fairs had offered exotic if temporary shopping venues since the nineteenth century, as had some of the larger department stores, with periodic festivals of goods from faraway places in equally atmospheric settings. But the conjunction of pedestrianism, shopping, and theme began with Country Club Plaza. In the depression‐ridden 1930s, hard‐pressed retailers increasingly appealed to customers by enforcing the separation between driver and vehicle. Los Angeles, a city soon to be transformed by the car, became the site of much experimentation with protomalls. The Farmers’ Market (1934), designed to resemble a midwestern farm, and Crossroads of the World (1936), in which blocks of shops ranged from Elizabethan quaintness to the moderne style, presaged the postwar invention of the themed mall.

Southdale (1956), the first fully enclosed shopping mall, was built by the architect Victor Gruen in Edina, Minnesota. Roughly contemporary with Disneyland in Anaheim, California, Southdale took as its theme a modernist, minimalist elegance, with sculpture positioned about a decorous interior evoking a posh art museum.

As conceived by Gruen, Southdale represented a kind of surrogate civic center for American suburbia. Set like a jewel amid acres of free parking, Southdale offered the Minneapolis suburbs their closest approximation of a spiritual and physical core. Later in the 1950s, in Midtown Plaza, in Rochester, New York, Gruen tried to revitalize a cold‐weather inner city decimated by white flight with a vertical mall built over an underground parking ramp topped by an office tower. By then the lessons of Disneyland were clear to anyone planning a pedestrian environment: Like the theme park, Midtown was brash, bright, colorful, and fun. Entertainment and atmosphere became the keys to retailing success.

Mall of America, which opened in 1992 in Bloomington, Minnesota, not far from Southdale, was America's largest and best publicized shopping mall. Despite provision for elderly mall‐walkers and the occasional concert, arts fair, or church service, few malls served as true civic centers. They did, however, evoke the feeling of an old urban core: walking for pleasure, crowds, spectacle, and the sense of being part of an ephemeral public. But for most consumers, the mall with its themed stores, restaurants, and even tree‐shaded (indoor) amusement parks made shopping a glamorous diversion. Transcending mundane commercial transactions, the modern megamall turned buying and selling into a kind of conceptual time travel.
See also Amusement Parks and Theme Parks; Automotive Industry; Business; Capitalism; Consumer Culture; Fifties, The; Leisure; Mass Marketing; Suburbanization; Urbanization; World's Fairs and Expositions.

Bibliography

William Severini Kowinski , The Malling of America, 1985.
Chester H. Liebs , Main Street to Miracle Mile, 1985.

Karal Ann Marling