Babes in Toyland

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When, in 1954, he finished his first center (Northland, outside Detroit)—an open-air complex with nearly a hundred shops, and with the first suburban branch of Hudson’s, the venerable department store, as its “anchor—Gruen again proved sensitive, perhaps deviously so, to shoppers’ psychology and desires. He had recognized that the colossal new suburban population, which had grown by 43 percent in just the previous six years, was largely bereft not only of commercial life but also of community life. Shopping centers, he fervently believed, would provide it, and would thus translate the urbanity of his beloved Vienna to the suburbs. With its auditoriums and club rooms (think coffee percolators and earnest talks on space exploration, The Family of Man, and the UN), Northland’s civic functions were no doubt somewhat stilted and artificial, but the clean-lined, modernist center—constructed with a remarkably high level of detail, craft, and finish—had colonnaded walks, sophisticated and pleasing graphic design, playful fountains, elaborately landscaped plazas and courts (Gruen grasped that Northland’s most important feature was not the buildings but the space between them), and a cornucopia of whimsical, high- middlebrow sculptures, some of which had to be discovered by pedestrians, as they were partially hidden in the plantings (Gruen’s budget for them was a then-staggering $200,000). It was a delightful place to stroll (Northland and Gruen’s few other outdoor malls, most notably Phoenix’s Maryvale—alas, all but ignored by Hardwick and Wall—are, along with his New York boutiques, the architect’s aesthetic triumphs).

But what neither of these perceptive books sufficiently emphasizes is who was doing the strolling (and who was finding sculptures in the plantings): Gruen understood that mothers and their young children were suburbia’s nearly sole daytime inhabitants, and that they—mostly unmoored from their extended families and thus most in need of the community, or at least the public, life that shopping centers promised—would be by a long way Northland’s most frequent visitors. Bowlby’s assertion that “the history of shopping is largely a history of women” is made more comprehensible in this context by the fact that as early as 1963, according to Betty Friedan, women held 75 percent of purchasing power. As Chung analyzes in the Harvard guide, “Public space has been formed—directly, indirectly, and more significantly than previously understood—by the interaction of women and shopping.” To grasp the form and functions that shopping centers and malls have taken, and especially the part they played in mid-twentieth- century American life, it’s not enough to assess, as Hardwick and Wall astutely do, the intentions and strategies of their primary creator. Like the great nineteenth- century urban department stores, these temples of consumption responded adroitly to the needs, values, and aspirations of their primary customers, even down to the configuration of the parking spaces (a subject on which mall designers have always lavished exhaustive attention), which were made unusually wide specifically to accommodate women drivers, many of whom were newly licensed.

The legions of critics of these centers, such as the historian Kenneth Jackson, like to point out derisively that in contrast to the vaunted vitality and diversity of the urban streetscape, the centers “cater exclusively to middle-class tastes” and that the “theme of their design is enclosure, protection, and control.” Precisely. Enclosure, protection, and control were just what a mother with young children in tow was looking for. But Gruen’s great insight, and his great advance from those seductive New York boutiques, was to recognize that the same qualities that lured customers into a commercial space could also keep them there, and that if they simply spent more time in that space—even hours consumed in the aimless wandering that children favor—they would ultimately spend more money. People came to Northland to be enriched or entertained, or to discover sculptures. But, as Gruen knew, “[they] did one other thing also. They shopped.” Before Northland opened, sales figures for it were projected to be $35 million in its first year and $50 million by its fifth; in fact, it brought in $50 million its first year and $100 million by its third.

The ideas put into practice at Northland would eventually alter not only the way Americans shopped but also the ways they understood and experienced the purposes and boundaries of the public and commercial spheres. But Gruen wouldn’t fully realize these ideas until he built his second shopping center, Southdale, outside Minneapolis. There he resolved several problems that had limited retailing’s full fruition, many of which hadn’t even been recognized as problems. With its scorching summers and gelid winters, the area around Southdale, Gruen determined, allowed for only 126 days a year in which customers could be expected to drive to a shopping center and meander. The solution was obvious: the first enclosed shopping center. An innovative heat pump (one of the largest in the world, a single system that ventilated, cooled, and heated) kept the mall at a constant temperature of 72 degrees (Gruen claimed that the savings in construction costs—the storefronts could now be made of light and inexpensive materials—would pay for the climate control). Air conditioning had already proved crucial to the development of the department store. Besides permitting customers to remain in the store for longer periods of time throughout the year, it also allowed the building to be larger, which meant not only that more goods could be displayed and sold but also that the store would be more difficult to exit, again creating more opportunity for customers to spend. But the enclosed mall with a garden court at its center—which attracted customers with what Gruen called its “eternal spring,” and which obviously afforded more “enclosure, protection, and control” than an open-air center—trapped shoppers inside a space larger and even less escapable than any single department store.

In a triumph of cooperative capitalism, the competitor to Southdale’s anchor department store was persuaded to locate at the opposite end of the same center; the two rivals together attracted more people to the mall, and made the smaller stores adjacent to the anchors central, rather than peripheral. The increased bustle and density (to heat and cool it efficiently, Gruen built Southdale on two levels; it therefore occupied a far smaller footprint than did open-air centers) in itself attracted yet more people, who stayed longer and bought more.

Gruen thus hit upon a winning formula that he and a small number of other shopping-center architects and developers would replicate and expand on in increasingly tatty versions throughout the country, as nifty speckled tile floors gave way to cheap carpeting that would eventually spread from floors onto walls and columns, and as cheesy and soon- chipped molded plastic replaced nearly everything else. The Gruen formula is tired now, but it had a great run—he alone would ultimately build 45 million square feet of shopping area.

By the late 1960s, Gruen had begun to forsake his creation, and had in fact joined in the chorus of critics who blamed the mall for suburban sprawl and an atomized society. His solution—which has evolved from forlorn pedestrian malls, formed when such cities as Kalamazoo and Fresno closed a few downtown blocks to traffic and local merchants ponied up for some potted plants and multicolored walkways, to such city/shopping hybrids as Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade—essentially involved moving the mall (the suburban version of the urban) to the city. Of course, these pedestrian-oriented shopping zones have proved so popular that developers are now transplanting the urban version of the suburban version of the urban to the suburbs. Shopping is ever adaptable.

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