Made In America - Bill Bryson [140]
As America spread into the suburbs, businesses naturally followed. Soon every residential area had a row of little businesses – a barber-shop, a corner grocery, a drugstore perhaps – standing beside popular streetcar stops as a kind of prototype shopping centre. These early assemblages of suburban stores were known variously as shopping strips, string streets, or taxpayer blocks (so called because they were often intended only as temporary improvements, the hope being that they would generate enough revenue to pay the taxes on the land until something grander could be erected).
Such was the proliferation of strips, triangles, squares and other collections of retailers that the argument over who built the first true shopping centre in America is all but unanswerable. As far back as 1907 a Baltimore businessman named Edward H. Bouton erected a development of six stores that was slightly set back from the street, with space for parking at the front, and which he called the Roland Park Shopping Center. The National Register of Historical Places recognizes Market Square, built in 1916 in Lake Forest, Illinois, as the first planned shopping mall.12 Others give the honour to Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, built by J. C. Nichols in 1922 as part of a huge housing development. It was the first to contain a few areas exclusively for the use of pedestrians, though its layout was otherwise strictly conventional with the stores facing on to the street. Highland Park Shopping Village in Dallas, built in 1931, was the first to completely segregate shoppers and motorists by turning its back on the street. With the exception of the Roland Park Shopping Center, most of the early complexes were called neither shopping centers nor malls, but something rather cosier, usually incorporating in their titles the words square or village, as with the Highland Park Shopping Village, Suburban Square (built in 1928 in Ardmore, Pennsylvania), and Hampton Village (erected in St Louis in 1941).
The shopping centre was, however, essentially a 1950s phenomenon. By the close of World War II there were just eight shopping centres in America and as late 1949 no more than a dozen. Then in 1950 came the Northgate Center in Seattle, followed the next year by Shoppers’ World in Framingham, Massachusetts, and the floodgates opened. Shopping centres began to go up everywhere. Such was the rate of development that by 1956, Business Week was headlining a story ‘Too Many Shopping Centers’ and noting with alarm that in just two months of 1956 more shopping-centre space opened in America than in the eight preceding years.13 In the generic sense for shopping centre, mall is not recorded until as late as 1967. The word has a curious history. It comes from a game popular in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Called palla a maglio (’ball to mallet’) in Italy and pallemaille in France, it became in England pall-mall (but pronounced ‘pell mell’). The game involved knocking a wooden ball along a leafy alley and chipping it through a hoop – a sort of early hybrid of golf and croquet. By the mid-eighteenth century it had fallen out of fashion, but the name lives on in two London streets: Pall Mall and the parallel avenue called the Mall (which by analogy ought to be pronounced ‘mell’ but isn’t). The Mall in particular became associated with aristocratic strolling. By 1784 mall had found a place in the American lexicon as a fashionable name for any green place suitable for perambulations, notably for the sweep of grass that features in the centre of Washington, DC.
The man responsible for the layout and ambience of the modern shopping centre was not an American but a Viennese named Victor Gruen, who