Made In America - Bill Bryson [141]
‘We must sensitively observe the colourful, stimulating and commercially busy urban scenes in the market squares in Central European cities in order to understand the contribution to community life the open spaces in our new shopping towns can make,’ he wrote in his 1960 book Shopping Town USA.14 He ‘systematized’ the shopping centre and developed the idea of an anchor store at each extremity to encourage people to stroll from one to another. The idea was to get shoppers out of their cars and on to their feet. He insisted on having public gathering places at strategic spots – open areas with benches, fountains and perhaps a piece of sculpture or two to encourage social interaction and a sense of community.
In 1956, the year that the British novelist Aldous Huxley coined the much-needed term spending spree,15 Gruen’s utopian vision was given tangible shape with the construction of the Southdale Center in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina. Built at a cost of $20 million, it was the biggest shopping centre in the world, and the commercial wonder of its age. Reporters from almost every large newspaper and magazine in America came to marvel at its 10 acres of enclosed shopping area, 72 stores and 45 acres of parking with space for 5,200 cars. It became the model from which almost all other malls in America were cloned. Gruen followed Southdale with other malls in a similar vein – the Northland and Eastland shopping centres near Detroit, the Southland Shopping Center near Minneapolis, Valley Fair in San Jose, the Bay Fair Center in San Leandro, California, and the South Bay Shopping Center in Redondo Beach, California.
Shopping mall design became a science. At their conferences, mall planners bandied about new concepts like Reilly’s Law of Retail Gravitation (essentially, the mix of stores necessary to keep people moving) and optimal positional isochrones (another way of saying that the best location for a shopping centre is near a highway interchange). No one any longer thought about the idea of encouraging people to linger or socialize. Benches were built without backs so that people wouldn’t linger on them, and food court tables given just enough crampedness to induce a sense of discomfort after about ten minutes. Victor Gruen’s vision of people sitting with cappuccinos, reading newspapers on gripper rods provided by a thoughtful management, or playing chess beside whispering fountains never materialized.
Shopping centres didn’t just transform towns, they often effectively created them. In the late 1940s Paramus, New Jersey, was a dying little community with no high school, no downtown to speak of, and almost no industry or offices. Then two shopping centres were built along Route 4 – Macy’s Garden State Plaza and Allied Stores’ Bergen Mall. Within a decade Paramus’s population had more than quadrupled to 25,000 and its retail sales had shot up from $5 million to $ 125 million. Much the same thing happened to Schaumburg, Illinois. In 1956 it had 130 people. Then two things happened: O’Hare became Chicago’s main airport and the Woodfield Shopping Center, with over two million square feet of retail space, was opened. By 1978 Schaumburg’s population had increased to 50,000 and it was on course to becoming the second biggest city in Illinois after Chicago by the turn of the century.16
As