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By Root 2585 0

shopping centres blossomed, downtowns began to die. Between 1948 and 1954, at the height of America’s postwar economic boom, downtown retailers in America’s thirteen largest cities lost on average a quarter of their business.17 One by one downtowns grew more lifeless as stores and offices fled to the suburbs. Hudson’s Department Store in Detroit closed in 1981 after watching its annual sales fall from $153 million in 1953 to $45 million in its last year – the victim, ironically, of the automobile, the product that had brought Detroit its wealth.18 Sears closed its flagship store on State Street in Chicago in 1983. All over America, where downtown department stores survived it was as a matter of pride or of tax breaks, and seldom one of commercial logic.

By the early 1980s America had 20,000 large shopping centres, which between them accounted for over 60 per cent of all retail trade. They employed 8 per cent of the workforce, nine million people, and were generating sales of $586 billion – 13 per cent of the nation’s gross national product.19 By 1992 the number of shopping centres had almost doubled again, and new malls were opening at the rate of one every seven hours. Four billion square feet of America’s landscape was shopping centres, two-thirds of it built in the previous twenty years.20 Shopping centres weren’t just growing in numbers, but evolving into new types. One type was known as the large regional center – that is, a shopping centre with at least 400,000 square feet of shopping space, or more than most downtowns. There were almost 2,000 of these by 1990. Another type came to be known, somewhat ominously, as power centers, unenclosed developments, usually built in a U-shape around a central parking lot and containing at least one category killer store – a place like Toys ‘R’ Us or Circuit City selling a particular type of product in such volume and at such low prices as to deter any nearby competition.

Mall shopping had become America’s biggest leisure activity. Mall of America in Minneapolis, the country’s biggest mall with 4.2 million square feet of consumer-intensive space (though still considerably less than the world’s biggest, the West Edmonton Mall in Canada with 5.2 million square feet), was forecast to attract more people than the Grand Canyon in its first year of business.21 By the early 1990s Americans were spending on average twelve hours a month in shopping malls, more than they devoted to almost any activity other than sleeping, eating, working and watching television.22

And what of Victor Gruen, the man who had started it all? Appalled at what he had unleashed, he fled back to Vienna where he died in 1980, a disappointed man.

13

Domestic Matters

If the British disliked Americans for their use of English, they liked them no more for their habits. In book after book through the nineteenth century – William Cobbett’s A Years [sic] Residence in the Unites States of America, Harriet Martineau’s Society in America, Dickens’s American Notes, Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, Frances Wright’s Views of Society and Manners in America, Thomas Hamilton’s Men and Manners in America – the British showed a strange and unfriendly preoccupation with American life and habits.

‘In regard to the passengers,’ wrote Thomas Hamilton in typical vein, ‘truth compels me to say, that any thing so disgusting in human shade I had never seen. Their morals and their manners were alike detestable.‘1 William Cobbett offered the opinion that ‘the natives are by nature idle, and seek to live by cheating’. Frances Trollope detested almost everything:

The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured, the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterwards