Shopping malls

But social values were very much on the mind of Victor Gruen, the Austrian-born designer who created the first enclosed mall in the United States, Southdale Center in suburban Minneapolis, in 1956. Gruen wanted to give patrons a version of the lively and intensely social shopping districts he remembered from the Vienna where he grew up. It wouldn’t just be a collection of stores — it would include schools, post offices, medical centers and museums. A modern mall, especially in a cold-climate place like Minnesota, would be a sort of urban market town, a Main Street under glass.

In the years before his death in 1980, Gruen realized and regretted the failure of his creations to meet his original vision. They may have been pedestrian-friendly in their way, but they were nevertheless islands in a sea of parking. And the idea of a shopping mall as a key element in modern social life was rarely mentioned. 

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When you look at what has happened to many of the dead malls of the last century, you find a whole variety of retrofits. Some of them have simply been torn down, of course, but others have been repurposed to contain housing, hotels, museums, gyms, churches, senior centers, libraries and a whole variety of other features. Many of these are public enterprises, successors to the strictly private mall operations that have dominated shopping-center history.

In perhaps the most startling transformation, Gruen’s Southdale Center in Minnesota, the first of the fully enclosed malls of the 1950s, is being re-created as a multipurpose development that includes luxury hotel rooms and apartment complexes, a fitness center in place of a defunct J.C. Penney store, medical clinics and day care for children, and a variety of other public and private properties.

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Ironic as it may seem, malls such as Southdale are moving closer to being the entity that Victor Gruen envisioned — places where different segments of the community can gather and find their basic needs as well as their consumer desires met, and also satisfy their desire for sociability.