On this date in 1954 one of the first shopping malls opened in Southfield, Michigan. 10 things you might not know about shopping malls:
The earliest shopping malls as we know them today were designed by Victor Gruen, who took his inspiration from his home town of Vienna. The shops were arranged around an indoor court with fountains, goldfish ponds, sculptures, and plant life, so that people could socialise and hang out there as well as go shopping. His design quickly caught on and similar centres began springing up all over the USA.
From the start the architect Frank Lloyd Wright hated the idea. After visiting one, he commented, “You’ve got a garden court that has all the evils of the village street and none of its charm. Who wants to sit in that desolate-looking spot?”
Victor Gruen himself wasn’t a fan of what his creation evolved into in the end. He felt that the sense of community had been lost in the numerous copies and became nothing but “Giant shopping machines”. In a speech he made in 1978 he declared: “I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments.”
Malls, or shopping centres as we call them on my side of the pond, have their origins in public markets and bazaars. The first covered shopping passage was the Passage du Caire in Paris. The Burlington Arcade in London was opened in 1819. In the US, The Arcade in Providence, Rhode Island lays claim to being the country’s first shopping arcade, in 1828.
Key features of a mall are a food court, where a number of food outlets and a seating area are located, and at least one large chain store, which was necessary to draw in the shoppers in the hope they would also visit the smaller shops around them. These larger stores are termed anchor stores or draw tenants. In the UK these might be Marks and Spencers and John Lewis.
Sources differ as to which is the largest shopping mall in the world. According to Wikipedia it’s Iran Mall, in Tehran 1,950,000 m2 (21,000,000 sq ft), but the Guinness World Record is apparently held by The Dubai Mall which allegedly attracts more tourist visitors per year than the Eiffel Tower, Disney World and Niagara Falls combined.
The largest mall in America (and the world, according to some) is Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. Its area is 520,257 m2 (5,600,000 sq ft), but that figure excludes other attractions such as a theme park associated with it. Perhaps if you count all the extra attractions as well as the shops it would beat all the rest.
Films set in shopping malls include Chopping Mall (1986), Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge (1989), Eight-Legged Freaks (2002) and Night of the Living Dead (1968).
Like casinos, shopping malls are designed to make people lose their sense of time and get lost and hopefully make more impulse buys as they wander around looking for the way out which is by design not clearly signposted. It’s a not altogether unpleasant feeling and even has a name, the “Gruen Transfer,” after the designer of the first malls. Fact 3 suggests he might be turning in his grave, however.
While as recently as the 1990s, 140 new malls were being built in the US every year, there proved to be a limit to how many of them even the US economy could support. Many of them closed and were abandoned, and in 2007 no new malls were built in America at all. Abandoned malls became known as "greyfields" or "dead malls"perhaps only useful as locations for horror movies! Victor Gruen’s first mall was a victim, too, when its final anchor store closed on 22 March, 2015, exactly 61 years to the date of the mall's opening. There’s a website dedicated to abandoned malls: deadmalls.com.
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