Is the Mall a City or Is the City a Mall?
Is the Mall a City or Is the City a Mall?
Probing the nature of America’s suburban public squares.
Meet Me by the Fountain
An Inside History of the Mall
by Alexandra Lange
Bloomsbury Publishing, 320 pp., $28
IN MEET ME BY THE FOUNTAIN, BOOK CRITIC Alexandra Lange does what too few mall pundits do: She treats the mall as a serious subject of study. It may be America’s temple to consumerism, but it is, or at least aspired to be, more than that. And in any case, like the suburbs more generally, the mall is no longer a tacky postwar innovation but became, for a time, one of the most familiar backdrops of American life.
The fact that the mall was actually designed after traditional walkable urban shopping districts is almost old hat nowadays, a bit of trivia a dad in high socks might share with his kids every time they visit one. Sure, the mall superficially resembles a downtown block; sure its midcentury European-born inventor, Victor Gruen, envisioned something like a “true” downtown for America’s burgeoning suburbs. But does any of that have any meaning today?
Lange presents not just a deeply researched history of the mall, but the entire story of America’s twentieth-century land-use revolution. And the relationship between the mall, considered as a sort of private city, and the real city is a much closer and complex one than you might imagine.
Victor Gruen, traveling around the postwar United States and chewing on ideas in planning and retail that were being tried out all over the rapidly suburbanizing country, conceived of the mall. His malls—the first of which was built on an open-air plan—were meant to be gathering spaces, not just commercial spaces. They were not, or at least not only, “temples of consumerism”; they were actually envisioned as more civic alternatives to the untidy suburban commercial strips that by the 1950s were already showing their age. His first enclosed mall—also the nation’s first—was envisioned as a full-fledged mixed-use development, but only the commercial portion was built.
The mall was intended from the outset to leaven the suburbs with a hint of the urbanity that most of its residents both fled and missed. Even the mall’s department store anchors were directly descended from the old urban department stores that anchored commercial districts. In other words, the mall developed its reputation for being a purely commercial space as its founding civic promise became increasingly attenuated. And in some ways, the replacement of ailing malls with mixed-use “town centers” is not really a new development but a substantive return to the original idea of the mall. “If downtown could not be made to hitch up to the mall,” Lange summarizes the views of the first mall builders, “the mall would become downtown.” And so, in a way, it did.
The Urban Land Institute defines “town center,” in part, as “an enduring, walkable, and integrated open-air, multiuse development that is organized around a clearly identifiable and energized public realm where citizens can gather and strengthen their community bonds. It is anchored by retail, dining, and leisure uses.” That “public realm” language notwithstanding, these developments are master-planned and generally privately owned and managed. They are the successor to but also the fulfillment of Gruen’s original idea of the mall.
But that idea, with its more civic and urban emphases, was deferred almost from the outset when malls first started getting built. Lange notes that the adjacent housing often imagined as being part of mall projects rarely ended up going up alongside them, and the land was instead sold to other developers for various uses. Federal money, importantly, did not support mixed-use development, which the architects and planners of the country’s new suburban landscape had deemed obsolete. The car-centric nature of the mall properties, and the massive contiguous parking lots they required to host all the car-bound shoppers, also made it difficult to connect them to local neighborhoods in the way that urban commercial districts were. Many early mall projects envisioned things like libraries, post offices, schools, and other civic or public amenities being located within their walls. This vision did not last very long.
The shopping, it turned out, was enough to attract large numbers of visitors, who, of course, became little more than customers. Despite all of the talk about the mall as a new type of downtown, it was urban primarily in its form and trappings, not in its purpose—not just because cities were about more than shopping, but because the mall, as a tightly regulated private property, had a desired market segment. In attempting to sanitize the city and make it a racial and economic monoculture, mall developers did what they felt they needed to do in midcentury America to lure white middle-class housewives to their properties. And, from a commercial perspective, it worked.
But in doing this, they were not taking part in the building of cities. The mall was a sort of Disney-esque abstraction of a city, a city-like place understood primarily as an amenity and not as the result of fundamental human activities. All of this—the mall builders’ shallow ideas about urbanism; the destruction of real cities under the euphemism of “urban renewal”; an abstract, elite reinvention of what urban life was about—suggest that as early as the 1950s and 1960s, Americans had already broken with their local and civic pasts deeply enough to have forgotten what cities in essence were.
When Lange writes, “the malls of the late 1950s and early 1960s were Main Street under glass, their dimensions taken from the street fronts of prewar downtowns,” one gets the sense that she is describing a process of taxidermy.
NONETHELESS, THE COMPLICATED but surprisingly close relationship between the mall and the classic downtown becomes even more blurred later in the twentieth century, as the drive for order, with its overtone of consumerism and undertone of racism, brought the “private city” back to the old cities, then hollowed out from “urban renewal.” Often, this entailed the exclusion of cars, but for the purpose of transforming commercial districts from live, local neighborhoods—where Jane Jacobs’s “intricate sidewalk ballet,” during which a complex set of interlocking needs is spontaneously managed, unfolded—into, well, outdoor shopping malls.
The deadening effect on street life of permitting only pedestrians, and the flattening effect of explicitly turning commercial blocks into outdoor malls, was one reason the “pedestrian mall” concept, which at one point convinced over 200 American cities to pedestrianize portions of their core downtowns, failed within only a couple of decades. (Victor Gruen was also a champion of this planning concept.) Likewise, urban markets like Faneuil Hall, which Lange includes in the taxonomy of malls and dubs “festival marketplaces,” began as innovations but later struggled to maintain foot traffic. (Faneuil Hall, however, was one of the more successful of these.)
Lange also traces the evolution of the quasi-private “business improvement district,” the de-mapping of public streets, and other innovations that permitted private commercial interests—and private security—to claim what had once been de facto and de jure public space. The “town center” has perfected this transformation, aping the form not just of a street, but of an entire downtown, under the aegis of a single commercial landlord. Despite some legal protections in some states, the First Amendment usually does not apply in these places. The Reston Town Center, in my own home county of Fairfax, Virginia, even once ejected a local journalist for taking photos without permission. In a country whose “urban” life takes place mostly outside of actual cities, this raises fundamental political questions. Can an accident of urban planning effectively nullify Americans’ constitutional rights?
The racial element is impossible to ignore here. Lange cites concerns that traditional downtowns were—or sometimes, just felt—unsafe or uncomfortable for white suburban housewives. Black customers, who shopped downtown not least because they were locked out of the growing suburbs, were largely ignored by mall developers despite being a major customer base. Racism sometimes trumped economics. Malls were, in Lange’s words, a bet on the commercial viability of a “whites-only version of the city.” And when malls became “black malls,” as demographics in older communities changed, they frequently became targets for “revitalization”—even when they were doing brisk business.
WHILE RACE AND RACISM help to explain much of America’s twentieth-century land-use revolution—the suburbs; the mall; the destruction, controlled reinvention, and even privatization of the city—another core element is the car, and the logic of mass motoring.
Within the almost obvious observation that the mall is modeled after a downtown street is a much deeper insight: that the success of the mall, despite its complete car-centricity, is reliant on the magic trick of making the car disappear completely, so long as the customer remains inside.
The chief advantage of the mall over the urban downtown is not its car-centric nature outside, but its utter lack of cars inside. And the chief disadvantage of shopping and socializing in town is not the walkable nature of the street, but the constant noise and occasional menace of cars. The flight from downtown was a story of crime and race and fear from the beginning, but concerns about traffic safety were also cited in the earliest materials about suburban malls.
Like every magic trick, there is a concealed mechanism by which the “magic” occurs. In the case of the car-free mall, that subterfuge is the massive, bleak, frequently empty ocean of asphalt that renders the actual human-centered spaces into little stranded islands. (Look at a mall on the satellite map, and see how much more land the parking lot covers than the building.) That is the cost—once mass motoring is assumed—of retaining a carless walking and shopping experience. The intrinsic logic of suburban, car-oriented land use, which merges stuff with cars, is a poison pill for human commerce and socializing. Suburbia, and the mall that typifies it, is all about escaping the very thing on which it necessarily relies. There is something absurd and even perverse about this.
And so, in an almost too-perfect coda to the story of the dying mall, the “town center”—a reverse-engineered simulacrum of a city—sprinkles barely-disguised parking garages in among the stores and apartments, thereby making the subtext text.
After decades of destroying and forgetting, the actual town or city—where commerce and constitutional rights coexist; where “mixed-use development” is the default; where the automobile has not imposed a bland, impersonal scale with its demand for space—is barely a live option these days, despite the extent to which something like it has been a revealed preference all along. So we are left with two varieties of suburban escapism: that which rejects the city, and that which copies it without understanding it. Which one is more honest, and which better navigates the contradiction at the heart of America’s twentieth-century land-use transformation, is hard to say.