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What was your mall?<\/p>\n
Mine was Oakridge Centre in Vancouver. It wasn\u2019t particularly glamorous with its exterior of boring brown brick, but it was the town square for our pocket of the city. Anytime we went to Oakridge, we ran into somebody we knew.<\/p>\n
I knew it intimately as a kid, visiting the family doctor for my first colds and flus, meeting Santa at Christmas, fishing coins out of fountains, rolling in the carpeted play pit and lining up at the cinema for blockbusters like the Harry Potter<\/em> series. Sprinkled among the stuff of typical malls like mmmuffins, the Bay and Electronics Boutique were more local offerings, like the underground library where I learned to read.<\/p>\n As I got older, we pinched shopping carts from the Zellers to race around the neighbourhood. Oakridge was at the nexus of a number of high schools, and the food court came to life after school on Fridays as the after-school lounge for local teens. Whether you wore a private school uniform or not, you\u2019d file in with your friends to feast on dollar tacos and greasy poutines.<\/p>\n You might have had a relationship like this with a mall of your own: the base of errands like haircuts and insurance renewals, and also the site of first dates and family outings.<\/p>\n When Alexandra Lange, the American architecture and design critic, announced that she was writing a book on malls, I eagerly awaited the volume as validation of their overlooked role in the ecosystems of downtowns and suburbs.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve stopped in malls around the world. Some are local town squares, like Oakridge was for me. There\u2019s Portland\u2019s Chinese-Vietnamese Fubonn Shopping Center, fronted by a towering moon gate, where small-time restauranteurs can buy giant stock pots for noodle soups. But some malls are mini-cities. In Shanghai, I stood in the shadow of Aegean Place, a hulking nine-storey spaceship of a mall whose outer shell was a jumbotron. On its roof were a farm and pony ranch.<\/p>\n Despite the mark they leave on the landscape, I\u2019ve encountered very few people paying attention to the rhythms of mall life in my time covering urban issues as a journalist.<\/p>\n North America is full of self-serious planners and designers who worship the Greenwich Village visions of urbanist Jane Jacobs, blasting anything that carries a whiff of suburbia.<\/p>\n I hope this fun fact from Lange shakes their faith: Jacobs herself was a fan of the mall.<\/p>\n In the opening of the book, called Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall<\/em>, Lange shares her own apprehension about writing a title on this topic.<\/p>\n She asks: what\u2019s up with this rush to \u201cdance on the mall\u2019s grave\u201d?<\/p>\n Mall-pocalypse?<\/strong><\/p>\n There have been pop culture critiques of the mall as early as George Romero\u2019s Dawn of the Dead<\/em> from 1978, in which a band of survivors seeking refuge from a zombie horde takes up residence inside a mall. They domesticate their hideaway with sofas and go on dates at the mall restaurant, prompting one of them to cry, \u201cYou are hypnotized by this place, all of you! It\u2019s so bright and neatly wrapped, you don\u2019t see that it is a prison too!\u201d<\/p>\n In the 2000s, malls struggled as their anchor stores left. Romero\u2019s apocalyptic vision became a reality, with DeadMalls.com<\/a> and other pockets of the internet lovingly documenting the fall of local malls: ghostly corridors, parking lots choked with weeds, snow falling through broken skylights.<\/p>\n Did people just not like malls? Lange isn\u2019t convinced by this simple dismissal. Rather than a collapse of malls, she points to a collapse of retail as we once knew it.<\/p>\n There\u2019s the decline of department stores to blame. Once go-to destinations, they\u2019ve lost their cultural role as tastemakers. There\u2019s also the fact that the U.S. simply has too many malls. Mark Cohen, the director of retail studies at Columbia University who also worked as a department store CEO himself, is quoted in the book saying, \u201cThe United States is blessed with a tremendous amount of space, and the mall industry has taken tremendous advantage of that to the point of foolishness.\u201d The mall boom was fuelled by the consumption habits of a booming middle class, which has become more polarized, skewing richer and poorer.<\/p>\n Then came the rise of online shopping. Some predicted it would deal a death blow to malls. But even with the pandemic, this fear proved to be greatly exaggerated. In Canada, online shopping shot up from 14 percent in 2019 to 32 percent in 2020, before dropping down to 15 percent in 2021. It\u2019s true that there are malls closing, but many are also evolving with the times.<\/p>\n \u201cShopping isn\u2019t going anywhere,\u201d writes Lange, \u201cand it\u2019s so much nicer to do it together.\u201d<\/p>\n The Gruen effect<\/strong><\/p>\n So what is it about the mall \u2014 from its form to the activities that it hosts \u2014 that makes it such a persistent global species?<\/p>\n Anyone who dismisses malls as highly evolved creatures of capitalism will miss the ingenuity that led to their creation and design.<\/p>\n The man who started it all \u2014 the magnetic mall maestro \u2014 was Victor Gruen. Gruen was a short man with wild eyebrows who was described by Fortune magazine as a \u201ctorrential talker with eyes as bright as mica and a mind as fast as mercury.\u201d He was born in 1903 in Vienna, where he studied architecture and worked until 1938, when Austria was annexed by Germany under Nazi rule. Gruen, who was Jewish, took off for the U.S., where he built up an eclectic resume.<\/p>\n In New York City, he worked on the Futurama, a model of America two decades into the future, and the centrepiece for the World\u2019s Fair. He later moved to Los Angeles, and with his second wife, an interior designer, they lent their talent to Grayson\u2019s clothing boutiques, designing storefront displays<\/a> that were dazzling exhibits of glass, light and product. He was invited to design a Milliron department store, which included touches like rooftop parking and a glassed-in portion with a restaurant, daycare and community auditorium. Lange expertly details his experience on these appetizers that would eventually lead up to his mall of a main dish.<\/p>\n Gruen came up with the mall concept as a solution to car-oriented suburban sprawl, a strange fact for us to encounter almost eight decades later, considering how malls and sprawl have become so intertwined. Gruen\u2019s dream was the mall as a centre of culture, society and services, the kind of place that old European cities were. But to execute his vision, he needed someone with deep pockets.<\/p>\n So Gruen went to department store giant Hudson\u2019s in Detroit, where he caught the ear of executives worried about the migration out of downtown, where the shopping was done, to the suburbs. By the end of the week, Gruen convinced Hudson\u2019s to be part of a four-mall venture in all directions of Detroit\u2019s sprawl. Northland Centre, the first open-air suburban mall, opened in 1954 to critical and popular acclaim, with up to 50,000 visitors showing up a day \u2014 far more than needed for the project to be profitable.<\/p>\n From there on, Gruen became the go-to guy for mall development. Many signature features of our malls today were present in his earliest iterations: big anchor stores, wings with idyllic names to help orient shoppers, and decorations like plants, fountains, and sculptures. Atriums, elevators, and overhead walkways made it pleasurable to people watch. It was the American answer to the French arcades<\/a> and Italian gallerias<\/a> of the 19th century, grand and memorable shopping strips covered with iron-and-glass roofs. As for food courts, we now think of them as fast and cheap places to grab a bite, but they started off in the style of museum caf\u00e9s, with tastefully chosen chairs and open-air courtyards.<\/p>\n Part of Gruen\u2019s genius would come to be known as the \u201cGruen effect\u201d or the \u201cGruen transfer.\u201d Lange describes it as \u201cthe moment when your presence at the mall tips from being goal-oriented (must buy new underwear, must buy birthday gift) into a pleasure in itself.\u201d<\/p>\n Whose mall is it anyway?<\/strong><\/p>\n Daycares. Theatres. Theme parks. Skating rinks. Ever since Gruen\u2019s creations, other developers and architects ran with the concept.<\/p>\n Lange includes a number of big names behind the making of America\u2019s malls, from Frank Gehry to I.M. Pei.<\/p>\n One surprising figure is science fiction author Ray Bradbury, who too lamented that Los Angeles lacked meeting spots like the plazas of Mexican cities, the outdoor restaurants and bars of Paris and even his own childhood in small town Illinois: \u201cIn those days there was a microscopic community in every neighborhood: the theater, the sweet shop, the drugstore fountain. Your friends? Why, they were always<\/em> there!\u201d<\/p>\n In an essay<\/a> penned in 1970, he dreams up a neighbourhood design with coffee shops and \u201cconversation pits,\u201d which end up inspiring a real mall, the Glendale Galleria. The architect Jon Jerde<\/a> went on to design a number of famous malls like Universal CityWalk and the Mall of America outside Minneapolis, all focused on recreating town squares where interactions can happen.<\/p>\n But while malls were intended to save the suburbs, they only provided a bit of an oasis for public life that didn\u2019t have anywhere else to flourish. And that public life occasionally came to a head with the private face of the mall, as containers of commercialization and consumption, privacy and security.<\/p>\n The architect C\u00e9sar Pelli called one of the malls he designed \u201cmore like a downtown living room.\u201d Gruen\u2019s own vision was the same: for malls to host civic life. But at the end of the day, are malls public or private spaces?<\/p>\n As shopping centres, you might assume that they\u2019re private spaces, no question about it. But legal challenges sought a more definitive answer to this question, with a handful of states<\/a> guaranteeing the right to free speech in malls, determining that they had indeed become the only town squares in their respective communities for public life to happen.<\/p>\n Other states were unconvinced. In 2015, one dramatic confrontation was when Black Lives Matter protesters chose to demonstrate at the Mall of America. A Minnesota judge concluded that malls in her state were private, not public, spaces.<\/p>\n But malls still provide the illusion of public space to many.<\/p>\n In 1982, \u201cmall walkers,\u201d people who jog or walk briskly in malls for exercise, took off. Malls proved to be a haven for seniors and families with young children in particular. They were weather-proof and washroom-rich. For mall-walking seniors, the mall would always be the perfect temperature for cardiovascular exercise and they would never get lost in it the way they might in a neighbourhood. South of Vancouver is Richmond Centre, which has its own version of mall walkers: 250 people meeting in the mornings to do tai chi.<\/p>\n But you never know when a crackdown on these activities might happen. In 2016, Park Royal in West Vancouver tried to chase out<\/a> the regulars playing chess in the food court, a routine that emerged in the early 1980s, around the same time mall walking did. The mall threatened regulars with arrest for loitering, only to later reverse the decision and create a special chess area for players away from the food court.<\/p>\n Are people still welcome in a mall if they\u2019re not shopping enough? It\u2019s all the whim of management.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/vancouver\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2022\/08\/AegeanPlaceMall.jpg\")
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