Mall MakerCopyright © 2004 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper o987654321 Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hardwick, M. Jeffrey. Mall maker : Victor Gruen, architect of an American dream | M. Jeffrey Hardwick. p. cm. ISBN 0-8122-3762-5 (cloth : alk. paper) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Gruen, Victor, 1903-2. Expatriate architects—United States—Biography. 3. Architects—Austria—Biography. 4. Stores, Retail—United States—History—20th century. 5. Shopping malls—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. NA737.G78 H37 2004 725.21/092—de22 2003060192THE GRUEN EFFECT 3 became the Minneapolis conference's scapegoat. All the sins of the shopping mall were laid at his feet. He was held responsible for single- handedly shaping the stereotypical cultural wasteland of suburbia. But as with so many apocryphal morality tales, seeing Gruen as a wholly evil figure responsible for the malling of America, the collapse of an ear- lier communal culture, and America’s consumption mania seems like a rush to judgment. Gruen’s theory about shopping captures only one aspect of his extraordinarily rich architectural career. And yet, for bet- ter or worse, Gruen did help reshape America into a country obsessed with shopping. At first glance, Gruen—a fervent socialist and a Jewish refugee from Vienna who escaped Hitler's occupation—seems an unlikely villain in the drama of American consumerism. In the early 1960s, Fortune mag- azine marveled that Gruen had a puzzling background “completely remote from the U.S. commercial scene.” Within the world of store design, Gruen was extremely fortunate. From the moment he landed in New York City in 1938, he found enthusiastic clients. Beginning with Fifth Avenue boutiques, Gruen helped invent a new aesthetic for retail- ing. Taking his store modernization theories across the country during World War II, Gruen spread and standardized the new commercial aes- thetic. In the postwar years, the successful retail architect would turn to designing paradoxical projects: immense suburban shopping centers and ambitious urban renewal projects.” Gruen’s American architectural career spanned the years between the dream of the 1939 New York World's Fair and the nightmare of the 1968 urban uprisings, an era that witnessed large-scale suburbanization, mas- sive changes in retailing, the triumph of the automobile, white flight, and the economic deterioration of America’s downtowns. As a result of his architectural projects, it is no overstatement to say that he designed and built the popular environments of postwar America. Americans of all classes and races have encountered Gruen’s architectural dreams. Gruen created the spaces that postwar Americans lived in, moved through, and longed for.3 Chain stores, department stores, shopping centers, and downtown plans—Victor Gruen was a powerful influence on all these areas. He also substantially shaped the ways that merchants, architects, planners, and politicians conceived of and realized these projects. Commercial archi- tecture, and retailing itself, also changed substantially over the course of Gruen’s career and his influence was felt at every turn. From the 1930s to the 1960s, retail strategies were standardized across the nationSEDUCING THE SUBURBAN AUTOIST 109 Pointe) meant a lower population density, and Gruen worried that the wealthy would always prefer shopping downtown.*? Despite his worries, for the most part the statistics were in Gruen’s favor. In one report, Gruen explained that Eastland would succeed because of the recent sub- urban boom around Detroit. The city of Detroit had grown by 13 per- cent, while the suburbs had expanded by 25 percent. The suburbs near Eastland’s site, Gruen continued, had exploded: Gratiot 952 percent, Grosse Pointe Village 271 percent, and East Detroit City 149 percent.5° He situated Eastland to cater to and capture that growing suburban pop- ulation of working and middle-class residents. In an article analyzing Eastland, Architectural Forum counted people as well, using the term “pulling power” to encapsulate the advantage a shopping center had over a branch store. The ability to comparison shop in a densely developed area had made downtown popular. People would brave traffic jams and parking problems in order to compare prices. But suburban department stores were often too isolated for this advantage, the magazine complained. Suburban shopping centers, on the other hand, would usurp downtown’s “pulling power” through their own den- sity of stores. Shopping centers that were “big enough to hold all the stores required for a family’s buying needs-from high-priced apparel to a toothbrush, from furniture to shoe repair shops”—would create “planned competition.” “When this cumulative pull is transferred to the suburbs,” Architectural Forum predicted, “downtown can expect to lose some business.”5! Gruen hoped that the magazine’s glowing predictions were at least partially right. When the architects completed their preliminary drawings for East- land, Hudson's was thrilled. With great fanfare, the store announced the plan on June 4, 1950; the drawings of the space-age shopping center appeared on the front page of the Detroit Free Press. Inside, the paper featured more illustrations showing a circular Hudson store, colonnaded sidewalks, and a central parking plaza. Gruen envisioned Eastland as a gigantic ellipse of nine buildings. Covered sidewalks connected the boxy two and three-story buildings. Gruen placed a circular Hudson's, looking like it had been borrowed from the 1939 World’s Fair, at one end of the shopping center.5? The central part of Eastland’s ellipse would serve as a giant parking lot with some trees and plantings.53 A thin pedestrian bridge, three hundred feet long, cut across the sea of parking. Slicing diagonally across the center parking lot would be a sunken four-lane highway for patrons and deliv- eries.110 CHAPTER FOUR The design attempted to meld large amounts of automobile infra- structure with a great amount of retail. His plan threw buildings, bridges, throughways, and parking structures together in an incongru- ous manner. However, Eastland would be an automobile lover's dream. Six thousand cars could easily park there (compared to 15,000 down- town, where an estimated 100,000 autos entered daily).54 The Architec- tural Forum article on Eastland observed that “widespread automobile ownership” had “liberated the customer.” Since people could travel any- where in their cars, the most important feature to offer them at a shop- ping center was “a place to park the car.” Gruen did that, and his design, like a cabaret performance, used a little bit of everything. Surprisingly, he left out what most other architects at the time employed as their cen- terpiece: a central courtyard. By 1950, a principal pedestrian area had become standard in shopping center designs. As early as 1934, Clarence Stein and Catherine Bauer had called for a green space at the center of their shopping center design. The shopping center should “face toward green open spaces and turn its back to the road,” they advised. They also planned for the retail development to connect to parkland, imagining that the park would act as a buffer-thus protecting residential property values and providing an appealing leisurely route for people to stroll to the shopping center.55 Other architects brought the park into retail’s orbit. Of all the govern- ment-built shopping centers of World War II, Linda Vista outside of San Diego received the most publicity. The shopping center also contained a generous landscaped court at its center. Its architect, Whitney Smith, boasted that “there are no cars on Main Street in Linda Vista.” Compar- ing Linda Vista’s charms with commercial strips’ failures, Smith observed that “instead of hot pavement and trolley tracks there are benches to sit on, shrubbery, flowers, trees. Instead of garish store fronts and a raucous discord of signs there are the order and peace of an early village green.” Not blind to the commercial potential of the landscaped courtyard, Smith explained that “facing all stores to the court gives all merchants an equal chance to attract customers.” 5° Gruen was well aware of the perceived value of placing retail in a pastoral space. In their 194X proposal, Gruen and Krummeck also had placed a court- yard, completely separated from the parking lots, at the shopping cen- ter's heart. In 1948 Gruen praised the idea of placing a “Mall” between store buildings. He insisted that malls formed a necessary part of “shop- pers’ convenience” because they provided “a quiet, restful atmosphere.”