Before the Shopping Center

Acropolis and Agora,

from Perseus

London Bridge ca. 1650

from Museum of London

Leadenhall 1808
from PPS

Washington Market 1853

from PPS
Cleveland Arcade 1966,
from HABS

Saint-Hubert Gallery
from Brussels Guide

"Separate Sphere" from

Godey's
 A. T. Stewart store
from American Memory

Galleria Vittoria
Emanuele
from USC

500 BC - The Greek Agora at the foot of the Acropolis in ancient Athens was one of the first
urban marketplaces, with a central open square surrounded by buildings.

100 BC - The Republican Forum at the base of Capitoline Hill was the commercial and
government center in Rome.

1174 AD - The Market-Place developed in the city of Brussels on the site of a dried swamp
dried, with buildings constructed by guilds and craft corporations along a rectangular square.
Similar market squares would appear during the Middle Ages in European cities, and would
become the location for the construction of cathedrals, clocktowers, and city halls.

1288 - The Piazza del Campo in Venice Italy was an open space surrounded by the cathedral
and buildings, with eleven shop-lined streets converging on the center.

1400 - Sturbridge Fair near Cambridge England was one of the largest medieval fairs that
were market centers for merchants.

1461 - The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Turkey, grew from two small warehouses during the ea
of Mehmet the Conqueror to 4400 shops today, known locally as the Kapalicarsi ("covered
bazaar").

1500 - London Bridge was lined with shops across Thames River in London England.

1666 - After the London fire, great rectangular market courtyards were built to remove
markets from the city streets. The largest market in Europe was Leadenhall in London with
courts and rows of stalls selling all types of goods.

1735- Oswego market on Broadway was one of several large market buildings built by the
British to replace stalls and streetshops in New York City.

1753 - The Stock market was built in London.

1771 - Bear market developed in New York City on land donated by Trinity Church that
would later become the site of the World Trade Center. It was first known as Bera Market
after a butcher killed and displayed a bear that had crossed the Hudson. This old market was
replaced by the new Washington Market that dominated lower Manhattan throughout the 19th
century. An observer in 1862 wrote that this "market is without doubt the greatest depot for
the sale of all manner of edibles in the United States; it not only supplies many thousands of
our citizens, but I may say, many of the surrounding cities, towns, villages, hotels, steamers
(both ocean and river) and shipping vessels of all descriptions."

1789 - One of the first enclosed shopping galleries was built in Paris in a former royal garden
near the Palais Royal. This was replaced in 1830 by the more elaborate OrlÈans gallery.

1800- During the Napoleonic wars, John Trotter in London transformed a former warehouse
into a new shopping place called a "bazaar" for the widows and daughters of British soldiers.
The Soho Bazaar flourished, as did the Baker Street Bazaar and the Pantheon Bazaar on
Oxford Street. The bazaar and the enclosed gallery represented the transition from open air
markets and individual merchant shops to the centralized department stores of the mid-1800s.

1819 - The Burlington Arcade opened in London's West End on Piccadilly, designed by
Samuel Ware for George Cavendish, the 5th Duke of Devonshire, in the garden of the duke's
Burlington House, with 72 shops along a single walkway covered by a glass ceiling. This
"arcade" style would inspire similar galleries in Brussels and Milan, early arcades in the
United States such as the Providence Arcade in Rhode Island built 1828 and the Cleveland
Arcade in Ohio built 1890. These 19th-century arcades would be a model for the enclosed
pedestrian mall of modern urban America.

1825 - The opening of the Erie Canal catapulted New York City into America's leading
emporium. The harbor filled with ships bringing goods from Europe and Asia, and new docks
lined the Hudson and East Rivers. The New York Arcade opened in 1827, along Broadway
between John Street and Maiden Lane, with 40 stores clustered under a corrdor covered by a
skylight. Henry Sands Brooks opened one of the first men's clothing stores on Cherry Street
near the waterfront, renamed Brooks Brothers by his sons in 1833. Giovanni and Pietro Del-
Monico opened the nation's first "restaurant" in 1830 modeled after Boulanger's in Paris, with
cloth-covered tables and menus allowing customers to place individual food orders. The night
life of entertainment soon followed around Broadway, with theaters lining streets illuminated
with gas light after 1825. To serve the growing crowds of businessmen and shoppers
downtown, John Jacob Astor built his six-story Park Hotel on Broadway in 1836 near his Park
Theater and became the nation's richest man from his real estate investments in Manhattan
The steam-powered penny press made the city into a leading publishing center, with
newspapers by James Gordon Bennett and books by the Harper brothers. Daniel Appleton
was a store owner who started selling books in his grocery store, and after 1831 became one
of the city's largest publishers. Magazines and books popularized new fashions for the
growing domestic sphere of the middle class woman. Godey's Lady's Book was founded in
1837 by Sarah Hale to guide women on fashions and shopping and homemaking, the subjects
according to Hale that were most "important for our sex amd more proper for our sphere."
The cult of domesticity and women's "separate sphere" would stimulate the rise of a consumer
culture in America, and department stores, arcades and shops began to fill the urban centers of
America.

1846 - King Leopold I laid the first stone for the construction of the royal galleries Saint-
Hubert in Brussels, designed by architect J. P. Cluysenaer as an enclosed shopping
environment with a glass and metal roof. Although other enclosed galleries had been built in
Europe, St. Hubert would be the oldest covered gallery to survive to the present day.
1846 - Alexander Turney Stewart created the first department store in the U. S. when he
opened his Marble Dry-Goods Palace on Broadway Street in New York, offering a wide-
range of merchandise under one roof at a fixed price affordable to the middle class, and by
1862 had expanded to 8 stories and a full city block to become the largest retail store in the
world.

1865 - Architect Giuseppe Mengoni designed the Galleria Vittoria Emanuele II, one of the
most beautiful galleries in the world, built in Milan, Italy, and open by 1877. It was an
enclosed pedestrian arcade separate from the traffic of the main streets, connecting the
Duomo cathedral with La Scala opera house.

Next: the Department Store and the Shopping Center

Sources:

 De Voe, Thomas F. The Market Book: A History of the Public Markets of the City
of New York. 1862, reprinted by Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers, 1970
 Harrison, Molly. People and Shopping: a Social Background. Totowa, N.J. :
Rowman and Littlefield, 1975.
 Larkin, Jack. The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790-1840. New York: Harper &
Row, 1988.
 London Bridge model from BBC
 Project for Public Spaces. A Public Market for Lower Manhattan; Preliminary
Feasibility Study. 2002, online from the PPS, and is the source of the 1862 quote
above about Washington Market.
 Rubenstein, Harvey M. Pedestrian Malls, Streetscapes, and Urban Spaces. New
York: Wiley, 1992.
 Thomas, Lately. Delmonico's; a Century of Splendor. Boston, Houghton Mifflin,
1967.

Citation: Schoenherr, Steven E. Before the Shopping Center. http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/soc/shoppingcenter2.html

[Feb. 11, 2006]