6
 
Arcades and Malls, Big Boxes and Lifestyle Centers

If the first half of the twentieth century in American urbanism—the era of the City Beautiful movement, the garden suburbs, and urban renewal—can be characterized as the Age of Planning, the period after 1970 was the Age of the Market. To understand the implications of an urbanism based on popular demand, it helps to look at an environment where the consumer is paramount: the places where we shop. Shopping habits have changed radically over time. A century ago, shoppers dressed up and took a streetcar to a downtown department store; fifty years ago they drove the station wagon to a suburban shopping center; and twenty-five years ago they might have spent the afternoon at the mall. Today, many young people have never seen a true department store (most so-called department stores sell chiefly apparel and cosmetics), and I suspect that in another twenty-five years many shoppers will never have set foot in a mall.

Although many of the changes to shopping places have had a significant impact on the physical shape of the city, they have generally originated with merchants and businessmen, rather than with city planners and architects. The origins of the American shopping mall, for example, can be found in the decision of an eighteenth-century Parisian entrepreneur, a certain M. Langlois, to buy a narrow alley and the adjoining properties behind the Théâtre Feydeau in the second arrondissement and, by the simple expedient of adding a glass roof, to turn a squalid lane into a protected shopping street. The size of the so-called Passage Feydeau (which opened in 1791 and was demolished in 1824) can be judged by the number of its tenants: several milliners and haberdashers, two book stalls, a florist, a tobacconist, a stamp dealer, a chestnut seller, and, along the entire length of the upper floor, an estaminet (a distinctly unfancy type of café that permitted smoking).1

Since Parisian streets were dirty and ill-maintained (this was before Haussmann’s fine boulevards), these weather-protected pedestrian ways, open at each end and serving as convenient shortcuts, became extremely popular. By 1840 the city had more than a hundred passages, many with exotic names such as Prado, Caire, and Panoramas. Their glass and cast-iron roofs, which would later become common in conservatories, exhibition halls, and railroad stations, were a novelty; so was gas lighting, whose first use in a public space occurred in a Parisian passage.

The London version of the passage was the arcade. The first was the Royal Opera Arcade, which was built in 1816–18 next to the Haymarket Opera (since burned). It was designed by the famous architect John Nash, who covered the long, narrow space with a series of vaults topped by glass domes and fitted the shop-fronts with delicate bow windows. Regency arcades were grander than their Parisian counterparts. The Burlington Arcade in Piccadilly, for example, housed seventy-two two-story shops and sported liveried attendants. The beautiful Royal Arcade, built in 1879, was so named because it was where Queen Victoria had her riding skirts made. Joseph Paxton, who built the Crystal Palace, proposed an enormous glass-roofed arcade more than a hundred feet high and ten miles long. That ambitious project was never realized, but monumental glass-roofed arcades appeared in Brussels, Berlin, Naples, Saint Petersburg, and Moscow. The most impressive was in Milan, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a beautiful structure with four glass-vaulted arms meeting in a hexagonal dome. Several glass-roofed arcades were built in North America: a Greek Revival arcade in Providence, Rhode Island, that opened as early as 1829; a block-long arcade in Toronto; an impressive five-story structure in Cleveland; and the Gothic Revival Arcade Building in downtown Saint Louis.

Burlington Arcade in London, an early example of urban design created by entrepreneurship.

The Saint Louis arcade, which opened in 1919, was late on the scene, for by then fashionable downtown shoppers were drawn to a new venue: the department store. Only ten years after the first department store opened in Paris in 1838, the New York City merchant Alexander Turney Stewart built the Marble Palace, a grand multistory building that resembled a Renaissance palazzo, across the street from City Hall, and twenty-four years later expanded into an eight-story building featuring an open central space covered by a ninety-foot-tall glass dome. Like the London arcades, department stores were intended to convey an atmosphere of luxury and glamour—and technological progress: they were the first public buildings to have electric lighting and passenger elevators. Department store owners frequently turned to prominent architects. In 1885–87, for example, Chicago’s Marshall Field brought H. H. Richardson from Boston to build a seven-story Romanesque-style store that occupied half a city block. A decade later, two German-born Chicago merchants, Leopold Schlesinger and David Mayer, commissioned Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan to build their main store on the corner of State and Madison. For his flagship store, the pioneering Philadelphia merchandiser John Wanamaker hired Daniel Burnham, who was then designing Union Station. Burnham produced a spectacular five-story central atrium that reverberated to the sounds of the world’s largest pipe organ.

Department stores not only sold a variety of goods under one roof, but the merchandise was openly displayed and—another novelty—had price tags. Department stores sold everything—apparel, furniture, toys, appliances, and hardware—and included food departments and beauty salons, as well as tearooms and restaurants. Extravagant window displays were a holiday tradition; so was a visit to the store’s Santa Claus. In a period without national chains and national advertising, shoppers recognized and trusted the downtown department stores—Macy’s in New York, Filene’s in Boston, Hudson’s in Detroit, the Emporium in San Francisco, Eaton’s in Montreal.

Department stores dominated downtown retailing for a hundred years, and when families started to move to the suburbs in the postwar period, the department stores moved with them. As early as 1930, the downtown Philadelphia merchandizer Strawbridge & Clothier built a branch in Ardmore on the Main Line. Named Suburban Square, the cluster of Art Deco buildings comprised a multifloor department store surrounded by smaller shops around an outdoor concourse—an early shopping center. In the late 1940s, similar developments appeared in Los Angeles, Beverly, Massachusetts, and Columbus, Ohio, but the lasting model for the full-fledged regional shopping center was Seattle’s Northgate. The complex was built north of the city by the owner of Bon Marché, a downtown department store. Opened in 1950, the center consisted of a three-story department store and seventeen shops, including a supermarket and a bank (a movie theater and a bowling alley were added a few years later). The architect of the center, John Graham Jr., lined up the stores on two sides of an open-air promenade and surrounded the building by a parking lot for four thousand cars. The landscaped promenade was pleasant for pedestrians, and the parking lot was convenient for drivers, although the inside-out arrangement produced a bland exterior of blank walls and truck bays.

Shopping center builders followed a simple formula: identify a location adjacent to a highway interchange; provide plenty of free parking; and use a department store to “anchor” the center and attract smaller tenants. The formula worked. By 1960 the United States had four thousand shopping centers. Northgate included a single department store, but the standard arrangement, called a dumbbell plan, had two department stores, one at each end of a pedestrian promenade. Sometimes the promenade included an open gallery and stores on a second level. A significant design innovation occurred in 1956 in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, when the Dayton Company, which owned a downtown department store, built the first fully enclosed mall. The architect Victor Gruen, originally a Viennese, said that he was inspired by Milan’s Galleria, although the Southdale arcade was entirely enclosed rather than open at the ends.2 Heated and air-conditioned shopping malls were expensive to build and operate, but they proved extremely popular and quickly became the industry standard. To attract more shoppers, the malls added not only movie theaters and restaurants, but also banks, health clubs, medical centers, and even noncommercial services such as post offices and libraries. The form of the shopping mall may have been inspired by urban arcades, but malls became, in effect, the self-sufficient roadside markets that Frank Lloyd Wright had imagined two decades earlier. The largest malls included several anchor stores and exceeded 1 million square feet; so-called megamalls, such as the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, and the Mall of America outside Minneapolis, could be as large as 6 million square feet, housing amusement parks and hotels as well as stores.

Suburban shopping malls were so successful during the 1970s and 1980s that many cities, still struggling to revitalize their downtowns and smarting from the failures of urban renewal, turned to mall developers for help. Despite their roots in urban passages and arcades, shopping malls seemed ill suited to downtown. Suburban malls were built on cheap land, but urban land was expensive, which constrained design in two important ways. As developers of suburban malls discovered, shoppers will climb only one flight of stairs; hence suburban malls typically have two floors. The small sites of urban malls required four to six floors, and urban developers had a difficult time attracting merchants to the upper levels.*³ Expensive land imposed a second constraint: with insufficient space for surface parking, multistory parking structures were required. But a parking garage costs ten times as much to build as a simple lot.⁴ Municipalities attempted to overcome this obstacle by building and operating the parking structures themselves. Such concessions, as well as other financial incentives, encouraged developers to build large downtown shopping malls in a number of cities.⁵

Shopping malls in the suburbs thrived because shoppers could easily drive to malls and park nearby. Urban shopping malls cannot provide the same convenience: drivers have to navigate congested city streets, and parking garages are neither convenient nor free. Moreover, suburban malls are self-contained—there isn’t anywhere else to go—whereas urban malls are surrounded by scores of competing stores, restaurants, and other attractions. As a result, the financial record of urban shopping malls has been checkered. Researchers Bernard Frieden and Lynne Sagalyn suggest that while urban malls may be profitable for lenders (who incorporate high-risk premiums) and merchants (since sales per square foot in urban malls are generally high, at least on the lower levels), they are not always profitable for developers, since the up-front and operating costs are much higher than in the suburbs.6 Nor have urban malls had the hoped-for effect of rejuvenating downtowns. Instead, the marketing strategy of grouping national name-brand stores in clean, hospitable environments has drained pedestrian and commercial life from nearby streets. The Gallery at Market East, a multilevel mall in downtown Philadelphia, for example, is full of shoppers, but adjacent Market Street, once the city’s chief shopping street, now attracts only discount merchants and dollar stores.

In the late 1990s, suburban shopping malls, too, began to falter. Overbuilding produced too many malls, and architectural complexity and luxurious materials drove construction costs to levels that exceeded potential rental income. Shopping habits were also changing. With two-income families becoming the norm, people were more interested in convenience and efficiency than in spending hours walking around a huge shopping mall. Moreover, the traditional department store, which was the mainstay of the shopping center concept, was in trouble. Specialty retailers were undercutting many of the department stores’ prices so that department stores were no longer the cheapest places to buy brand-name running shoes, toys, furniture, bath towels—or almost anything.

Shoppers now had a new alternative: the big-box store.* The big-box format emerged in the mid-1980s. The merchandising concept is simple: sell the same goods as traditional retailers, but at notably lower prices. According to economists Peter Linneman and Deborah Moy, between 1993 and 2003 “at least ninety percent of the growth in retail sales has gone to big-box retailers.”⁷ Many of these boxes belong to Walmart, the corporation that has revolutionized shopping in America (and increasingly around the globe).^† Walmart has mastered the art of delivering goods directly from the manufacturer to the consumer, and it does so for a bewildering variety of products: T-shirts, toys, tires, T-bone steaks, and tiaras, as well as banking services, medical prescriptions, and insurance. The average store exceeds one hundred thousand square feet and some can be more than twice that size.

The other retailers who successfully adopted the big-box format are discount clubs, which resemble Walmart but charge a membership fee; factory outlets, which sell discontinued or discounted goods; and specialty retailers, who carry a single product type such as home-improvement materials, knocked-down furniture, electronic equipment, or clothing. What all these big boxes have in common, in addition to size and lower prices, is self-service. The consumer pushes her shopping cart up and down the aisles alongside a large variety of goods undramatically displayed on utilitarian shelves and racks, collects the merchandise, and exits via a checkout counter. The focus is on increasing convenience while reducing overhead and providing the consumer with an extremely wide range of choices at low prices.

A ubiquitous big-box store in Shenzhen, china.

The ancestor of the big box was a grocery store that opened in 1916 in Memphis, the brainchild of local merchant Clarence Saunders. Customers in Saunders’s grocery entered through a turnstile at one end of the store, picked up wire baskets, and, following a predetermined route between rows of shelves, exited through a checkout counter at the other end. This was shopping reconceived as an assembly line. There were only two clerks, one at the cash register and one to restock the shelves. Saunders patented his idea and created a successful franchise called Piggly Wiggly, which eventually expanded to no less than twenty-six hundred outlets across the South and Midwest.8 Piggly Wiggly stores were relatively small, but self-service grocers soon grew in size, adding parking lots and becoming what people called supermarkets.

The device that enabled the supermarket to develop into a big box was the humble shopping cart. In 1936, Sylvan N. Goldman, an Oklahoma supermarket-chain owner, introduced a wheeled frame that was capable of carrying two removable baskets; when not in use, the frame collapsed to save space. It took another decade for the shopping cart to assume its present form: a large wheeled basket, with a rear flap that allows carts to be nested inside one another for compact storage. Ungainly and crude, the lowly shopping cart has remained unaltered for seventy years, making up in practicality what it lacks in elegance.

Big-box stores proved so successful that they spawned a new kind of suburban shopping place, the power center. A power center consists of several big boxes (as few as three, as many as a dozen) arranged around a large parking lot. Unlike a shopping mall, a power center has no small shops, the entrances to the big boxes are far apart, and if you have to go to more than one store, you drive. There are no enclosed common areas—shoppers are not directed, or even encouraged, to visit more than one store; if you want a flat-screen television, you drive to one box; if it’s toilet paper you’re after, you drive to another. The economic rationale for a power center is nearby highway access and a shared parking lot; sociability, that staple of traditional shopping places—even malls—is entirely absent.

Big-box stores appeared first in suburban locations, but as retailers sought new markets, the concept migrated to the city. The big-box store has adapted to urban conditions more successfully than the shopping mall, although urban big boxes tend to be smaller than their suburban counterparts (apartment dwellers have less storage space, so they tend not to buy in bulk). Urban big boxes are often organized on several floors and, at least in Manhattan, dispense with parking lots. They also usually lack delivery bays for large trailer trucks, since deliveries are made by smaller vehicles that bring goods from intermediate distribution centers at the edge of the city. Despite such logistical challenges, urban density makes big-box stores extremely profitable. In 2008, Home Depot opened its third Manhattan store, in the Bloomberg Tower on Fifty-ninth Street and Third Avenue; Costco, the largest membership warehouse-club chain in the world, has built a 147,000-square-foot store in a new residential development in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia; and IKEA, the Swedish furniture retailer, has opened a 346,000-square-foot store in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn.

I always feel a little depressed when I visit a big-box store. The experience is a considerable step down from even a shopping mall, whose interior at least has natural light, fountains, and trees. Shopping mall developers did not set their architectural sights high compared to the builders of the elegant arcades and palatial department stores, but the design of a big-box store is governed entirely by economy. Basically, a one-story warehouse is built in the least expensive manner: plain exteriors, painted steel columns, utilitarian lighting, no attempt at decoration. The impression given to the shopper, confirmed by the low prices, is that everything possible is done to keep overhead to a minimum and to pass the savings on to the consumer. This is the opposite of the department store’s shopping-as-glamour, or the mall’s shopping-as-fun; this is shopping-as-utility.

Although the big-box store signals the triumph of a lifestyle that values convenience, price, and anonymity, it does not signal the end of leisurely shopping. Shoppers don’t just want fast-and-convenient, they also want slow-and-relaxed. The setting for the latter can be a traditional main street, a farmers’ market, or a so-called lifestyle center.9 Lifestyle centers, which are built and managed by a single owner and contain the same sorts of national chain stores as malls, are distinguished chiefly by their design. Basically outdoor shopping malls—sometimes referred to as topless malls—these have streets and sidewalks rather than indoor pedestrian arcades. The storefronts face the street, restaurants spill out onto broad sidewalks, and small parks and squares further enliven the streetscape; cars are parked on the street, in garages, and in discreetly hidden lots. While 1990s shopping mall developers built amenities such as amusement parks, the lifestyle center revives traditional urban experiences such as outdoor dining, strolling, and people-watching.

Lifestyle centers do more than mix people and cars, however; they add other uses.^* Victory Park, for example, a lifestyle center on the northern fringe of downtown Dallas, includes four thousand residential units, as well as office space, a thirty-three-story hotel, and a professional-basketball arena.10 Although the architecture of the early lifestyle centers, such as Mizner Park in Boca Raton, and Santana Row in San Jose, is distinctly old-fashioned and intended to recall a small-town Main Street of the early twentieth century, more recent projects have adopted edgier architectural styles, with expanses of glass, modern materials, and industrial-looking details.¹¹

Since lifestyle centers use land intensively, do not have heated and air-conditioned public spaces, and usually dispense with anchor tenants (who in a mall pay little or no rent), they are cheaper to operate than traditional malls. However, financing, designing, and building a high-density, mixed-use lifestyle center is more complicated than building a single-use shopping mall. Achieving a lively mix of retail, residential, and commercial also requires a relatively affluent population that can afford the upscale shops and high-end residential units. The important question for developers is whether lifestyle centers will have the same drawing power as the traditional anchor department stores, and whether shoppers will accept the open-air format after having enjoyed several decades of air-conditioned and heated malls. So far, the answer seems to be a qualified yes—as long as the town center is located in a prosperous, growing region and in a mild climate.

While some lifestyle centers are in isolated locations, they work best when they are part of an existing city. CityPlace, in downtown West Palm Beach, for example, has played a central role in reviving this previously moribund downtown. Apartments and condominiums are combined with six hundred thousand square feet of retail space, more than twenty restaurants and clubs, a twenty-screen cinema, and an old church that has been converted into a cultural center. In Rockville, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., a fifteen-acre section of downtown that included an abandoned shopping mall (built as part of a 1970s urban-renewal project) and a strip mall has been converted into a lifestyle center called Rockville Town Square. The uses include retail space at street level, more than six hundred apartments on upper floors, a public library, a community center, and parking garages. The center covers several city blocks and includes a town square. The project is a joint venture of the city, the county (which built the library), a retail developer, and a residential developer.12 The presence of a library and a community center signals a growing trend in lifestyle centers: incorporating nonretail uses such as theaters and schools.

When mixed-use centers grow large enough, and dense enough, they function almost like big-city downtowns. The model for the planned downtown is Reston Town Center in Virginia, twenty miles from Washington, D.C. Reston, a pioneering planned community on 6,750 acres of Fairfax County farmland, was founded in the 1960s by developer Robert E. Simon (hence RESton). His concept, loosely based on the Garden City model, was an alternative to sprawling postwar suburbs: the projected population of sixty thousand was housed in five clustered residential neighborhoods, called villages, surrounded by woods and unbuilt countryside. In addition to small neighborhood centers, Simon also planned to build a high-density town center.

The first neighborhood center, Lake Anne Village, opened in 1965 and garnered national attention for its modernist architecture (designed by architects Julian H. Whittlesey, William J. Conklin, and Cloethiel Woodward Smith) and its picturesque lakeside plan, said to be influenced by the Italian seaside town of Portofino.13 However, for the main town center, Whittlesey and Conklin designed a conventional sixties megastructure, with all the functions in what was effectively a single building. Simon objected that this solution was too expensive, and too difficult to implement in phases, and suggested a more traditional approach using streets and sidewalks.¹⁴ Instead, the planners, some of whom had been involved in the design of Radburn, proposed an all-pedestrian scheme, with car traffic and parking on a lower level. Before this could be built, the Gulf Oil Corporation, which was a major investor, bought out Simon and took control of the project. A planning firm from Philadelphia was commissioned to produce a third plan, which likewise separated pedestrians from cars, this time drawing inspiration from regional shopping malls and incorporating a glass-covered arcade. That wasn’t built, either.

In 1978, Reston was taken over by a subsidiary of the Mobil Oil Corporation, and RTKL, a large Baltimore-based architecture and planning firm, was hired to take yet another stab at the town center. This time, influenced by The Death and Life of Great American Cities and the failures of large-scale urban projects, the planners adopted a less radical approach. Instead of creating superblocks and pedestrian malls, they laid out a more or less conventional grid of streets and sidewalks, with relatively small blocks subdivided into building lots. This plan allowed construction on the five hundred acres to unfold gradually, and more naturally, over the next three decades. The character of the project also changed, from a high-density suburban center to a full-fledged business district, with an emphasis on office space. Largely complete today, Reston Town Center aims for a daytime population of eighty thousand people—office workers, shoppers, residents—and a residential population of six thousand.15 That makes a net residential density of seventy-five people per acre, lower than in Manhattan, but exceeding that of most American downtowns.

People, sidewalks, and cars in a planned downtown in Reston, Virginia.

The business model for Reston Town Center was influenced by nearby Tysons Corner. Tysons Corner is an early and large example of a phenomenon that Joel Garreau christened “edge city.”16 An edge city is a suburban concentration of offices, shops, apartment buildings, and entertainment venues distinguished by its large scale (Tysons Corner is the nation’s twelfth-largest business district and draws fifty-five thousand shoppers a day), and its urban density (Tysons Corner is denser than downtown Miami). “[Edge cities] look not at all like our old downtowns,” observed Garreau. “Buildings rarely rise shoulder to shoulder, as in Chicago’s Loop. Instead, their broad, low outlines dot the landscape like mushrooms, separated by greensward and parking lots.”17 The confusing mixture of office blocks, shopping malls, apartment buildings, and parking structures at Tysons Corner defies traditional urban categorization.

Reston Town Center, on the other hand, is immediately recognizable as a “downtown.” Robert A. M. Stern, who designed one of the apartment complexes at Reston, has compared it to earlier suburban planned downtowns such as White Plains, New York; Stamford, Connecticut; and Evanston, Illinois.¹⁸ Reston has twenty-story office towers and tall apartment buildings, a large hotel, and a cinema, as well as a central square with an open structure that in winter houses a skating rink (shades of Rockefeller Center). The buildings along the main street—Market Street—contain shops and restaurants at street level. Unlike many lifestyle centers, Reston Town Center is not architecturally themed; building styles vary from steel-and-glass contemporary to what Stern calls “moderne-inspired”—limestone and brick with setbacks and terraces.

This town center is a novel effort to apply the lessons of Jane Jacobs and traditional downtowns to a commercial real estate development. It mostly works. The sidewalks and public spaces are lively, and the streets and the assortment of high-rise buildings and storefronts don’t feel “planned.” Parking is handled in large aboveground garages that line the two sides of downtown. Perhaps one day these structures will be replaced by office buildings or apartment blocks with underground parking, but for the moment the row of parking structures form a somewhat dreary “back” to Market Street’s lively “front.”

The presence of so much parking is a reminder that this downtown is, like a shopping mall, a place to which people drive.* Once they get there, they find the usual assortment of national chains, from Victoria’s Secret to Starbucks; supermarkets, groceries, and hardware stores are located in an open-air shopping center nearby. As in a shopping mall, there are many eateries—no fewer than thirty. During a visit, I chose Clyde’s of Reston for lunch. Despite its name, this restaurant is part of a local chain with outlets in Washington, D.C., and in suburban Maryland and northern Virginia. But the burger was good, and I enjoyed sitting outside on a warm spring day. My view from the terrace was of a small square with a fountain, park benches and street trees, women with strollers, children on scooters, pinstriped businessmen. The setting was familiar: cars parked on the street, wide sidewalks, storefronts, and shop windows. I was also struck by what I didn’t see. No superblocks, no freestanding towers surrounded by parks, no windswept plazas, no vertical separation of cars and pedestrians, no indoor shopping malls. It was as if the urban renewal of the 1960s had never happened.

*The old department stores regularly had six floors, but the upper levels were reserved for less frequented departments, such as those selling furniture and appliances. The most popular items, such as clothing, were always on the lower levels; toy departments were generally halfway up.

^*Also called superstores or megastores; in Europe they are sometimes referred to as hypermarkets.

^†Walmart arrived in China in 1996 and over the next decade opened sixty-nine stores there.

^*Mixed-use lifestyle centers should not be confused with themed shopping places such as Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles, Downtown Disney in Anaheim, or La Encantada in Tucson, which have outdoor public spaces but contain only retail uses.

^*An extension of the Washington, D.C., Metro is scheduled to reach Reston Town Center by 2015.