DOWNTOWN PLATTSBURGH IN UPSTATE NEW York, where I used to go for lunch until the Metropole bar closed its dining room, has seen better days. It’s not so much that things have been allowed to run down, although here and there boarded-up windows deface the staid Victorian storefronts. It is the general air of patient but unmistakable retreat. This is visible in the types of stores that line the main street—the secondhand bookshops, a thrift store, an outlet for used restaurant equipment—the sort of businesses whose survival depends on low overheads. There are no snappy or fashionable establishments; the signs tend to be home-made, the window displays unchanging and dusty. Merkel’s, a department store that is descended from a tobacconist established by Isaac Merkel more than a hundred years ago, appears to be barely hanging on. A snack bar across the street keeps changing owners and menus; now it’s an ice cream parlor, but next month, who knows? Down the street, the site of a fire remains an empty lot; there is not enough demand for commercial space. The movie theater, a proper one with a marquee, is still operating, although it doesn’t show the kinds of movies that people line up for—my wife, Shirley, and I have sometimes been the only patrons. On the street there is evidence of sporadic attempts at civic beautification—benches and planters—and there is an attractively landscaped promenade alongside the Saranac River. But these improvements haven’t had their desired effect. The streets are more or less empty; there is simply none of the bustle or activity normally associated with downtown life. The unbroken facades of the three-story brick buildings along the main street—stores below, offices and rooms above—remind me of an Edward Hopper painting, Early Sunday Morning, in which the artist portrays a row of small-town storefronts. The blank stares of the vacant windows and the still emptiness of the Plattsburgh street are Hopperesque, too.
Empty it may be today, but Plattsburgh had a proper little downtown once. The old Customs House is gone, as is the imposing Weed Building, a thousand-seat theater for drama and opera opened in 1893, as well the Witherill, the biggest of five downtown hotels in operation at the turn of the century. Enough of the architectural heritage remains, however, to remind the visitor of what a handsome town this must have been. Still in operation is the Clinton County Courthouse, a grand building in stone and brick, surrounded by a bevy of lawyers’ offices; not far away is an elegant obelisk designed by John Russell Pope, the architect of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. The monument commemorates a naval victory in the War of 1812. Further along the shore of Lake Champlain is the railroad depot, built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style in 1886, when Plattsburgh became an important stop on the Delaware & Hudson line between Montreal and New York City. The depot functioned as a transfer point to stagecoaches and to the paddle steamers that linked Plattsburgh to Burlington, Vermont, across the lake.
Plattsburgh’s main street is called Margaret Street—the founders had a charming habit of naming streets after their wives and daughters. In a photograph of Margaret Street taken in 1918 one of the stores displays a telephone sign. Plattsburgh had had a telephone system as early as 1880, and an electric power company since 1889. There is a trolley car running down the center of the street. The Plattsburgh Traction Company operated six and a half miles of trolley line linking downtown to the residential neighborhoods, the fairgrounds, the baseball park, and the army barracks; a spur ran out to the Hotel Champlain, a rather magnificent 500-room resort hotel south of the city. The trolley car in the photograph is an open-air model, suggesting it is summer. There are also a horse-drawn buggy and several automobiles on the tidy, brick-paved street. On the sidewalk, a number of well-dressed men and women window-shop under striped canvas awnings. It is a distinctly urban scene.
What happened to this urbanity? To answer the question, one should note, first, what did not happen. Plattsburgh did not suffer the devastating loss of employment of many nineteenth-century mill towns in upstate New York and New England. True, the power supplied by the falls of the Saranac, which is what drew the founder Zephaniah Platt here in 1784, is no longer an industrial asset, and firms like the Williams Manufacturing Company (maker of the Helpmate sewing machine) and the Lozier Motor Company (of the Lozier touring car) no longer exist, but other industries have replaced them. The grand Hotel Champlain has been converted into a community college. The tourists still come, not by train and steamer, but by car and camper to nearby Adirondack State Park. Plattsburgh has a state college campus, and the army barracks have grown into a giant air force base, part of the Strategic Air Command. All in all, Plattsburgh has prospered.
The decline of downtown Plattsburgh has nothing to do with deindustrialization or with crime or with white reactions to black migration. Nor is it due to a drop in population. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, population growth has been steady, if unspectacular: in 1918 the population of the city of Plattsburgh was about 12,000 people; today it is nearly twice that size. The county has also grown and made the city an important regional center for shopping and entertainment. Plattsburghians did not move to the suburbs, and most of them still live in large comfortable houses on quiet, tree-lined streets in the residential neighborhoods that surround the downtown, much as they did one hundred years ago. What caused the downtown to change was neither urban decay nor suburban flight.
The first indication that change was in the air occurred on November 11, 1929, when the Plattsburgh Traction Company folded.I This was less than two weeks after the stock market collapsed on Wall Street, but that was not the reason—the company had been losing money consistently for the previous nine years. Rising operating costs were part of the explanation, but the real problem was that fewer and fewer people were riding the trolley; they were driving cars. In 1900 there were only 8,000 private automobiles registered in the United States, but in the following decade this number grew to almost half a million, thanks in no small part to the introduction of the Ford Model T. By 1920, car ownership stood at eight million. Car ownership started in the large cities, but it spread quickly to smaller towns, judging from a report in the Plattsburgh Daily Press, which in 1928 reported traffic congestion on Margaret Street.
Downtown Plattsburgh was formed by the same forces as big cities: the railroad, hotels, and a concentration of stores and businesses. The railroad brought travelers, who in turn sustained the hotels, which offered civic amenities like dining rooms, bars, ballrooms, and evening entertainment. The stores and other businesses (including manufacturing) brought more people downtown, both shoppers and employees. But cars (and later planes) changed the way people traveled; when measured in terms of passenger miles, patronage of non-commuter passenger trains in the United States dropped 84 percent between 1945 and 1964. Local train service in Plattsburgh ceased in 1971 (the converted depot contains rental offices and a restaurant). Now only the New York-Montreal train stops twice a day to take on and discharge passengers, and in 1994, Amtrak announced that this train, too, would cease operation.
By the 1960s the Witherill was the only remaining first-class hotel in downtown Plattsburgh, and before the end of the decade it too had closed, unable to compete with the tourist cabins and motor courts that had sprung up along the main roads leading into the city. This also became the location for automotive needs: garages, car washes, showrooms, and used-car lots. This strip development did not affect other Plattsburgh downtown businesses until the shopping center showed up. By the 1960s, Plattsburgh had three shopping centers, all built next to highways, on the west, south, and north sides of the city: North Country Plaza, Plattsburgh Plaza, and the Skyway Shopping Center. Downtown was finished.
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The success of shopping centers, in Plattsburgh and elsewhere, was predicated above all on the existence of the supermarket. In combination with the refrigerator and the automobile, the supermarket changed shopping habits. Since they could store food in refrigerators—and later freezers—housewives didn’t have to shop every day; weekly shopping meant having to transport many bags of heavy groceries, which is where the car came in. In fact, the first supermarket pre-dated widespread car ownership and originated in an urban area. Piggly Wiggly, started in Memphis in 1916, was the first self-service grocery-store chain and the model for large supermarkets like King Kullen, which opened its first store in Queens in 1930. But large supermarkets were not really suited to downtown. Unlike department stores, supermarkets are spread out on one floor and, especially when parking is taken into account, require large building lots, which are more affordable on the edge of town.
Personal mobility was responsible for the shift from downtown to the strip, and personal mobility molded American cities and towns in a way that was impossible to imagine in Europe. Not only was automobile ownership higher, but American physical mobility was combined with a high degree of social mobility and the space to exploit the advantages of rapid, easy movement. Only in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia were these conditions duplicated, and it is no accident that urbanism in those countries took a similar course. (Eventually, private automobile ownership did increase in many European countries, and postwar European cities started to incorporate some of the features—strip development, shopping centers—previously seen only in North America and Australia.)
A key feature of this new American mobility was not only individual freedom, but also the freedom to move goods and services. Large long-distance trucks replaced the railroad. Since trucks arrived in the city on highways, the edge of town was the ideal location for distribution warehouses, the new railroad depots. Small industry and workshops, the kind that earlier would have been downtown, near the railroad tracks, also relocated; small trucking companies distributed services as well as goods around the city. They, too, settled beside the convenient highway. As the landscape historian J. B. Jackson wrote, “The automobile—especially the commercial automobile, the truck, the pickup, the van and minivan and jeep—has been most effective in introducing a different spatial order. For what those vehicles contain (and distribute) is not only new attitudes toward work, new uses of time and space, new and more direct contacts with customers and consumers, but new techniques of problem solving.” Jackson’s valuable observation underlines the fact that the “automobile city” was also the “truck city,” and that personal mobility affected not only where people worked, but also how they worked.
The strip spawned drive-in establishments like diners, dairy bars, and juke joints. By the 1960s, when teenagers could afford to buy cars, the strip also became a hangout and place for cruising. Despite the disappearance of the railroad and hotels—as well as grocery stores—downtown continued as a home for many traditional businesses; it was still where you bought a record album, a bouquet of flowers, or a hat, and it was where you went to a movie, got a prescription filled, or opened a bank account. Soon that changed, too. You could do all these things and more without setting foot in downtown because the shopping centers had arrived. The chief attraction of the early shopping centers, which usually included a supermarket, was the concentration of commercial establishments in one spot. This meant that shoppers could park their cars and walk from store to store, instead of driving up and down the strip.
From 1960 to 1970, more than 8,000 new centers opened in the United States, but the first shopping centers, sometimes referred to as “shopping villages,” emerged much earlier, in the first decade of the century. The shopping village had three identifiable features: it consisted of a number of stores built and leased by a single developer; it provided plenty of free off-street parking; and it was usually located near the center of a planned suburb. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the first shopping center opened at the turn of the century in Roland Park, an exclusive suburban enclave planned by the Olmsted brothers and George Kessler about five miles north of downtown Baltimore. With only six establishments, however, Roland Park barely qualifies as a shopping center.
A more impressive early example is Market Square, designed by Howard Van Doren Shaw in 1916 for the Chicago garden suburb of Lake Forest. Now on the National Register of Historic Places, the exquisite Arts and Crafts-style buildings house a combination of small stores and a Marshall Field department store. The buildings sit on three sides of a landscaped plaza across from the railroad station, and include two charming clock towers. These, as well as the intimate scale of the arcaded stores and the integration of apartments on the second floor, make Market Square not merely a shopping center but a true town center. Country Club Plaza, which opened in 1925, was the town center for Jesse Clyde Nichols’s Country Club District outside Kansas City. Like Market Square, it is broken up into several buildings containing retail and commercial spaces—including a movie theater—and incorporating professional offices on the second stories. Shoppers can park in small lots discreetly concealed by low brick walls and walk through landscaped squares interspersed between the buildings. There is nothing discreet about the architecture, however, which is a flamboyant Spanish-Moorish concoction that includes a copy of Sevilla’s Giralda tower. Nichols, the founder of the Urban Land Institute, a developers’ trade association, was a tireless proselytizer for planned suburbs, and thanks to him, Country Club Plaza became well known.
Market Square and Country Club Plaza consciously recalled small-town shopping districts in the intimate, almost domestic scale of their architecture and in their layouts—the stores faced the street and the parking lots were in the rear. This was not accidental. The developers of the shopping village were also the developers of the surrounding residential areas, and retail areas were designed to fit into the overall master plan. One of the most attractive shopping complexes of this period was developed by the architect Addison Mizner in Palm Beach in 1924-25. Two picturesque pedestrian alleys lined with small shops—Via Mizner and Via Parigi—cut through the block; an arcade along Worth Avenue provided additional retail space. The pedestrian had the impression of walking through an old Spanish town, with crooked walls, wrought-iron balconies, worn steps, and clouds of falling bougainvillea, all artfully arranged by the architect. Mizner, whose scenographic approach to architecture is insufficiently appreciated, intended the complex to resemble a converted medieval castle. As he colorfully described it to a reporter, he wanted the shopping complex to appear as if “with the advent of more civilized times the armies were dismissed and commercially minded people converted the cellar-like rooms into small shops.”
Not all the early shopping centers were part of planned suburbs. Farmers Markets, a California chain, were the 1930s equivalents of today’s discount warehouses. The stores faced an inner, completely private pedestrian walkway, which presaged the inward-looking shopping centers of the future. To keep overheads low, Farmers Markets were built on cheap land on the edges of cities, and the peripheral location was no longer an inconvenience because most people drove to go shopping. This did not escape the attention of developers, who understood that with almost universal car ownership the pool of potential customers for any single shopping center—those who lived within a ten-minute drive, say, rather than within a ten-minute walk—had grown very large.
The spread of shopping centers was slowed by the Depression and World War II, and in 1946 there were still only eight large shopping centers. The postwar period saw much new suburban construction, but just as the subdivision replaced the garden suburb, the shopping village was replaced by the regional shopping center. Probably the first such center was Northgate, which opened on the outskirts of Seattle on May 1, 1950. The architect John Graham, Jr., devised a long, open-air pedestrian way that was a sort of earless street lined with a department store and a number of smaller stores. The idea was that the department store—called Bon Marché—would attract people, who would then walk and shop along the way. In addition to stores and a supermarket, Northgate eventually acquired a gas station, a drive-in bank, a movie theater, and a bowling alley. Like all future suburban shopping centers, Northgate was built next to a highway. Unlike the earlier shopping villages, it was developed, literally, as a freestanding project—the inward-oriented building was surrounded on all sides by a 4,000-car parking lot that took up about three-quarters of the sixty-acre site.
During the 1950s the construction of shopping centers, in tandem with the construction of subdivisions, began in earnest; the total went from about 100 centers nationwide in 1950 to about 3,700 only a decade later. Not only were there more centers, but they were growing bigger. One of the largest was Northland in Detroit, which opened in 1954 and included more than a million square feet of rentable space and parking for 7,400 cars. The 250-acre site around the center was planned to accommodate a host of nonretail buildings, including offices, research laboratories, apartments, a hospital, and a hotel.
In 1956 a shopping center that was to become a model for the next three decades opened in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis. Southdale (the early centers all seemed to be named after compass points) was not particularly large, just over half a million square feet, and it followed the usual pattern of buildings surrounded by parking lots. It incorporated one striking innovation, however: the public walking areas were indoors, air-conditioned in the summer and heated during the winter. The architect, Victor Gruen, a transplanted Viennese and a prolific designer of shopping centers (he had been the architect of Northland), cited the glass-roofed, nineteenth-century gallerias of Milan and Naples as his inspiration, even though the bland, modernistic interior of Southdale held no trace of its supposed Italian antecedents. Indoor shopping streets are attractive anywhere the climate is marked by hot, humid summers or harsh winters or a lot of rain; hence enclosed shopping malls appeared in the cold Midwest and Northeast, in the South and Southwest, in hot Southern California, and in the wet Northwest—that is to say, everywhere.
Starting in the sixties, most new regional shopping centers, following Southdale’s success, were indoor shopping malls. To optimize the extra investment, malls were built on two or even three levels (an idea also introduced at Southdale). This made for shorter walking distances and more stores. In 1970, suburban Houston’s Galleria, which did recall its Italian namesakes by providing a grand skylit promenade, opened with 1.5 million square feet of retail and commercial space; the following year Woodfield, outside Chicago, enclosed 2 million square feet of shopping under one roof. During the 1980s malls got even larger: the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, California—3 million square feet—and the mother of all malls, the Ghermezian brothers’ West Edmonton Mall in Alberta—5.2 million square feet. In all, from 1970 to 1990, about 25,000 new shopping centers were built in the United States: during that period every seven hours, on average, a new center opened its parking lot to the public.
The Galleria in Houston, whose centerpiece is a year-round iceskating rink, added yet another ingredient. The developer, Gerald Hines, incorporated a variety of nonretail uses within the mall itself. A hotel guest or an office worker could go out of the lobby and straight into the mall, a simple change with a great impact. Malls were no longer merely shopping centers; they were urban places. Although retail functions continued to dominate, mall developers started leasing space to a variety of clients, including health and athletic clubs, banks, brokerage houses, and medical centers. Malls now also house civic functions: with public libraries, in Saint John, New Brunswick, and Tucson, Arizona; a United Services Organizations (USO) outlet in Hampton, Virginia; a city hall branch office in Everett, Washington; and federal and state agencies elsewhere. The Sports Museum of New England, in East Cambridge, Massachusetts, is housed in a mall; so is a children’s museum in Ogden, Utah. The Board of Education of Ottawa has been leasing space for a storefront classroom in a local shopping mall since November 1987, and a local high school recently opened a counseling center in the West Edmonton Mall, which also contains a small synagogue. Just as noncommercial spaces are showing up in shopping malls, malls are popping up in unexpected places: York University in suburban Toronto recently added a shopping mall to its campus, and Pittsburgh’s new airport includes a mall with more than a hundred outlets, three food courts, and a chiropractor.
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The introduction of noncommercial tenants into shopping malls, which made them more like traditional downtowns, raised the issue of public access. Were malls private property, as mall owners maintained, or had they become, as the American Civil Liberties Union argued, public places where principles of free speech applied? Mall owners were not keen on the idea of abortion groups arguing their cases in the food court, or of having their customers witness a violent altercation between the Ku Klux Klan and its opponents, which actually happened in a Connecticut mall in the mid-1980s. On the other hand, if large regional malls wanted to be a part of the community and attract a broad cross section of the population, it was in their interest to allow access to as many people as possible, including various community groups.
In 1976, the United States Supreme Court ruled that there were no rights of free speech at shopping malls. Nevertheless, several state supreme courts, including those of California, Oregon, Massachusetts, Colorado, Washington, and New Jersey, have ruled in favor of allowing a certain degree of free-speech activities such as leafleting and canvassing in malls. Mall owners may eventually even support public access, since it has proved neither troublesome nor expensive. In 1991 the giant Hahn Company, which owns and operates thirty malls in California, signed an agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union that permits leafleting and canvassing in designated locations in most of its malls. Robert L. Sorensen, vice-president of Hahn, told Shopping Centers Today, an industry monthly: “We haven’t seen expenses rise because of it, and I don’t think it’s costing us shoppers.” In other states, although not legally required to do so, mall owners are beginning to make similar provisions. The Rouse Company provided a booth for community activities in its mall in Columbia, Maryland, and encourages its mall managers to make similar accommodations; so did The Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation of Youngstown, Ohio, the nation’s largest shopping center developer and manager.
Legal issues aside, it is disingenuous for mall developers to argue that they are merely merchants. They are the new city builders, and as such should be prepared to take the bad—or at least the awkward—with the good. In fact, many malls have been acting more and more like municipal governments, sometimes banning smoking, for example, even in states where they are not legally obliged to do so. This does not mean that shopping malls will become like downtown streets. I think that what attracts people to malls is that they are perceived as public spaces where rules of personal conduct are enforced. In other words, they are more like public streets used to be before police indifference and overzealous protectors of individual rights effectively ensured that any behavior, no matter how antisocial, is tolerated. This is what malls offer: a reasonable (in most eyes) level of public order; the right not to be subjected to outlandish conduct, not to be assaulted and intimidated by boorish adolescents, noisy drunks, and aggressive panhandlers. It does not seem much to ask.
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Work and play, shopping and recreation, community service and public protest—more and more of the activities of the traditional downtown have moved to the mall, including that newest of urban industries, tourism. With its skating rink and glass-roofed promenade, Houston’s Galleria quickly became a tourist attraction. The builders of the West Edmonton Mall, which includes a resort hotel, also installed a skating rink as well as an aviary, a dolphin pool, an artificial lagoon with a submarine, a floating replica of the Santa Maria, an amusement park, and the world’s largest indoor water park, complete with artificial beach and rolling surf.
A large portion of the visitors to the Mall of America, the recently opened 4.2-million-square-foot mall in Bloomington, Minnesota, outside Minneapolis, are tourists. The Mall of America is counting on attracting an average of about 100,000 people a day; this was exceeded during the first three months after its opening in August 1992, when nearly a million people a week visited the mall. Indeed, the owners of the Mall of America expect it to out-draw Walt Disney World and the Grand Canyon.
The Mall of America is extremely large—four department stores, about 3 60 specialty stores to date, more than forty restaurants and food outlets—but the three-level retail area is not particularly remarkable, only bigger than most. What is unusual is the fact that the stores are grouped around a huge (seven-acre) glass-roofed courtyard containing an amusement park complete with twenty-three rides, two theaters, and dozens of smaller attractions. The courtyard design brings to mind another building that combined shopping and recreation—the eighteenth-century incarnation of the Palais Royal in Paris. The instigator of that project was the Due de Chartres, whose family home in Paris, beside the Louvre, included an extremely large garden. The duke, chronically short of funds, decided to use the garden as the site for a commercial venture. He engaged the architect Victor Louis to design a building to include commercial spaces and rental apartments, and to make the centerpiece of the project a public pleasure park, following the current English fashion. The so-called Palais Royal opened in 1784 to immediate accolades and dominated Parisian social life for fifty years. Like many developers since, the duke did not reap the profits of his brilliant scheme—financially ruined by the heavy investment, he was forced to sell off most of the project.
The Palais Royal consisted of a large landscaped courtyard about one hundred yards by three hundred yards, surrounded on three sides by a five-story building; the fourth side, which was never completed, was temporarily closed by wooden stalls. Facing the garden was a continuous two-story arcade. Within the arcade were glass-fronted shops and a variety of other establishments: cafés, eating places, social clubs, gambling rooms, music rooms, auction houses, a puppet show, a silhouette show, a waxworks, several hotels, a Turkish bath, and a theater (which later became the home of the Comédie Française). The upper floors contained apartments and rooms, many of which were rented to the courtisanes for whom the Palais became famous. The central pleasure garden contained a roofed amphitheater—the Cirque Royal—used for public performances, concerts, and balls.
In today’s language, the eighteenth-century Palais Royal might be described as an upscale mall. Most establishments were luxurious and frequented solely by the rich—or by army officers on a spree—but the arcades and the garden were open to all except the lowest orders (invited in only three days a year), and it was where the aristocrat and the bourgeois mingled. The Palais Royal merged shopping, entertainment, and leisure. “Should an American savage come to the Palais Royal,” the Russian novelist Nicolai Karamzin wrote, “in half an hour he would be most beautifully attired and would have a richly furnished house, a carriage, many servants, twenty courses on the table, and, if he wished, a blooming Laïs who each moment would die for love of him.”
The Palais Royal still exists, although today it’s a sedate place that includes antiquarian stores selling books, prints, and military memorabilia. Where does the average Parisian go for his running shoes or his VCR? He or she drives on the périphérique to a giant hypermarché out in the suburbs. The Paris of vast shopping marts and high-speed highways is not what Danielle was thinking of when she asked me her question, nor is it the Paris of my youthful visits.II But it’s worth underlining that the hypermarché (the model for the warehouse-type shopping mart) is a French invention and not, like Disney World or Macdos (McDonald’s hamburgers), an American import. Perhaps our cities are more alike than we imagine.
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Kenneth T. Jackson, the author of Crabgrass Frontier, a history of the suburbs, argues that shopping malls represent almost the opposite of downtown areas. “They cater exclusively to middle-class tastes,” he writes, “and contain no unsavory bars or pornography shops, no threatening-looking characters, no litter, no rain, and no excessive heat or cold.” In fact, large malls do appeal to a variety of tastes—they have to. The Mall of America, for example, has The Gap as well as Bloomingdale’s, Sam Goody and Brooks Brothers, Radio Shack and Godiva Chocolatier, video arcades and NordicTrack, a maker of expensive exercise machines. The eating establishments also cater to different tastes and budgets: there is an array of fast-food outlets arranged around two food courts; several family restaurants (with occasional live entertainment); an assortment of inexpensive steakhouses; several mainstream Italian eateries; an upscale restaurant serving California cuisine; and a Wolfgang Puck pizza and pasta emporium, the first one outside California. There is also a nightclub area where a sports bar, a comedy club, and a country-and-western supper club are open until one in the morning. It is true that there are no pornography shops in the Mall of America, although the video stores certainly rent soft-core porn, and as for threatening-looking characters, there are plenty of weird-looking (to me, at least) teenagers.III Yes, malls (like city streets in Canada and many northern European cities) are clean, but the notion that urbanity is somehow represented by litter is surely a sad comment on the miserable state of American downtowns rather than a serious criticism.
Unquestionably, shopping malls are managed places. They are strictly policed, regularly cleaned, and properly maintained; public washrooms are provided; goods are delivered without disruption; leases are terminated on failing or unprofitable businesses; and as spaces become vacant, new tenants are found to fill them. Mall owners strive to achieve a balanced mix of stores and attract high-profile tenants who will benefit the smaller stores. Special events such as bazaars, concerts, and festivals are organized to attract shoppers; and advertising programs promote the shopping mall as a whole. “In ambiance and retail mix the suburban model of success turned its back on the market-driven chaos of downtown and left little to chance,” two MIT professors of urban planning, Bernard Frieden and Lynne Sagalyn, observe. Interestingly, this tactic has proved so popular with the public that it has been emulated by downtown merchants’ associations, who realize that the traditional hit-or-miss approach to retailing will no longer do.
And what of the issue of enclosure? Does the fact that shoppers are protected from extremes of heat and cold disqualify malls as urban places? I don’t think so. Merchants have been building enclosed shopping spaces for a long time. Glass-roofed arcades, or passages, first emerged in the center of Paris in the early 1800s, and were widely imitated across the Continent and in England. Nineteenth-century London and Paris also had shopping bazaars, and Milan, Naples, and other Italian cities had gallerias; these were large, often multilevel shopping arcades with independent stalls, covered by impressive roofs constructed of cast iron and glass. One of the few surviving examples of a shopping-bazaar building is the splendid GUM department store in Moscow, completed in 1893. Compared with the high-flown, extravagant interiors of the Victorian shopping bazaars and department stores, which celebrated shopping and consumerism on a scale unrivaled before or since, the architecture of most contemporary shopping malls is downright modest.
Still, Jackson has a point—the lack of extremes of weather does make malls feel artificial. Downtown shopping areas are traditionally made up of open as well as enclosed public spaces, which is one of the appeals of the early shopping centers like Market Square and Country Club Plaza. Part of this atmosphere is undoubtedly produced by the landscaping, the shaded arcades, and the sunny outdoor squares. Contemporary developers, in their rush to build completely enclosed malls, may have missed an opportunity for greater diversity. In Boston, Baltimore, and New York City, The Rouse Company, a major shopping-mall developer, has built so-called festival marketplaces, which are really shopping malls in a waterfront setting. Since the commercial spaces in Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Harborplace, and South Street Seaport are located in rehabilitated dockside buildings, much of the public space is outdoors; in that sense, these malls resemble Lake Forest’s Market Square more than Southdale. Indoor/outdoor malls have proved extremely popular as well as commercially successful, and have spawned imitators, like the shopping area in New York’s Battery Park City, which has a glass-roofed space that recalls Crystal Palace, and is visually and physically related to the outdoors. Horton Plaza, an urban mall in downtown San Diego, is a large, multilevel shopping complex that dispenses with enclosed traffic areas altogether in favor of arcades and open-air courtyards. Jon Jerde, the architect of Horton Plaza, also designed Citywalk in Universal City, California. Taking a page from Mizner’s Palm Beach work, he has created a picturesque pedestrian mall flanked with small-scale buildings. The architecture is not intended to recall Spain, however, but the Los Angeles region, including Sunset Strip, Melrose Avenue, and Venice Beach.
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The debate about whether shopping malls could or should replace or augment downtown is academic. In places like Plattsburgh, there is little doubt that the shopping mall is the new downtown.IV The Plattsburgh mall, which was built in the 1970s and greatly enlarged a few years ago, is about two miles from downtown, next to the interstate. It is enclosed, and large enough to qualify as a so-called regional mall—defined as including more than 400,000 square feet of retail space and at least one department store. According to the National Research Bureau, at the end of 1992 there were 38,966 operating shopping centers in the United States, of which 1,835 were regional malls. Although plenty of upscale malls cater to the rich, the mall in Plattsburgh is not an effete oasis of luxury; like most malls it serves Middle America—that is, the broad middle class, which here also includes people from the surrounding farms and small towns.
When I lived in Hemmingford, across the nearby Canadian border, every two or three weeks Shirley and I would drive down the interstate and go to the mall, sometimes to shop, sometimes to go to a movie, sometimes just to stroll. The atmosphere was lively, a marked contrast to the emptiness of downtown’s Margaret Street. There were crowds here, excited teenagers swarming to the video arcade, parents trailing children on the way to the movie theater, young couples window-shopping, elderly people walking for exercise or sitting on park benches. On Saturdays, there were usually booths selling the sort of mass-produced crafts that one finds at country fairs: hand-painted ties, varnished wood carvings, junk jewelry. The chamber of commerce occupied a stall and promoted local tourist attractions. There were even Girl Scouts selling cookies.
Families ate lunch in the food court, a sunny space that almost felt like the outdoors thanks to the fairly large trees and the natural light filtering through the stretched fabric roof. The large open area, which was the convivial focus of the mall, was full of tables and seating; on the periphery were counters whose colorful overhead signs proclaimed a variety of take-away foods: Tex-Mex, Chinese, Italian, Middle Eastern. People carried their trays to the tables. Because there was no physical boundary between the eating area and the surrounding mall, the impression was of a giant sidewalk café.
I suppose that some people would find this an unsophisticated version of urbanity (although you could get a reasonable espresso here), and some of my academic colleagues would refer darkly to “hyperconsumerism” and artificial reality. But I was more encouraged than depressed by the Plattsburgh mall. I saw people rubbing shoulders and meeting their fellow citizens in a noncombative environment—not behind the wheel of a car, but on foot. As for hyperconsumerism, commercial forces have always formed the center of the American city—the old downtown no less than the new—and it is unclear to me why sitting on a bench in the mall should be considered any more artificial than a bench in the park. Admittedly, I still liked to walk down Margaret Street, but it was a nostalgic urge. When I wanted to be part of a crowd, I went to the mall.
I. The trolleys were replaced by buses, but these did not prosper. By the 1960s only a summer service to the beach had survived, and that ceased operation in 1969.
II. Fast food and takeouts are taking their toll of traditional French life; according to Le Limonadier, the trade journal of French bistros, whereas in i960 there were 220,000 bistros, in 1994 there are fewer than 65,000.
III. According to an American friend living in Edmonton, the West Edmonton Mall does have bag people. “There aren’t many,” she writes, “but there are enough to make a transplanted New Yorker feel at home.”
IV. The New Jersey Supreme Court based its 1994 decision protecting free speech in malls on the fact that "suburban shopping centers . . . have substantially displaced the downtown business districts as the centers of commercial and social activity."