part0066

Shopping malls, the settings for dozens of urban legends, have lately become the subject of urban folklore themselves. In a series of stories, new malls and office buildings are rumored to be sinking, leaning, or swarming with wild animals.

In early February 1987, Nancy P. Serrell, a reporter for the Danbury (Connecticut) News-Times , called me to ask if I had heard that the Danbury Fair Mall was sinking. Rumors to that effect circulating in the Connecticut area refused to die, despite her paper’s repeated debunkings.

In one article for the paper, Serrell interviewed local people who had heard that the mall was sinking “because it was built on swampland” or because “there’s an old reservoir under it…. or something.” Others had heard that design errors would make it necessary for the mall to be demolished and rebuilt eventually.

Serrell guessed that the actual collapse of two other buildings, an office building and a public-housing complex being constructed in nearby Bridgeport, might have helped to perpetuate the rumors. But that didn’t explain the bewildering rumor that flooding in the mall’s parking lot—a genuine problem—had been planned intentionally by the architects. (But why?)

A year after it first opened, when I checked, the Danbury Fair Mall was still standing. And Serrell tells me that the sinking-mall rumors are finally subsiding.

Meanwhile, in Greensboro, North Carolina, a rumor going around in spring 1987 claimed that the Four Seasons Town Centre mall there was being renovated because its collapse had been foretold by tabloid psychic Jeane Dixon.

Dixon didn’t predict this, though. And when Greensboro News & Record writer Andy Duncan checked the newspaper’s files, he found that the same rumor had circulated in the area twelve years before.

These two are just the most current items from my rich collection of shopping-mall rumors. And believe me, there are some crazy ones. Some of them claim that reptiles or vermin are infesting the malls, crawling out of cracks and dark corners or wrapping themselves around patrons’ legs during meals in an expensive restaurant. The critters supposedly come from the farmlands, forests, and swamps that were cleared to make way for the mall.

Design flaws of public buildings are another frequent motif, revealing people’s distrust of architects and engineers—and maybe of progress in general, too. One good example of this is the rumor about the Oakbrook Terrace Tower, a thirty-one-story office building in a suburb west of Chicago. Architecture critics consider the Tower, designed by Helmut Jahn, a landmark in its postmodernist use of form, space, materials, and decorative accents. But some people simply consider it a doomed structure from the start.

Throughout its construction, the building, which opened in December 1987, was plagued with rumors that construction would be halted because it was leaning four or five feet out of its proper vertical line.

The reasons given for this supposed catastrophe were a faulty concrete mixture, engineering errors, or a failure to anchor the foundation in bedrock. None of these problems existed, but apparently the rumors were fueled by such normal procedures as the removal of a temporary freight elevator, the relocation of worker parking, and a delay in installing windows because of a period of high winds.

When the leaning-tower rumors refused to die, Raymond Chin, structural engineer and the project manager for the building, yielded to public fears. He called in a surveyor to check the vertical alignment for the building. “The tower is perfectly straight and cannot be any straighter,” Chin said.

As far as these rumors go, there’s no straighter answer than that.

Sometimes a grand, imposing public building just “looks wrong” to the person on the street. Hearing this, the architect might suggest that the public’s taste is deficient. But the people themselves often claim that inelegant edifices were the designer’s or builder’s fault.

People in Glasgow, Scotland, go so far as to say that the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum there was built backward, with the front in back and the back in front. And legend has it that the architect took his own life in despair when he discovered the error.

Glasgow folklorist Gordon McCulloch recently investigated this tradition—“a story,” he said, “whose authenticity I saw no reason to question over a period of three or four decades.”

He first heard the legend from his father many years ago, then heard it repeated frequently as an adult in Glasgow. It was told as a true story during the television coverage of the 1983 Glasgow Marathon as cameras zeroed in on the gallery while showing an aerial view of the course.

The Glasgow Herald opened an article about urban legends published May 14, 1988, with the gallery story. “Every Glaswegian knows,” it facetiously began, “that the Art Gallery and Museum at Kelvingrove was built back to front. The architect took it very badly; on the opening day he leapt to his death from the top of his travestied masterpiece, a martyr to the carelessness of the building trade.”

The legend seems to fit the building, judging from a picture of it. The back entrance boasts an imposing porch flanked by twin towers, while the main entrance on the opposite side has a less impressive row of three plain arched entries.

But McCulloch’s research into the history of the building concluded that not one but two architects prepared the design, which was followed precisely by the builders, and neither architect committed suicide.

The reason for the building’s backward look is simple: the gallery, completed in time for the Glasgow Exhibition of 1901, at first had temporary exhibition pavilions mounted behind it. The rear entrance was planned to give access to these structures.

McCulloch collected similar legends of suicidal designers elsewhere in Scotland. The architect of Marischal College at Aberdeen University, for example, is said to have killed himself because his design was mocked by some as “a monster wedding cake in indigestible grey icing.”

Fort George, built in the eighteenth century on the coast between Nairn and Inverness, was supposed to be invisible from the sea. But a local tradition claims that when the architect rowed out from shore and saw that a single chimney of the fort showed clearly, “he drew a pistol and blew his brains out.”

Such stories aren’t unique to Scotland. The Liverpool, England, Town Hall was allegedly built “the wrong way around.” And it is said that the French designer of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay killed himself when he found that his design had been rotated 180 degrees in construction. In fact, the hotel was designed by a British architect, and was built according to plan.

There’s also a subgroup of legends about suicidal sculptors whose finished statues did not conform to their original intentions—such as the one about the English designer of the ornamental lions on the Chain Bridge in Budapest, Hungary, who is said to have thrown himself into the Danube when he heard that the lions had been cast without tongues.

I had not known about any stories of backward buildings in the United States until I heard from Karen Whorrall of Shoals, Indiana, which is between Loogootee and Paoli on U.S. Highway 150, down around French Lick. (Trust me, I’m not making up these names. As an alum of Indiana University in Bloomington, I know these Hoosier appellations well.)

The backward building that Whorrall heard about is right on the Indiana University campus, though I missed hearing the story when I studied there.

“The Tulip Tree married students’ apartment building was supposed to have been curved the other way,” Whorral says, “to be more in harmony with the shape of the hill. The architect was very disappointed when he came to Bloomington and saw what they had done.”

Whorral’s story follows the same pattern as other backward-building legends, lacking only the suicide. But the Indiana variation of the legend is just as spurious as all the other stories, although it is true that the Tulip Tree apartment building is laid out in a long smooth curve along a hilltop.

Rose Mcllveen of the Indiana University News Bureau checked the history of the building in the IU Archives for me. The archivist produced the original site plan and blueprints for Tulip Tree, confirming that the building was constructed absolutely according to its design, and that it faces in the direction called for by the architect.

I’ve also got a pair of backward- statue stories, which are cousins to the backward-building ones.

The first concerns the statue of Brigham Young that stands on a pedestal at the intersection of South Temple and State streets in downtown Salt Lake City. This figure of Brother Brigham, the nineteenth-century leader of the Mormons, is positioned “with his back to the Temple, and his hand outstretched to Zion’s First National Bank.”

There is even a folk rhyme about the statue: “There stands Brigham, like a bird on a perch / His hand to the bank, and his back to the church.” In Utah, the terms “the Temple” and “the church” always refer to the Latter-day Saints and their headquarters on Temple Square. The implication is that Young was more interested in the church’s economic success than in its spirituality, and that he really should have been facing the Temple.

Incidentally, Zion’s First National Bank, across the street from Temple Square, is owned by the Mormon Church.

Apparently the legend linked to Young’s statue is not just a local, or Mormon, quip—it has at least one parallel elsewhere. I heard a variant in Dunedin, New Zealand. There a statue of Scottish poet Robert Burns stands in “The Octagon”—the plaza in the center of the city. Burns is represented as seated, pen in hand, eyes gazing skyward. But Dunedin residents have noticed that Burns “has his back to St. Paul’s Anglican Cathedral and is facing across the Octagon towards the commercial section of the city.”

I expect that there are further legends of this kind around, so don’t be backward in sending them to me.