THE VISIONARIES

How a handful of people shaped the way we shop

BY ED McKINLEY

But nearly every element of today’s diverse retail landscape once represented the radical notion of some visionary. Developers who glimpsed the future often had to shoulder tremendous risk to bring their ideas to reality. Retailers were skittish and lenders skeptical when moguls and would-be moguls pitched their untried schemes. But some of the pioneers who persevered found success. If shoppers liked the new ways of shopping, they voted “yes” with their purses, wallets, checkbooks and credit cards. Once that occurred, the financial community jumped aboard, retailers rushed to join in the bonanza and imitators sprouted almost overnight.

What follows is a tribute to a few of the people who have shaped the way Americans live by changing the way they shop and spend their leisure time. Most readers will find omissions. Space didn’t permit the inclusion of every worthy pioneer of the shopping center industry. But the glimpses we do offer here say a little about the half century of retail real estate development that has transformed the United States and made its influence felt in many other parts of the world.

Those early days of shopping center innovation are over, but visionaries will continue to have their visions, and developers will keep finding new ways to mold the retail landscape. As they do, SCT will be here to tell their stories.

If anyone deserves credit for inventing the enclosed mall, it’s probably Victor Gruen (1903-1980), an Austria-trained architect who came to America in 1938 to escape the Nazis in Europe. At the behest of the Dayton family, whose department stores bore its name, in the 1950s Gruen designed Southdale Center — the first climate-controlled, two-level, two-anchor enclosed mall with inward-facing storefronts. Ground was broken for Southdale in 1954, and a farm field was turned into an 800,000 square foot center with 5,200 parking spaces and 72 tenant spaces, according to a history compiled by the center. Southdale opened in 1956 in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina.

“What Gruen did was provide a new urban device to work with,” said Jon Jerde, the architect for Mall of America, Horton Plaza and many other notable shopping centers and districts. Before Gruen, the raw materials of the shopping center architect’s trade were buildings, sidewalks and streets, Jerde said. “He made it buildings, sidewalks, streets and malls.”

Besides a Dayton’s department store, Southdale housed Donaldson’s, a competitor. According to many, it was the first center with rival department stores, and they were placed at opposite ends of the mall, where neither had an advantage. Shoppers had to pass by half the stores in the center to walk from one of the department stores to the other.

“Southdale was the Dayton family’s retail vision of the future, and they understood that in the future, consumers would demand convenience and variety,” said a Southdale historical document. “The Center was designed to provide every service from a U.S. Post Office to a grocery store to fine apparel.”

Early accounts of the amenities described a striking indoor plaza. “Everywhere shoppers looked they encountered eye-catching features: brightly plumed song birds, art objects, decorative lighting, fountains, tropical plants, trees and flowers,” said one critic in an assessment preserved on the Southdale Web site.

According to the Southdale history, “The physical environment was thought to quicken the human impulse to mingle, and create an atmosphere of leisure, excitement and intimacy similar to a European market square.”

Today, Southdale covers 1.6 million square feet, has 130 retailers and is anchored by a Marshall Field’s department store.

The roots of Southdale may stretch back to Gruen’s life in the old country, suggests a recent article in The New Yorker. After the popular revolts that swept Europe in 1848, Austrians tore down the Medieval walls that had separated the wealthy people of inner Vienna from the common folk living in outlying areas, the article said. A ring road was built in the wall’s place, with wide sidewalks on which Viennese from every social class could mingle.

Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center, the first enclosed mall in the United States, in a picture taken shortly after its 1956 opening. It became the prototype for regional malls across the country.

Gruen’s hopes weren’t realized, says Jerde. Instead of a new kind of urban core, Southdale and its successors became just another suburban sprawl feature. “The mall went astray when you sat it in the middle of a parking lot,” he said, asserting that the lot isolates the center from the surrounding community. Gruen became disillusioned, according to several accounts of his life, because his malls had not transformed the suburbs into more urban settings.

Such thoughts aside, Southdale still ranks in the minds of many as one of the most important designs in American history because it served as the prototype for the regional malls that later proliferated across the country. But that center was by no means the first noteworthy architectural project to emerge from the mind, heart and pen of Victor Gruen.

Northland, an open-air shopping center in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Mich., was his first. When it opened, in 1954, it was the world’s largest, at more than 1 million square feet. It included parking for 7,200 cars.

Among his other designs were Eastland, also in suburban Detroit; Glendale, in Indianapolis; Valley Fair and Bay Fair, both in the San Francisco Bay area; and South Bay, in Redondo Beach, Calif. In 1962 his Midtown Plaza, the first enclosed urban center, opened in Rochester, N.Y.

Gruen was born Victor Grunbaum in 1903 in Vienna. He set up his first architectural office there in 1932, and worked rebuilding shops and apartments, according to the Austrian Press and Information Service. In 1938 the Nazis reduced him to a humble employee in his own office. The details vary, but accounts of his flight from Europe agree that either he or a friend posed as a German officer to help expedite his escape by plane. He took the name Gruen when he arrived in the United States.

First Gruen designed stores in California. Then he switched coasts, moving to Manhattan, where he won acclaim for the stores he designed. His staff grew to 300 and his firm became one of the biggest architectural firms in the United States.

When Gruen retired, he returned to Austria and died there in 1980. But the firm he founded, Victor Gruen & Associates, still operates.