Mark Dery on the death and rebirth of malls

(left) Burdick Mall, Kalamazoo, MI, designed by Victor Gruen, 1959; (right) Dixie Square Mall, Harvey, IL, 2009, photo by Jon Revelle

In anticipation of the consumerist high holy day of Black Friday, I was delighted to read former BB guestblogger Mark Dery's insightful essay in Change Observer about the birth, and death, and rebirth, of the shopping mall. Mark begins with the father of mall architecture, Victor Gruen, and his Southdale Center built in 1956 outside Minneapolis. From there, it's a delightful Deryan romp through the death of malls and on to the present "rare window of opportunity to hit the re-set button on consumer culture as we know it." From "Dawn of the Dead Mall" in Change Observer:

Visions of taking a wrecking ball to malls everywhere are satisfyingly apocalyptic. But sending all that rebar, concrete, and Tyvek to a landfill is politically incorrect in the extreme. Already, architects, urbanists, designers and critics are thinking toward a near future in which dead malls are repurposed, redesigned and reincarnated as greener, smarter and more often than not more aesthetically inspiring places -- seedbeds for locavore-oriented agriculture, vibrant social beehives or [fill in the huge footprint where the mall used to stand].

Brimming with evangelical zeal, New Urbanists are exhorting communities with dead malls to reverse the historical logic of Gruenization, turning malls inside-out so storefronts face the wider world and transforming them into mixed-use agglomerations of residences and retail; repurposing parking lots into civic plazas; infilling the dead zones that surround most malls with transit-accessible neighborhoods checkerboarded with public spaces (a rare commodity in sprawl developments),and weaving the streets of said neighborhoods into those of the surrounding suburbs.  

The more visionary ideas sound a lot like what the cyberpunk designeratus Bruce Sterling calls "architecture fiction," somewhere between Greg Lynn and Silent Running, Teddy Cruz and Ecotopia.

"Dawn of the Dead Mall"

• [Anonymous]

  The Arcade in Providence, RI is pretty darn old too. Sadly it sits vacant indefinitely for “renovations.” Locally its rumored that the owner is considering allowing a big box store to take over the whole space. Hopefully that won’t happen though because it has way more potential than that.

• [Neon Tooth]

  Dixie Square Mall is where they filmed the mall chase scenes from The Blues Brothers. I was already closed even then though.

• [Karl Jones]

  ” … Southdale Center built in 1956 outside Minneapolis …”

  Southdale Center was, and is, located in Richfield, Minnesota, a first-tier suburb on the South side of Minneapolis.

  Back in ’56, Minneapolitans probably did think of Richfield as “outside Minneapolis”.

  But for the past three decades or so, native Minneapolitans such as myself have just thought of the entire region as “the city” — it’s all contiguously urban, there’s no real sense of “outside” until you get out to the third tier suburbs.

  But even as late as the late 1960′s, the area immediately south of Southdale was gravel pits and more gravel pits, where I played as a kid. I suppose a lot of that gravel went into the concrete with which so much of that urban sprawl was built.

• [Neon Tooth]

  *It was* rather.

• [TheMadLibrarian]

  Repurposing a mall will only work where the existing infrastructure has not decayed to the point where ripping the mall down isn’t less problematic. If the structure has become unsafe, get rid of it.

  Wasn’t there a link a month or so ago to a site featuring abandoned or dying malls across the US?

  p.s. the link as given doesn’t take you to the dead mall essay. Sry.

• [Jonathan Badger]

  We need to turn the dead malls into arcologies and live in them! I mean, I used to be really into the idea of arcologies but was depressed when I saw the lack of progress at Arcosanti. But big concrete buildings full of skylights already exist — they are called malls. Why not use them?

• [RexallWodehouse]

  There were 3 malls in Tampa, Florida that died in the two decades I lived there.

  Eastlake Square was redesigned into several purposes, and now houses a sorely-needed branch of the county library (in the old Montgomery Wards end) — a number of call centers, and a cluster of county offices. Instead of being the bombed-out cluster of small stores huddling together in a nearly-empty mall that attracted small-time thieves like bees to honey, it’s now a busy area once again. This one wasn’t very old — it was built in the early 1980s.

  Tampa Bay Center was completely razed — it was late 70s or early 80s, too — when the mall up and died, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers bought the property, demolished the mall (which was rotting where it stood — it was musty and damp with water stains on the floor by the time it died) and built themselves a spiffy new training facility. Given the win and loss record for the last couple of seasons, they apparently need to keep training…

  Floriland Mall, the first mall built in the city in the late 1950s, has been repurposed into city and county offices…it’s kind of nice to have all the services in one place — tax office, drivers’ licenses, clerk of court…a big building with plenty of space for everything…and lots of parking already there.

  I know Florida doesn’t do a lot of things right…but on this one they seem to be doing reasonably well.

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  We have a dead mall on the main street in Palm Springs. The owner is a developer. He uses the mall as blackmail to get his projects through the City Council. If you don’t approve my project, I won’t rehabilitate the mall. It’s at the absolute center of downtown. It’s been mostly empty for a decade. They’ve approved dozens of questionable projects in the hopes that he’ll make good on his promise.

• [schmod]

  I love this quote:

  “Unfortunately, Gruen made the fatal mistake — fatal for an arm-waving futurist visionary, anyway — of living long enough to see American consumer culture embrace his idea with a vengeance. In a 1978 speech, he recalled visiting one of his old malls, where he swooned in horror at “the ugliness…of the land-wasting seas of parking” around it, and the soul-killing sprawl beyond.”

• [jfrancis]

  First the malls killed downtown. Now they imitate downtown, only on private property, where the visitors have none of those pesky first amendment rights.

• [MikeyV]

  Hmmmm, this also sounds an awful lot like the fiction in Cory Doctrow’s Makers book. Which I paid for tyvm even though its out in ebook creative commons license and all that. I applaud Mr Doctorow for how he does things. Wonder if he’ll be moving into one of these malls and setting up his own punk R&D labs?

• [Tichrimo]

  They did a bang-up job with a revamp like this in my home town of Waterloo, Ontario. Waterloo Town Square used to be an eyesore and an embarrassment, but it has since been knocked down and new storefronts built to match the rest of uptown… It was a much-needed change that really improved the look (and calibre of business) in the city core.

• [Anonymous]

  We’re going to end up doing something with those properties. The last wave of them were built in locations too valuable to ignore, close to major highway intersections. But the reason that you’re seeing talk of demolishing them and starting over isn’t psychological or philosophical, it’s practical: these buildings’ designs were too tightly optimized for one and only one use. Architect after architect, engineer after engineer has tried to figure out some way to leave the hardscape up (the immense concrete walls and so forth) and build anything else inside that box, but the results are so inefficient, so sub-optimal for the new use, that they can’t compete with new, less burdened construction.

  I’m surprised the article didn’t mention deadmalls.com, an excellent amateur repository of photographs and stories, documenting these structures, their histories, and their demises. It’s an interesting evening’s read, at the very least. Every building has a story (see Kipling, “The Palace”), but these buildings meant so much to so many people that there’s a depth of emotion invested in them that comes out in the stories at deadmalls.com and other websites dedicated to the dead malls.

• [tem dmindu]

  They built a new mall in a …suburb, I guess, on the north side – quite recently. It’s well done, from what I understand, but there’s another mall/shopping center 5 minutes away by train. This being Japan (and moreover, relatively conservative Hiroshima), style was never a serious problem at either one. A smaller city north of Hiroshima, Miyoshi, has its own mall, but the local economy can’t quite support its entire weight, so it’s starting to look its age and stores are opening outside of it.