The Death and Life of Great American Shopping Malls

A large, windowless box. Trudging crowds captivated by consumerism. The ubiquitous big brands that probably exploit their workers - you would Google it, but the free Wi-Fi isn't working. As a self-confessed shopping hater, my experience of malls may be somewhat biased. But, despite their many failings and my better judgement, they fascinate me. I’m not a fan of being inside a mall, so this is not an article about shopping. What really captivates me about them is their origin story.

The inventor of the shopping mall wasn't a retail tycoon or a superfan of big-box buildings, but Victor Gruen, born Viktor Grünbaum in 1903. He was an Austrian Jew, trained architect, and dedicated socialist who ran an illegal anti-fascist cabaret group in Vienna. Bit of a mouthful, I know, and indeed not the ‘founding father’ I had expected. Gruen worked as an architect in Vienna, but after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, he, like many other left-wing Jews, emigrated to the USA.

Gruen arrived in New York at America's tipping point between inter-war isolationism and its emergence as a global superpower. Despite his lack of English, and with just eight dollars to his name, he set up his architectural business and began working on retail projects on Broadway and Fifth Avenue. This set brilliant foundations for what came next.

The seeds of the shopping mall were sown in the early 1950s when the American economy was flourishing, the population booming, and the consumer goods market expanding. Rapidly. More people had cars and more people had more disposable income. It was the era of individualism and the American Dream. But this social prosperity that many (often white, privileged) Americans experienced is over-romanticised. The fifties also saw huge geopolitical tensions which rumbled in the background of these white-picket-fence lives. By 1954, the Cold War was in full swing: both America and the Soviet Union had successfully tested the hydrogen bomb, a weapon ten times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The two opposing superpowers were engaged in proxy wars and political struggles across the globe. At home, Americans were paralysed by the fear of 'reds under the beds': of communists secretly hiding amongst them.

The domestic political landscape was also facing turmoil. It was the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. Following the Supreme Court case Brown vs Board of Education in 1954, segregation was very, very slowly being dismantled. As black Americans sought better jobs and better rights in the cities, millions of white Americans fled to the suburbs in a racist effort escape desegregated urban living. This 'white flight', along with abundant white wealth and car ownership, is widely considered the catalyst for the American suburban sprawl. It's in this political environment that the modern shopping mall emerges. 

Gruen hated the American suburbs. The suburban roads, he once said, were "avenues of horror … flanked by the greatest collection of vulgarity". Suburbia's endless homogeneity contradicted everything Gruen believed made a healthy and happy built environment: which was, in his eyes, a mixture of houses, shops, restaurants, businesses, and green space. This organic jumble of buildings creates a vibrant, pedestrian-focused, close-knit environment. This was the make-up of many European cities at the time, and is what we call 'mixed-use' today.

In the early fifties, Gruen decided to bring the essence of Vienna to the American suburbs. He suggested weaving 'shopping towns' into the residential sprawl to improve social life outside of the city. He began to design a European-style, dense, walkable, mixed-use development with apartments, schools, medical centres, offices, public parks, and a flagship shopping mall at the centre. This flagship mall was completed in 1956 in Edina, Minnesota and was an immediate, resounding success.

The mall, named The Southdale Center, was the first fully-enclosed, air-conditioned shopping mall, and it revolutionised shopping and consumer culture. Upon opening, the mall received praise such as "a pleasure-dome-with-parking" (a comment which has not aged well) and "strikingly handsome" among many others. The advertisements promised the mall to be like an "eternal spring", and one of Southdale's main attractions was the café tables and eateries 'outside' in the central, enclosed courtyard. The Minnesotan journalist James Lileks commented, "You have no idea what an innovation this was in the 1950s; there wasn't any place where you could sit 'outside' in your shirt-sleeves in January," especially not in the biting winters of Minnesota.

Sidewalk Cafes: ‘outdoor’ eateries in the Southdale Center. Gruen Associates.

A sea of parking surrounds the Southdale Center in February 1957. Guy Gillette, Getty Images

Southdale's success is still felt today as Gruen's designs are repeated faithfully across the globe. Gruen had taken the idea of the common high-street and enclosed it in a box, splitting the stores into two levels to minimise walking distances. Two department stores bookended the central, sky-lit 'street'. It was 'introverted': everything faced towards the middle to create a sense of community, leaving the external walls blank. It's so familiar it is barely worth explaining. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his 2004 New Yorker article, "Victor Gruen designed a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant shopping complex with a garden court under a skylight - and today virtually every regional shopping center in America is a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant complex with a garden court under a skylight."

However, the rest of Gruen's masterplan was never realised. Although Southdale was finished in 1956, the plans for the surrounding greenery and mixed-use facilities were replaced with asphalt and parking spaces, serving the consumers visiting from the surrounding suburbs and beyond. In part, there was not enough enthusiasm, nor enough funding, to complete Gruen's mixed-use vision. In part, there was concern that a neighbourhood around the flagship mall would limit its capacity as a nuclear bunker. Yes, you read that right. Nuclear bunker.

We must not forget the geopolitical landscape into which the mall was born, with a socialist designing a consumerist box, in a capitalist country becoming more anti-communist by the day. It's almost the start of a bad joke. Gruen exploited Cold War fears and advertised his introverted, self-contained malls as potential bunkers in the event of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. Southdale - and almost every subsequent mall - was in the suburbs and thus conveniently outside the 'blast radius' of a bomb dropped on a city. Even symbolically, malls stuck two fingers up to the Soviet Union: an outward display of capitalism and consumerism, surrounded by a sea of cars and the individualistic, single-family homes which define the suburbs.

Gruen's mixed-use utopia slowly faded from memory as replicas of Southdale sprung up around the country and indeed the globe. By 1964, there were 7,600 malls in the US, and by 1972 this had almost doubled to over 13,000. Gruen began to rue his creation and commented bitterly on the "land-wasting seas of parking." In 1978, he disowned malls entirely when he said, "I am often called the father of the shopping mall. I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities."

Disenchanted with the American Dream, Gruen moved back to Vienna in 1968. He arrived to discover that someone had built a shopping mall on the outskirts of his city. A cruel irony. Gruen had tried to bring Vienna to the American suburbs, but he simply, inadvertently, brought the American suburbs back to Vienna.

For over sixty years, the shopping mall and Gruen's bastardised vision dominated consumer culture. In suburban areas, malls took customers away from local high-streets and small businesses, offering convenience, uniformity, entertainment, and climate-controlled environments. It has taken until now for the reign of the mall to crack. In 2018, the BBC warned that over 200 UK shopping centres were in danger of going bust due to the rise in online shopping. In 2019, Forbes stated that "Online shopping is killing physical stores." Brick-and-mortar stores have been on a downward trajectory ever since the rise of online retail, and small businesses and local high-streets have been hit particularly hard.

Fast forward to 2020, and retail became unrecognisable. Lockdowns across the globe necessitated the use of online shopping, fuelling Amazon’s dictatorship and birthing even worse sites such as Temu. Amazon's market capitalisation boomed by $90 billion since February 2020, boosting Jeff Bezos closer and closer to becoming the world's first trillionaire. Physical shops have suffered immensely due to the convenience, safety, and necessity of online retail. Amazon is to the mall what the mall was to the high street.

However, as the world learnt to cope with Covid, there is much to learn from Victor Gruen and his socialist vision. During the first peak of the pandemic, we got a glimpse of a car-free world, where bikes and pedestrians dominated the streets. Stuck inside, limited to our immediate surroundings, we understood the importance of community. In the UK, we were encouraged to shop local, to “eat out to help out”. I hope that, after decades of mall oppression, the community high-street is given the respect it deserves.

The pandemic also fuelled movements such as the '15 Minute City', pioneered by Parisian mayor Anne Hidalgo. A Guardian article from 2020 explains the socialist mayor's plans for "self-sufficient communities" with "grocery shops, parks, cafes, sports facilities, health centres, schools and even workplaces just a walk or bike ride away." It sounds almost identical to Gruen's original Southdale vision, although notably without the central shopping mall, which has evidently run its course.

We do not need malls anymore. The convenience of online shopping has usurped the convenience of the mall. After months of quarantine, just thinking of the hordes of mall shoppers made me panic. After flirting with the apocalypse, how could we possibly return to these windowless boxes which doubled as nuclear bunkers? We need to support small brands, local retailers, and businesses which spill out into the community. Sure, we may have inadvertently crowned Amazon as king, but let's champion the local high-street, the local café, the street vendor in the local square. Victor Gruen was right: malls destroyed our cities. So, cities must retaliate. Reclaim our high-street and our urban space. Let the mall live in history. It's what Gruen would have wanted.

Republished 2025. Original article published by Sepha Schindler on ArchiFeminist in 2020