#victor gruen

[germanpostwarmodern]

Commons Courthouse Center (1973) in Columbus, IN, USA, by Cesar Pelli & Victor Gruen Associates. Photo by Balthazar Korab.

[americaisdead]

albuquerque, new mexico. october 2023

© tag christof

[americaisdead]

sliced up Dillards with former interior mall entrance visible.  winrock mall, albuquerque, new mexico.  december 2021

© tag christof

[menandwomanofhistory]

Victor Gruen

[sheltiechicago]

Paul Rudolph, Lower Manhattan Expressway, 1967-1972. Images from Never Built New York, 2016. Courtesy of Metropolis Books

The City That Wasn't by Pierre Alexandre de Looz

Never Built New York, edited by Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell (Metropolis Books, 2016)

Victor Gruen, Welfare Island, 1961.

Robert Moses, Fifth Avenue Extension, 1955.

Charles Lamb, diagonal street plan, 1911.

[vintagelasvegas]

Joseph Magnin and Jackman’s, 3145 Las Vegas Blvd S. Architects and Interior Designers: Victor Gruen Associates.

Photos circa ‘63 and ‘70.

The store replaced the former Players Club, south of the Desert Inn resort at what is now slightly south of Wynn main gate. The store opened 8/30/57, the first standalone retail shopping on the Las Vegas Strip, and the only building in Las Vegas by Victor Gruen Associates.

“Since its smooth adobelike surfaces boasted almost no signs at all, the first impact was one of deafening silence … To some it looked like a mixture of early Pueblo and late Corbusier, with a dash of Picasso in its middle eye.” - New shape on Main Street. Architectural Forum the Magazine of Building 1957-12: Vol 107 Issue 6.

Closed and demolished in ‘83.

[manorpunk]

Maria Lorraine is the kinda gal who will read the story about how victor gruen the “father of the american shopping mall” denounced malls because they contributed to suburban sprawl and she’s like “no empire can ever recover from trusting an austrian”

[lapdogchase]

Victor Gruen’s original detailed plan for the Southdale project - from the Minneapolis Star, June 17 1952

(ID: A floorplan showing a shopping center with a school, a church, a restaurant, a park and playground, a lake, a nursery, a fire station, a recreational bowling center, business/medical/professional/utility buildings, another park and playground, a service station, and a market. In the middle of this is the shopping center, with two large buildings for shopping and two similarly sized sections for parking. Surrounding all of this is plenty of residential areas within walking distance from each other and the other buildings.

Text in the top left:

“Here is a detailed plan of Southdale, 10-million-dollar, 500-acre shopping and residential project in the area of Sixty-sixth street and France avenue S. (See story Page One). The project puts the shopping center some 600 feet from the nearest public streets. The center's own street plan acts as buffer between residential and commercial areas. The shopping center is a cluster type. The major department store--a branch of The Dayton Company--forms a nucleus about which some 50 smaller stores are grouped”

End ID)

[aokozaki]

I hope Victor Gruen knows I forgive him for inventing the shopping mall. It's okay buddy, you realized your mistake. That takes courage.

[nickgerlich]

Mall Shook Up

Our recent discussions about the doom and gloom facing current movie theatre chains got me to thinking about other bastions of the past that are on equally unstable ground. And there is perhaps no more wobbly a relic of our past than the mighty enclosed shopping mall.

Before we dive in, let me make it clear that I do not think they are all going to curl up and die just yet. But let’s face it. When about three quarters—that’s a full 75%—of our inventory of malls did just that since the 1980s, you have to wonder about the long term viability of the concept. One analyst predicts that the current stable of 700 malls could be whittled down to 150 in a decade.

It is interesting to note that malls were originally conceived as gathering places. Architect Victor Gruen, who designed the first fully enclosed mall still in use today in Edina Minnesota—Southdale Center—envisioned a climate-controlled environment in which people could escape the elements and could congregate under one roof. And this included not just shopping, but also dining, socializing, and even entertaining.

He was right, even though he later came to loathe his creation. In some regards, he was Dr. Frankenstein in the modern era. Malls became such a part of our cultural fabric that they spawned countless TV and movie scenes, because that is where humanity was happening.

In spite of all the social aspects, from senior citizen mall walkers to angst-filled teens and even a few legitimate shoppers, our malls are now by and large becoming near ghost towns. To be fair, there are still some powerhouse malls that likely have enough Teflon to withstand even the most significant forces of change, but they are increasingly becoming a minority.

And what are those forces of change? Of course, we must put online shopping at the top, even though it still only accounts for about 15% of all retail sales. Yes, that percentage spikes during the winter holidays, but the reality is that people still shop in BAM stores.

But there are other forces, notably that curbside and delivery have found traction, and that when we do venture out, we rather like outward-facing shops with nearby parking. Any of the outdoor formats, from strip centers to lifestyle centers and freestanding, are found to be more appealing than the sterility of the airtight mall. We can park in front of our destination. That climate control came to be an albatross; people don’t mind the elements as much as we once thought.

Then there is the matter of time, something that we can never seem to find enough of to complete all of our daily tasks. Shopping malls were designed to be massive time sucks. But who has time to just go browsing? I know I don’t. I cross the threshold of our nearby mall once a year—at Christmas, of course—and with a very purposive list of places to go and things to buy. In. And. Out.

We must also consider mall owners, which are often REITs. As long as stores are turning a profit and occupancy remains high, then life is good. But when departures increase, and especially the time-honored anchor stores, things get tough. Ponder all of the square footage dedicated to indoor commons areas. That area alone could have been put to much better use were the whole complex reconfigured. It costs money to heat and cool such monstrosities.

Today, we are left with the $64,000 question of the century thus far: What to do with these things when they die? Demolition is an easy if painful answer (there go our teenage memories), allowing for a new developer to come in and essentially start from scratch. But we probably don’t need anymore churches that occupy unused retail (they’re on the decline as well). That leaves converting them into warehouses, fulfillment centers, cloud computing facilities, and, if someone is willing to risk some money, adapting the entire space into a new live/work/shop center, retaining some retail elements, but adding apartments, offices, and gyms.



There are variations on this, of course. Whenever I see a mall that has filled empty slots with services, gyms, and adventure spaces, I know I am looking at a dying mall. This is desperation.  The new adventure space at Amarillo’s Westgate Mall is a shining example.

Even though I am not at all a mall shopper these days, I shake my head each time I hear of a mall’s demise. The mall in which I grew up—Dixie Square in Harvey Illinois—was one of the first to die. It shuttered in 1978, and was rented out to film a chase scene in The Blues Brothers movie that came out in 1980. I returned to the abandoned mall in 2010 to photograph it; finally, in 2012 it was demolished.

Poof. Gone. And yet I know there is a small part of my soul on that land.

I have to side with Mr. Gruen on this. He created a monster, and while that monster has some good attributes, it altered the retail landscape. Those effects may never be resolved completely. And that’s a movie I don’t want to watch more than once.

Dr “I Malled Out“ Gerlich

Audio Blog

[genderbendingavatar]

Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the guy who proposed the idea of the guillotine.

And Victor Gruen, the inventor of malls.

[big-shmeebus]

The inventor of the shopping mall, Victor Gruen had this to say about his creation:

[nickgerlich]

Time To Eat

What goes around comes around.It’s funny how an old strategy can come back years later, a viable option once more, but perhaps for different reasons. That’s what is happening at some enclosed shopping malls, a topic we visited only two days ago.

In that blog we wrung our hands over the decline of the mall, from its inception in 1955, to its peak in the 1980s, and now the gradual erosion of its appeal. Today we find some malls relying on full-service restaurants to try to get people to return, in hopes that after they finish eating, they will shop.

We have seen this all before. In the malls of my youth, it was not unusual at all for a mall to have one or more sit-down restaurants, from cafeterias to mid- and upper-class eateries. When I arrived in Amarillo in 1989, Westgate Mall had two sit-down restaurants. Unless you are old like me and know where they were located, you would have a hard time today pointing out where they were.

The now-classic movie The Blues Brothers (1980) had a chase scene inside a mall. That was the now-demolished Dixie Square Mall in Harvey Illinois, the Chicago suburb in which my family lived. I can’t say that I grew up at that mall, because we moved to a different suburb when I was nearly 13, but many of my formative years were spent there.

That mall had a Harvest House Cafeteria, a place we would frequent on Sundays after church. It was a lot like the Furr’s Cafeterias that were popular in Texas. You grabbed a tray and went through a line, pointing toward entrees, sides, and desert items that you wanted. A worker would plate your meal and hand it to you at the end. Remember, too, that malls at that time subscribed to architect Victor Gruen’s vision of the mall as being the new downtown where people came to shop, eat, and socialize.

A transition period started a half century ago, and more prominently in the 80s, when malls adopted the food court model. These were typically located in the center of the mall (although Westgate Mall’s food court is actually located near a main mall entrance), and often featured a large variety of options (think 10-20), some of which were franchises. There was something for everyone, and a family of four could easily patronize four food stalls. A central location made it far less likely that anyone would come to the mall to eat, though; instead, eating was an artifact of the shopping trip, the opposite of today’s new emphasis on restaurants.

With some malls now adding trendy eateries and food halls, I suspect that since it would be rare to find a restaurant-shaped hole in the middle of the mall waiting for a tenant, these new restaurants are on the periphery. They may even require new construction.

The big gamble is whether people will actually go shopping once they have eaten. It’s a risky gambit, because for many people, the mall has fallen off our radar for shopping, and I for one would never think of going to one just to go out to eat. Or shop. Between e-commerce, outdoor strip malls, lifestyle centers, and mass merchandisers like Walmart and Target offering everything, we have fewer and fewer reasons to visit a mall. Furthermore, our increasingly hectic lives leave precious little time for just wandering through a mall.

Color me just a bit skeptical that adding restaurants alone is going to work. They must offer more compelling reasons to come in the first place to eat, much less to venture farther in to shop. Perhaps focusing on the experiential side of things might sway some to return, but even that is questionable. Westgate Mall has not been able to keep a theatre tenant, and even when it was in business, we knew the back door, which allowed us to come and go without passing more than a handful of shops.

Even a brewery in the mall might not be enough, although for those who know me, they would know where to find me. We have been to a mall in Oviedo Florida that has one, but I must confess that we did not waste any time getting out of there once we were finished with our meal.

As I pointed out two days ago, Victor Gruen may have had it all wrong, that we would not view his enclosed marvel as the new meeting spot. Actually, he eventually came to loathe his creation, kind of like Victor Frankenstein in the epic 1818 novel. Maybe Gen Z will be the cohort to save the mall, since there is some evidence that they actually like shopping in BAM stores. The cohort accounts for 69 million people, enough to make an impact.

I’m not holding my breath, though. Putting lipstick on a pig is usually an act of desperation, and that’s what this is all beginning to look like. Just because we have come full circle doesn’t mean it’s going to work this time around.

Dr “Staying Home” Gerlich

Audio Blog

[nickgerlich]

Mall Shook Up

Back when the first enclosed mall opened in the US in 1956—Southdale Center in Edina Minnesota—no one ever imagined a day in which this perfect antidote to the inconveniences of climate as well as distance between destination stores would fall into disfavor. The Austrian architect of it all, Victor Gruen, predicted his masterpiece would become the new downtown where everyone came together for shopping and social activities.

But the mall has managed to fall into disfavor, and, sadly for mall owners, it has done so quite well. The waters are circling the drain. There are about 1150 malls remaining, that number the result of a drop of 16.7% between 2017 and 2022. Some analysts predict there will only be 150 malls remaining by 2032. As for the ones shuttered, many have been demolished, although some have miraculously been repurposed.

I recently returned from a few weeks in Florida, where this sad tale became front page news. The Seminole Towne Center in Sanford Florida is officially closing on the 31st of this month. Well, all but the remaining anchor stores, that is. Otherwise, all tenants in the interior have more or less been evicted.

The mall was built in 1995. Its location in a growing suburban area not far north of Orlando was deemed pretty much bulletproof back then. While Sanford does have pockets of poverty, its historic downtown is successfully reinventing itself. New homes and apartments continue to be built at a rapid rate, high interest rates be damned. And those new dwellings are being occupied by middle- to upper-class residents.

As it stands, only the Dillard’s, JC Penney, and an indoor entertainment center (which moved into the space vacated by a large department store chain) will remain, along with Dick’s Sporting Goods, which occupies the top floor of another empty anchor tenant space. A Burlington clothing store once occupied the lower level, but they recently moved to a nearby strip mall. One more former anchor space is empty. What happens to that space is anyone’s guess.

While reports are incomplete, there are suggestions that some or all of the interior space will be demolished. The new owner of the mall has done a good job thus far securing new tenants into what will be more of a lifestyle center than anything, combining shopping, hotels, entertainment, dining and apartments. Costco has indicated they are coming, as has Cheesecake Factory. Others are reportedly signing contracts as well.

There is no doubt the land is valuable, because it sits right along the east side of I-4. There are many out-lot stores and restaurants nearby, as well as a large strip mall anchored by Target. A Walmart is across the street, and to be honest, the drive down Rinehart Road—parallel to I-4—is filled with shopping nearly all the way to Lake Mary.

What is somewhat puzzling is the shift in consumer buying behavior at play, because the mall owner is basically replacing one format with another. It’s not just a matter of online sales, be they regular e-commerce or social media shopping, crushing it. It’s just that malls have fallen into disfavor, even ones that are only 30 years old.

To be fair, some malls are still doing well, including the Altamont Mall and Millenia Mall in the Orlando area, so it’s not like the mall concept is completely dead there. The decline at Seminole, though, was already in motion before COVID. But it was COVID that really picked up the pace. They never recovered.

The remaining anchors could use the shot in the arm. Honestly, I can’t figure out how any of them have remained open. You can usually count the cars outside the Dillard’s, which is not a good look. The same goes for the others. The smell of death nearby is enough to turn away even the most dedicated shopper.

The trends are clear, though. Between online shopping and outdoor shopping centers, we just aren’t as interested in the enclosed mall as we once were. Maybe it’s the fact that they became teen hangouts. Maybe it was all the aging mall walkers who might just knock you down. And maybe it was the fact that Gruen had it all wrong, that there’s a certain sterility of all-enclosed malls. Climate control may have sounded nice back then, especially in Minnesota, but we are still pretty willing to brave cold and heat. And we sure as heck don’t use malls as social gathering places. Yeccch!

I am looking forward to seeing what happens at Seminole Town Center in the coming months. I’ll be back. I hate to see wrecking balls demolishing things that technically still have a useful life. It’s just that the jury of public opinion has ruled otherwise.

Dr “Mall In The Family” Gerlich

Audio Blog

[mall-renewal]

Save our Malls!

The shopping mall was once a staple of American society, growth and pastime. It was a place where people spent time with friends or family, embarked on important milestones such as their first job or date, and went to in order to find a new outfit for a fancy event or a gift for a birthday party. Now, with the rise of online shopping and consumers being fatigued of big box stores, malls have been declining drastically. The once vibrant malls that were the community center of small towns are long gone. Now reduced to large open husks stripped of their personality and whatever’s left inside serving as a reminder of what once was. The remnants of these malls take up valuable space and attract trouble. They’re depressing to look at and are a stark reminder of what was lost. So, what should we do with them? I propose that instead of demolishing them, we should rejuvenate them, making use of its original intentions. 

The American shopping mall was never intended to be a massive landscape of shopping opportunities. Instead, it was mean to be something much different, akin to that of a walkable community. Victor Gruen, the designer of the first shopping mall envisioned something akin to a European town, with parks, housing, schools and medical facilities, among other things being easily accessible and highly walkable (Kotila). This idea never came to fruition, as we were instead given a warped version of his vision. Highly unwalkable except for the interiors which were lined with retail stores, the large structure encompassed by a large sprawl of asphalt with very little nature or community to be seen. The idea, as flawed as it was, worked extremely well, causing hundreds of others to be built around America, gaining its iconic status in American culture. 

Over the years, shopping malls skyrocketed into America’s culture, becoming a staple of the communities of which they were attached. Besides shopping, seasonal pop-up events and the occasional activity brought people together. But even without formally planned events, adults and especially teenagers made malls the center of their hangouts. It was considered a safe environment, and a marvel of convenience. Long gone were the days of mail order magazines and multi stop shopping trips. The mall had everything you could possibly need. Until shopping was revolutionized yet again. 

With the invention of online shopping, malls took a huge hit. If retailers couldn’t jump on the train of online shopping fast enough, they’d be left behind. Many shoppers migrated to online stores for even more convenience, better prices, and to move away from shopping in big box retail stores. Shoppers were tired of how sterile and lifeless the stores were, and how they took up so much space (Lubell). Malls were also becoming more hostile towards teenagers, implementing curfews, age restrictions policies and not allowing teenagers to come without parents at all. (“Mall Matters” 7) Overall, the average person had less and less reason to keep attending malls, leading to the closure of many of them. Places which once held their communities together and created memorable life experiences were closed for good, sealed away and stripped of everything that made them unique.

Now, these large structures sit abandoned in constant decline. Demolition is expensive, so in most places they continue to sit there, being a depressing stain on the city or town they’re in. Abandoned shopping malls often get broken into, vandalized, stripped and squatted. This is especially dangerous with older malls, as the structural integrity is deteriorating, making it unsafe for anybody to go inside. 

The future of these malls looks grim. Consumers are disinterested, and online shopping is far more profitable and easier to maintain. But not all hope is lost. Many people want to save these malls and see them be improved. And there are a number of ways to make that happen. 

One of way the more simpler ways to improve dead malls is to upgrade their interiors. Retailers need to make them more appealing to the average consumer instead of feeling like every other store they shop at. Consumers want stores that fit into their communities and aren’t cookie cutter copies of each other (Lubell).

But the biggest way to revive interest? Making them the community center that Victor Guren always wanted them to be. Medical providers are already taking advantage of the open space that many malls have, and are deciding to repurpose them as medical malls, giving the community a medical center it may have desperately needed, creating new jobs and making healthcare more accessible (Hole). They are also being redesigned and reimagined with more than just shopping in mind. Many shopping centers are building apartments around the malls in an attempt to create more of a community focused environment. These new apartment complexes could also be an opportunity to get homeless individuals housed and rehabilitated. In addition to this, free activities, office space and a deeper consideration of customers is being utilized in order to save the mall experience (Korngold).

With all of these combined efforts, I believe the American mall can make a big comeback in an even better way. American society has seen a sharp decline in third spaces in the last decade. The people of America are stuck between work and their homes, barely able to make connections with others and our car centric, tech driven environments only exacerbate the issue. Throughout the country feelings of helplessness and isolation are becoming more and more prevalent, especially with younger generations. As a people, our sense of togetherness is deeply broken. We need to build back up community environments like malls, not only for the betterment of our own consumer interests, but for our fellow man. 

Works Cited

Hole, Michael K., et al. “Community Health Partners in unexpected places.” Mayo Clinic Proceedings, vol. 98, no. 12, Dec. 2023, p. 1833. Gale Academic OneFile, <span class="docUrl">http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2023.07.031</span>. 

Korngold, Gerald. “Land use regulation as a framework to create public space for speech and expression in the evolving and reconceptualized shopping mall of the twenty-First Century.” Case Western Reserve Law Review, vol. 68, no. 2, winter 2017, p. 429. Gale Academic OneFile, <span class="docUrl">https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A535943451/AONE?u=lincclin_pcc&amp;sid=bookmark-AONE&amp;xid=2ac28563</span>. 

Kotila, Jennifer. “Repurposing and Revitalizing Empty Mall Spaces for Civic Use Brings Them Closer to Creator’s Original Intent.” West Central Tribune (Willmar, MN), 2023. America’s News, Accessed 10 Sept. 2024. 

Lubell, Sam. “Is there hope for the BIG BOX?” Architectural Record, vol. 193, no. 8, Aug. 2005, pp. 68–76. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost. 

“Mall Matters.” Current Events, vol. 106, no. 22, 2 Apr. 2007, pp. 7–7. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost. 

[nickgerlich]

Back To The Mall

Sometimes I like to return to the well of a topic we have already touched on, albeit only a few days ago. It’s just that the topic lends itself to so many discussions, and can be explored in much greater depth by revisiting it. And it helps when it is one of your favorite discussion topics.

I’m talking about the shopping mall, y’all, not because I love to shop, but because when I ponder their very existence, I see more than just retailing. They are a shining example of social engineering.

When Austrian architect Victor Gruen designed the first fully enclosed mall in the US, the Southdale Center in Edina Minnesota, he envisioned a new Main Street, a new Central Business District (CBD) for the modern era. Whereas we had previously gone downtown to tall department stores with mom-and-pop shops sandwiched between, we could now go to one place and never have to step foot outside this climate-controlled behemoth that was a world unto its own.

With the new emphasis on inward-facing commerce, malls did not have to look pretty on the outside. They could just be nondescript big boxes, with the major tenants’ names on their end cap buildings but little more. It could be described as Brutalist architecture, a fad that took root in the 1950s.

Thanks to a story about malls running on CNN.com, I was nudged to digress a bit. Good timing, too, since Retail is one of our topics of the week.

Shopping malls and casinos have two things in common: No windows, and no clocks. The goal is for the folks on the inside to completely lose track of time, to get lost in their escape from reality, to part with more of their hard-earned cash. And yes, it was cash back then, not plastic.

When you are cognizant of time, or the weather outside, or darkness, etc., your mind starts to drift back to reality. As soon as that happens, it’s all downhill for both the retailer and casino operator.

In some regards, the enclosed mall is like the manufactured community represented in The Truman Show, so utterly fake yet completely believable. Everything is orchestrated and scripted, and as long as you suspend rational thought, you are one with the eco-system.

I am not so old that I was around for Gruen’s masterpiece to open, but I wasn’t far off. I recall growing up in Harvey Illinois, one of Chicago’s south suburbs. I lived a middle class existence, with a younger brother, a father who took the train every day to his job downtown, and a mother who held down the fort. We went shopping at what was then a marvel of retail, the Dixie Square Mall that opened in 1966.

As malls go, it was actually quite different from what we see today. It had a JC Penney and Montgomery Ward as anchor tenants, but then also had a supermarket, a rarity in the modern era. I guess they weren’t thinking too much, because if you buy groceries, the odds are good you need to get home with your perishables, and not venture into the department stores or other shops. On a hot summer day, your burgers could be grilled before you ever got home.

There was also a large centerpiece artsy thing, not exactly a fountain, but it looked like one with hundreds of nylon strings or whatever vertically hung from the ceiling, and water or oil droplets slowly cascading downward on those lines, only to be recycled back to top in a never ending loop. Well, at least that’s how I remember it. It was mesmerizing, and you could look at it for hours. Gruen envisioned these centerpieces as being where shoppers congregated for conversation, taking a break from their shopping.

I also recall the Woolworth, basically a huge so-called dime store filled with trinkets, toys, crafts, fabric, and the like. And next door was the Harvest House Cafeteria, not much unlike the Furr’s Cafeterias we have had in Texas. You went through a line, pointed to the things you wanted, and someone handed it to you. It wasn’t a three-Michelin-star experience, but for middle class folks, it may as well have been. “Meatloaf…some mashed potatoes…green beans, …oh, and a slice of lemon meringue pie, please. Thank you.” We went often on Sundays after church.

As we have already discussed, malls eventually starting falling into disfavor, their carefully constructed micro-environments contributing to the ennui of multiple generations. And as for Dixie Square, it met its demise much sooner than most malls, because by November 1978, it was shuttered after only 12 years of existence. Turns out that Harvey underwent a different kind of social change, this time white flight as the city became increasingly black. Crime shot up. There were muggings and shootings, and no one wanted to shop there, especially after dark. I must also point out that back then Chicago was very racist. Everyone hated everybody else.

Director John Landis rented the vacant mall in 1979 to shoot a scene for The Blues Brothers movie, featuring a chase scene that found cops in pursuit of Elwood and Jake Blues right through a well-stocked mall. You can imagine the chaotic scene, or watch it online. They trashed the place, not bothering to clean it up, and left it for Mother Nature to reclaim.

That mall soon became legendary among Urban Explorers. Murders and drug deals did not deter people from wanting to check it out, myself included. I went in the summer of 2010—yeah, it was still standing—but by 2012, after decades of deciding who would pay for the asbestos abatement, it was demolished.

In many regards, Dixie Square became emblematic of a failed social experiment, the very one championed by Gruen. In fact, Gruen, who was a socialist, came to loathe his contribution to society. Then again, the notion of climate-controlled environments was popular back then, witnessed in little terrariums people bought for their homes, usually with multiple strata of differently colored sand, pebbles, and cactuses. By the late-80s, we even had Biosphere 2, a fully enclosed research facility in Arizona designed to study the living systems of Earth.

Along the way, as malls grew in popularity, we lost the heart and soul of our communities. Downtowns became ghost towns. The neon nights of old, with each shop sporting its own luminescent sign hung over their doorway, flickered and went away, replaced by the banalities of our suburban existence.

Maybe the current trend away from malls will cause us to reconsider our collective past, and find us clamoring about to build new city centers, complete with department stores and the little shops in between. I have my doubts, but a guy can dream. The answer will probably be somewhere in the middle, with, as I have said before, a lot of strip malls all outward facing. It’s better than the mall as we know it.

As for this grand social experiment, we can say that it served us for a season, but in the end, the rats in the maze won out and we rebelled.

Dr “Let’s Re-Engineer This” Gerlich

Audio Blog