I guess shopping malls are going the way of the dinosaurs, with people buying online now.
But the funny thing is, there never was one in the actual city of Detroit to begin with, just the suburbs.
In fact the closest thing we have to a mall in the city limits, is in the New Center Area. And it’s really not a mall, just a couple of buildings tied together with some pedestrian bridges.
And in anticipation of the quasi-racial arguments some might make, let me say ahead of time. Yes, I know everything changed after the '67 riots. But Northland Mall (which recently closed), opened up in the 1950’s. As anyone from Detroit will tell him, Northland was the first enclosed mall. And it is in Southfield (just north of Detroit), albeit right on the border. Enough said.
And thank you in advance for all your (civil:)) replies.
The first shopping mall in the U.S. opened in 1956. Suburbanization in the U.S. is basically a post-World-War-Ii phenomenon. The shopping mall in the U.S. has always been mostly about suburbanization.
Actually, the shopping mall has been entirely about suburbanization. It is a direct artifact of creating a so-called “third space” (the latter in ‘home, work, public’) in the suburban landscape, and was a particular poorly executed form of it, focused upon automotive access (a large complex surrounded by an ocean of parking space, generally inaccessible by public transit) and consumer activity rather than creating any sense of community. Shopping malls suffer from an impermanence in architectural form, generally embracing the most base and gaudy concepts in contemporary architecture and offer relatively little space to actually socialize. Because of the single use zoning in most suburban communities, Malls are often located in out of the way locations, citing for near access to highways and inexpensive land rather than being a part of any particular community.
Yeah, my response is either “the classic mall has never really been a big city thing”. For example, up the road in Seattle (which now has a bigger population than Detroit) there is only one “true” mall, Northgate. There are a few shopping centers downtown, but if you stick with the OP’s definition of malls, they’re just linked buildings and not malls.
Plus, almost all the malls are thriving in this area–which makes sense since the area itself is thriving. I note a lot of the “malls are dying” pieces in the media are almost always focused on areas that are declining overall.
Do (or did) any cities have malls? The classic shopping mall, with a few large, anchor stores and lots of smaller retail spaces, surrounded by parking lots, is a suburban phenomenon. The city equivalent would be a retail district with large stores, small shops, and parking garages in separate buildings, sometimes connected by pedestrian bridges. I always figured it was a matter of real estate, those sprawling acres, especially the parking lots, would be too expensive in a city. You build vertical in cities, not horizontal.
It doesn’t sound like Detroit is missing anything that other cities have.
Yes, certainly some cities have shopping malls. They tend to be ones that look more like one big building. For instance, since the city nearest me is Washington, D.C., I’ll talk about it. One such mall is Mazza Galleria. It’s right on the edge of the city. The area doesn’t look much different from Chevy Chase, Maryland right next to it. It’s an upscale D.C. neighborhood right next to an upscale suburb. Georgetown Park is another example. It’s not near the suburbs, but it’s in an upscale neighborhood. I suspect this is typical of shopping malls in big cities, that there is just a few of them in each big city and are mostly upscale.
I live in Flint, Mi, which is about an hour north of Detroit. We don’t and never had a mall within the actual city limits here either. I can think of two legit malls around here, Courtland Center (which is located in the suburb of Burton) and Genesee Valley Shopping Center (which is located in Flint Township). This is just a data point showing malls not always being a “city” thing.
you know my grandpa knew someone from nyc that was in the air force with him in ww2 and would come visit and one day in the early 80s grandma had to pick up something at a mall store and he mentioned hed never been in one , and I was excited to go since I usually got a new star wars guy so he went with us but when I said with amazement “you’ve never been in one ?” his reply was why did he need a mall when there were 4 or 5 stores that had 10+ floors to them right on the same block ?
I always thought that was the coolest thing because of the elevators …
The first big shopping mall that was built in the Green Bay area was Port Plaza Mall, which opened in 1977, and was in the center of downtown Green Bay. But, bear in mind that Green Bay isn’t a very big city (~100K people), and it was specifically built where it was as part of a plan to reinvigorate a dying downtown.
It was a classic shopping mall (one big enclosed space, two levels, with several big anchor department stores at the edges), and building it required tearing down a number of downtown buildings (which was controversial at the time).
I don’t think that it ever really reinvigorated downtown Green Bay in the way that it was hoped. Eventually, mall traffic dwindled, as a competing (and newer) mall in suburban Ashwaubenon became the primary shopping destination, and Port Plaza closed in 2006. It stood vacant for years, and was finally torn down a few years ago, and most of the site now holds the headquarters for a cheese company.
The closest thing Detroit (or other big cities) had to a mall was the big department store like Hudson’s. of course, NYC has Macy’s and Chicago had Marshall Field’s.
but malls in general seem to be in decline, at least in the inner suburbs. I’m surprised Eastland Mall didn’t close 10 years ago, and Macomb Mall is close to being on life support.
the funny thing is one of the more successful ones in the area (Partridge Creek) is a return to the open-air/outdoor mall. Eastland started as open-air and was enclosed sometime in the '60s or '70s.
I can’t think of any mall that was both successful and large and in a downtown area. The only successful one in a downtown area I can think of is in Ithaca NY but it is adjacent to an outdoor shopping area so can draw traffic from it as well. (In fact, Ithaca once had multiple indoor malls downtown, if by indoor mall you mean multiple full-fledged retail businesses connected by indoor hallways. Not sure how many still survive.)
I’ve seen full-fledged malls start up in Fort Worth and Rochester but they didn’t look very successful and the one in Rochester closed IIRC.
Downtown Sarasota had a location which occasionally would have a go at an indoor mall. The pattern repeated several times: splashy opening of a 2-story mall with 20+ businesses only to have the non-food-court businesses close over the course of the next year, followed by the food court itself over then next couple years. I hear its last attempt may have been successful, however.
Lots of downtown places have enclosed shopping arcades but for some reason they feel different, more like an covered street than a mall.
So what is everyone’s definition of a mall? A certain square footage? A certain size of anchor store? A certain number of businesses? I personally am willing to give a pass on anchor stores. You do however need at least 3 full-fledged retail business - any size will do but hot dog stands don’t count. If you have 3 businesses, and are connected indoors, and there is a space to meet in between the businesses, and there are places to buy cooked food there, then I am willing to call you a mall without reservations. So I guess I would concede that a downtown arcade is a mall if you can sit down in the hallway to eat and/or rest.
There’s also University Village but that was never enclosed.
One reason why there are few malls within the Seattle city limits is because the city is divided into many neighborhoods that each have their own business districts that function like mini-downtowns. The vast majority of these neighborhoods were built before 1950 so when enclosed malls came on the scene during that decade, there were very few places within the city to build any.
If you go back to the 1950s, exactly the opposite was the intent. Here’s a much better article on the true father of malls, Victor Gruen. Gruen wanted to give suburbs the equivalent of a downtown, not a third place. (That theory is 30 years later.) Downtowns were reachable by public transit, opening them to everyone. Suburbs were not; cars dominated them and had to be accommodated. So the outsides of malls were deliberately drab to lure users to the faux downtown street of the inside, where suburbanites could be pedestrians again.
Gruen hated cars and their isolating effect and their effect on street-level retail. He repeatedly proposed plans for the rapidly emptying downtowns of old cities that would eliminate car traffic and force everyone to the sidewalks. Not a single city adopted them. What they did instead was build the “inner loops” of freeways that would divert car traffic around downtown, creating the worst of both worlds.
One of those plans was half adopted in Rochester, NY. An inner loop circled downtown, a moat that cut downtown off from surrounding neighborhoods. In place of the shops on Main St. a Midtown Mall was built, the first downtown mall in America. It was a fabulous success for about two decades, anchored by a giant locally-owned department store, attractions that pulled in families, and zillions of stores. Schools held proms there. By the 1980s, though, white suburbanites stopped going there. Partly because all the stores were duplicated in the suburbs and partly because black teens used the mall after school. Crime! Danger!
Malls were not a bad idea. Homogeneous pricey white suburbs were a bad idea. Could anything have been done to stop them? Very little, realistically. Malls were an objectively obvious response to the reality of the day, just as the death of malls today is an objectively obvious response to current reality.
And in Rochester, Midtown Mall is long gone. A new more open development is taking its place. And part of the Inner Loop has been filled in, with the hope that businesses will line the new streets just like they used to in the old days when you could walk to downtown. The more things change…
St. Louis had no malls inside the city limits until St. Louis Centre opened in 1985. It never achieved the hoped-for goal of keeping people downtown after 5:00 p.m., and once the novelty of having a food court downtown wore off, people even stopped going there at lunchtime. The downtown mall really only had five good years before the suburban malls struck back with bigger, better anchor stores (not to mention free parking.)
We’ve actually got a recent mall in the Melbourne CBD!
It partly replaces the big stores – which are much smaller and less popular now. And it’s fed partly by public transport – which pulls in the people from the inner suburbs – and partly by an increased level of city living (driven largely by Chinese students and migrants).
Meanwhile our suburban malls are having mixed success. The expectation is that most of them will die, with the death of their anchor stores, but that hasn’t happened yet. There are no new post 1980 malls in suburban Melbourne, but we are not experiencing area die-back, because AUS has had very high levels of inward migration. There is no cheap unwanted real-estate in Melbourne.
