Cause & Effect

Annie Fickes

English 101V Clark College Winter 2006

The Evolution of the Enclosed Shopping Mall in America :

Its Causes and Effects

While some people are addicted to cigarettes, chocolate, or even skydiving, my addiction is shopping at the mall; more specifically, I prefer to shop in enclosed malls. The enclosed mall is a shopping concept that originated in America . In my lifetime, I’ve spent hundreds of hours (and dollars!) shopping in these malls. It is a pleasure for me to browse from one store to the next in a temperature-controlled environment that is aesthetically pleasing. To enter the stores at the mall, I don’t even have to push or pull open a door! In fact, there are no doors! I’m hooked, and the resultant effect is that I spend more money at malls than I would if shopping were less convenient.

However, shopping in America wasn’t always as easy (as I described it above). During the Industrial Revolution of the 1800’s, towns were congested and shops were located on filthy streets. In the early to mid-1900’s, automobiles allowed more and more Americans to move away from these conditions. Many Americans opted to live in the clean and more peaceful suburbs. Still, in the suburbs, shops were usually small family-owned specialty stores offering specific items such as hats, shoes, and baked goods. Going from shop to shop was time consuming. In the fifties and sixties, outdoor shopping centers were constructed (clusters of stores adjacent to each other, usually in an “L” shape). Today, outdoor shopping centers continue to be built, but on a smaller scale, called “strip malls.” The disadvantage of non-enclosed shopping centers is that you have to be outside and drive here and there to find the exact stores you need. Out of this inconvenience arose a need; a need which was met fifty years ago by Victor Gruen, the “father” of the American mall.

Three factors sparked the creation and success of the modern enclosed mall: Gruen’s brilliant design for the enclosed mall, the rise of suburban America , and 3.) A. Alfred Taubman’s innovative elaborations on Gruen’s model. Gruen was an Austrian-born architect who capitalized on his idea to provide suburban American with convenient and pleasant places to shop rather than having to drive to the busy cities. He designed the first fully-enclosed mall in America in 1956.  

Gruen named the mall, Southdale. Southdale is located in Edina, Minnesota (a suburb of Minneapolis), somewhat ironically, only fifteen minutes away from the relatively new Mall of America, the United States’ largest mall. Totaling twenty million dollars, Southdale had two “anchor” department stores, Donaldson’s and Dayton ’s, in addition to its seventy-two stores. Its introverted design was revolutionary; the outside walls were blank, instead of filled with windows and entrances like outdoor shopping centers. Gruen designed it this way to encourage customers to focus more on the inside environment of the mall than its outside appearance. Because all of Southdale’s shops and department stores were under one roof, the mall’s indoor temperature stayed constant using heat or air conditioning. Gruen also made it easier on shoppers’ legs to navigate the entire mall by building it on two levels joined by escalators. Almost all malls at the time were built with only one floor, making shopping more like a marathon than a leisurely experience. In contrast to limited “street parking,” Gruen built a convenient two-tiered parking garage alongside Southdale. Mall shopping was cleaner than “street” shopping and four-wheeled vehicles were never a worry on the mall’s pedestrian walkways. Gruen went to great lengths to make shopping at Southdale a relaxing and enjoyable experience.

Gruen used his engineering expertise to design Southdale, but it was his Viennese background which influenced the aesthetics of the mall. According to “The Terrazzo Jungle,” an article written by Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker, when Gruen lived in Austria , Viennese reformers (including Gruen) believed that “the quality of civic life was a function of the quality of the built environment. Gruen thought that principle applied just as clearly to the American suburbs.” Gladwell also stated that in the center of Southdale, “he (Gruen) put a kind of town square, a ‘garden court’ under a skylight, with a fishpond, enormous sculpted trees, a twenty-one foot cage filled with bright-colored birds, balconies with hanging plants, and a café.”

Journalists around the country raved about Victor Gruen’s Southdale. Life magazine hailed Southdale as, “The Splashiest Center in the U.S. !” Time Magazine called it a “pleasure-dome-with-parking.”

Statistics show that “today virtually every suburban American goes shopping or wanders around or hangs out in a Southdale facsimile at least once or twice a month” (Gladwell). This is largely due to other architects implementing Gruen’s idea of the enclosed mall over the years. The most notable of Gruen’s “underling” architects was A. Alfred Taubman. Taubman adopted Gruen’s idea for the enclosed mall a few years after Southdale was constructed, and made millions with his designs. He took the idea of the enclosed mall to the next level. Taubman favored the design of the enclosed mall over other shopping centers because he believed it did the best job of reducing “threshold resistance,” or “the physical barrier that stands between a shopper and the inside of a store” (Gladwell). The physical barrier that is referred to here, is, a door (or doors). Taubman states in Gladwell’s article, “People assume we enclose the space because of air-conditioning and the weather, and that’s important; but the main reason is that it allows us to open up the store to the customer.”  Taubman also reduces “threshold resistance” by building transparent half-walls and handrails around the second floor inner walkways so that customers on the first floor will be able to clearly see the stores on the second level and vice versa. In Gladwell’s article, Taubman explains, “You buy something because it’s available and attractive. You can’t have any obstacles. The goods all have to be there.”        

Also, Taubman designs all the main walkways of his enclosed malls to be no more than three city blocks, or one-thousand feet. He believes that, “three blocks is about as far as peak shopping interest can be sustained” (Gladwell).

The stores in Taubman’s enclosed malls are laid out so that they form “adjacencies.” For example, next to a store selling women’s evening gowns, Taubman would place a store selling women’s dress shoes. He explains that it wouldn’t make sense to place a seafood restaurant next to Versace, “where a woman about to spent five-thousand dollars could catch a whiff of sautéed grouper as she tries on an evening gown.” According to Taubman, “Lots of developers just rent out their space like you’d cut a salami; they rent the space based on whether it fits, not necessarily on whether it makes any sense” (qtd. in Gladwell).

In addition to creating adjacencies, Taubman makes sure his malls have “well-run” department stores, as he believes they are the leading force behind his malls. Lots of business comes from the department stores’ heavy advertising, popular brand names, and large cosmetic lines. Not only do the department stores generate their own business, they give the mall’s smaller stores business through what is called “cooperative capitalism.” As the department stores “lure” the maximum number of customers into the mall, the entire mall becomes successful (qtd. in Gladwell).

Taubman also believes that a mall is more successful when it is designed with only two stories. With two stories, shoppers can make a loop around the whole mall, see everything, and end up back where they started. If there were three stories, after touring the mall, you’d be at the opposite end and level from where you began!

To encourage shoppers to explore both the first and second floors of his enclosed malls, Taubman came up with the idea to put a kind of road around the whole mall that rises as you drive around it. He did this so that at least half of the mall’s entrances would be on the second floor. “We put fifteen per cent more parking on the upper level than on the first level, “because people flow like water,” Taubman said, “They go down much easier than they go up. And we put our vertical transportation—the escalators on the ends, so shoppers have to make the full loop” (qtd. in Gladwell).

Because the lighting environment of the enclosed mall could be controlled, Taubman installed small lights next to the skylights that went on when the natural light faded. That way the customers didn’t feel like they had to go home when dusk set in. Also, Taubman made sure the skylights were recessed so that the sunlight never reflected off the storefront glass, and the merchandise could always be clearly seen. Because Taubman adopted Gruen’s design for the enclosed mall, and added his own brilliant ideas, all of Taubman’s malls have “average annual sales of roughly five-hundred dollars per square foot. The average American mall has annual sales of around three hundred forty dollars per square foot” (Gladwell).

All around the world architects have adopted the idea of the enclosed shopping mall, but it was born in America . The rise of the suburbs coinciding with Victor Gruen’s and A. Alfred Taubman’s visions for comfortable shopping, were the catalysts for the earliest enclosed shopping malls in America. With my shopping addiction, I’m fortunate to be an American!  

Works Cited

Gladwell, Malcolm. “The Terrazzo Jungle.” The New Yorker 8 Mar. 2004. 15 Mar. 2004. <http://www.newyorker.com/

        fact/content?040315fa-fact1>.

Schoenherr, Steven E. Evolution of the Shopping Mall. 29 Oct. 2005. 15 Mar. 2004. <http://history.sandiego.edu/

        gen/soc/shoppingcenter.html>.

“Shopping Malls.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2006. 15 Mar. 2004. <http://www.reference.com/browse/

        wiki/Shopping_mall>.

It was a dark and wintry evening the first time I encountered a nutria. My friend Emilie and I had just finished (or had tried to anyway) a greasy steak sandwich between the two of us at a Shari's in a Milwaukie strip mall off of Highway 224. We were sitting on a tiny rock wall overlooking the marshy creek that flowed behind the restaurant, watching the ducks as we tried to digest our meal. That’s when I saw it.

“What the %#@* is that?” I instinctively blurted out. There, not six feet away from us, stood a whiskered fellow that resembled something between a demoralized beaver and a large rat. It had just surfaced from the water and was sniffing around on shore, bumping into ducks on its way. Apparently, it was rather blind. Emilie, having grown up near the marshes of Beaver Creek, immediately identified the furry freak. To my relief, she said it was a “nutria” (Whew, the thing has a name, I thought), that nutria were a foreign species originally brought over for their fur, and that now they were overpopulating marshes. Emilie gave me enough information to feel safer that evening, especially when the creature came close to us and sniffed for a few long seconds with its pig-like snout. The questions of how the foreign creature came to be here and what its purpose was continued to haunt me thereafter, so I decided to hunt down some answers.

The first interesting tidbit of information I found was the origin of the oversized rodents’ name. According to Edward T. Nickens, in his article, “Trying to Show the Door to a Marsh Munching Immigrant from South America,” “nutria” is the Spanish word for “otter” (Nickens 14). Secondly, a Newsweek article by Peter Annin states that nutria are, in fact, the second largest rodents on earth (Annin 67). What I found most interesting of all, however, was the rodents’ immigration status.

As reported by Sally Deneen in her article, “Monkeying with Nature,” the aquatic rodents were first brought onto Avery Island in Louisiana, oddly enough, by the owner of the Tabasco sauce company, E. A. Mcllhenny (Deneen 38). In 1938, he imported 20 nutria from Argentina with hopes of starting a fur farm (Nickens 14). McIlhenny clearly hadn’t a clue what he was actually starting. In cages, the nutria bred rapidly, and in 1940, when a hurricane hit, 150 of them escaped, beginning episode one of our country’s long series, “Attack of the Nutria.” The demand for fur soon became irrelevant. James McCann of the National Biological Service claims that there are now over 10 million nutria in the United States (Deneen 38). Nickens’ states, in his article written two years earlier, that as many as 20 million populate Louisiana alone (Nickens 14). Since their introduction to the States, nutria have since flourished and spread even to the wetlands of Oregon and Washington (Deneen 38).

As it turns out, it is not merely the sheer number of these fifteen pound creatures that is affecting our environment. After reproducing like mad, nutria, I discovered, seem to have only one true purpose, and that is to eat. In Louisiana, nutria will devour entire free-floating marshes, referred to as “eat-outs,” leaving only water behind. These areas can reach up to five hundred acres in size (Annin 67). Some states (and I’m sure they were sorry later) imported nutria for biological plant control. In Texas, nutria ate not only the targeted water lilies, but all the other vegetation in the area. “In a short time,” reports McCann, “the lakes were changed into denuded potholes that were not even suitable habitat for the nutria” (Deneen 38).

At this point in my research, my first reaction to nutria that night at Shari's hadn’t changed much. I was still thinking, What could these creatures possibly be good for? and Do they have any redeeming value whatsoever? That’s when I found the article, “Louisiana’s Amazing White Alligators,” by Jennifer B. Armand and Rosemary James. Bear with me here. Apparently, at the same time that the nutria were beginning to take over Louisiana’s wetlands, the alligator, their biggest natural predator, was being placed on the endangered species list. The Louisiana Land and Exploration Company (LL&E) thought all the trappers in those areas could come in handy at that point. The company used the nutria meat byproducts left over from the trappers’ kills made for fur to feed the alligators in order to breed them in captivity. Then randomly, one fall in 1987, 18 little white alligators hatched in one nest (Armand). Although there’s no connection between the nutria and the alligators turning white, this story somehow validated the existence of nutria a little more for me. They could be used to breed alligators (white ones, no less). Now there’s a worthy purpose.

While they may have had this one haphazard purpose, nutria are overwhelmingly a nuisance to our country’s wetlands, and anyone remotely environmentally conscious seems to agree that something must be done. Most experts, however, are realistic about such a challenge. As Roger Mitchell, Head of Biodiversity for English Nature, a government advisory group, puts it in Erik Stokstad’s article, “Vanquishing Nutria,” “when something builds up a strong population, getting rid of it is almost impossible” (Stokstad 1836-1839). What then, if anything, can be done?

Various approaches towards a solution have been made. In Louisiana, in an effort to avenge the critters’ significant destruction of their marshland, state officials decided to turn the situation around and start eating them. In 1998, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries teamed up with Louisiana Culinary Institute chef Philippe Parola and created a new menu, including Culotte de Ragondin la Moutarde (nutria in mustard sauce) (Nickens 15). Scientists in Maryland are taking a stronger position, however. The 50 thousand or so nutria that threaten their Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge are reason enough for them to want to completely eradicate the munching marsh-eaters. They are encouraged by the British effort of the eighties, which took six years to kill almost 35,000 nutria (called “coypu” in the United Kingdom) (Stokstad 1836-1839).

Here in our native land of Oregon, The Audubon Society of Portland Wildlife Care Center understandably declares that it will “not accept nonnative, exotic or domestic animals for treatment,” and includes on its list nutria, opossum, fox squirrels, and domestic ducks and geese (Audubon). It warns that if you leave such an animal at the care center, it will be humanely euthanized. The reason for this, it goes on to explain, is that “the decision to return an introduced species to the wild is oftentimes a decision to destroy the native wildlife that already inhabits that area” (Audubon). This is clearly the case with the nutria.

So what can the average Oregonian do about this national nuisance? Well, if you see a half-dead nutria lying around a marsh, or anywhere for that matter, don’t take it to the Audubon Society. As a matter of fact, I don’t think you’d be hurting many people’s feelings if you finished the poor rodent off. What good are they anyway? I’ve heard they taste kind of like chicken... or maybe a greasy steak sandwich from Shari’s.

Annin, Peter. “The Rat that Ate Louisiana.” Newsweek 8 Mar. 1993: 67. EBSCOHOST. 5 Nov. 2004.

Armand, Jennifer B., and Rosemary James. “Louisiana’s Amazing White Alligators.” Louisiana Environmentalist Jan.-Feb. 1994. 6 Nov. 2004. < http://www.leeric.lsu.edu/le/cover/lead014.htm >.

Audubon Society of Portland. “Preventing and Solving Problems: Non-native Animal Policy.” 5 Nov. 2004. < http://www.audubonportland.org/living/prevent/non.php >.

Deneen, Sally. “Monkeying With Nature.” E Magazine: The Environmental Magazine May-June 2002: 38. EBSCOHOST. 5 Nov. 2004.

Nickens, T. Edward. “Trying to Show the Door to a Marsh Munching Immigrant from South America.” National Wildlife Dec. 1999- Jan. 2000: 14-15. EBSCOHOST. 5 Nov. 2004.

Stokstad, Eric. “Vanquishing Nutria: Where There’s a Will, There’s A Way.” Science 17 Sept. 1999. EBSCOHOST. 5 Nov. 2004.