Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream by M. Jeffrey Hardwick

Author:M. Jeffrey Hardwick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2004-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Saving Our Cities

The questions “Can our cities be saved? Will they be saved? Are cities worth saving?” are merely academic. They not only can be saved, but they must be. The question before us is how.

—Victor Gruen, 1955

Though they earned him a national reputation, Gruen’s immensely popular shopping centers left him only partially satisfied. He thus set his sights on an even more formidable retail challenge. With shopping malls, Gruen had sought to create a new way for suburbanites to shop, and he had largely succeeded. Now he turned his attentions to one of the inspirations behind the suburban shopping center: downtown. As Gruen enjoyed the fruits of his work in suburbia, urban politicians and businessmen across America began to worry about their futures. Once again, Gruen turned first to writing to stake out a new area. In articles and speeches, he began to suggest a few simple plans to rejuvenate downtown. His strategies were the same as those that had spelled success in suburbia. He wanted to provide parking, entertainment, pedestrian malls, landscaping, and modernized stores for downtown. This plan, Gruen confidently promised, would help downtown hold its traditional place as a region’s economic center.

By the mid-1950s, American downtowns had run into hard times on a number of fronts. First, there had been little new construction in cities since the 1920s. Moreover, through the Depression and World War II, existing buildings—especially housing and apartments—had received little attention. Additionally, infrastructure improvements in roads, highways, or trolleys had also come to a halt. All these problems led to a dire situation that was compounded after the war. In particular, returning GIs and exorbitant rents created an extremely tight urban housing market, with the result that it was easier to buy a house in the suburbs than rent in the city. In response, new construction largely occurred outside the city limits; both businesses and residences began to leave cities in great numbers. Because of all these events, downtown business owners, city politicians, and urban planners all sought a radical remedy to their declining prospects. One optimistic author provided a recipe detailing how “the city fights back” against the ever-growing suburbs.1

For Gruen, switching his focus from suburban shopping centers to central business districts was not difficult. Indeed, when he had first proposed a suburban shopping center to Hudson’s in 1950, he was reacting to downtown’s declining prospects. Now he wanted to shore it up. Writing for the Harvard Business Review in 1954, Gruen portrayed downtowns and suburbs as interchangeable spaces that begged identical solutions for their merchants.2 He attempted to answer the increasingly urgent question: how could Americans save their cities?

He first described the dramatic changes in American cities. The single most important factor since World War II, Gruen maintained, was the phenomenal growth of suburbs. Suburbanization had long been a topic of interest for academics, but retailers were just starting to wake up to the implications. The affluence of the postwar period—seen in America’s “building boom, higher incomes,” and proliferating automobiles—should inspire merchants to look for a way to profit from the prosperity.

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