The history of shopping malls

It is hard to picture a modern suburb without a shopping mall: the roof, the air conditioning, the rows of stores, the food court. It feels like an eternal invention, but it has an exact birthday and a father with a first and last name. And the strangest part is that this father ended up disowning his own creation.

It all began in a Minnesota town called Edina, on October 8, 1956, when Southdale Center opened its doors as the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall in the United States. More than 40,000 people showed up on opening day alone.

A European, a freezing winter, and an idea

The architect behind Southdale was Victor Gruen, born in Vienna in 1903 to a Jewish family, who fled Austria in 1938 when Nazi Germany annexed it and arrived in the United States with almost nothing. Gruen missed the squares of his native Vienna: places where people strolled, drank coffee, met, and talked. The America of the 1950s, by contrast, struck him as too dependent on the car and on open-air strip centers scattered along the highway.

The practical trigger was the weather. Donald Dayton, owner of the Dayton's department store, was looking for a way to sell more on Minnesota's freezing days, when people preferred to stay home. Gruen's answer was brilliant: if it is unbearably cold outside, let's put everything under one roof and keep a pleasant climate inside.

More than stores: a square with a roof

Southdale held a steady temperature of around 75 degrees all year, no matter the snow outside. But for Gruen it was not just a shelter from the cold. He imagined a community space, a substitute for the city center: with natural light, public art, fountains, plants, and European-style sidewalk cafes, where people would get out of their cars and mingle.

• It was the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled mall in the United States.
• It opened on October 8, 1956, in Edina, Minnesota.
• It was designed by Victor Gruen, an exiled Viennese architect.
• It grew from the idea of selling in winter, but aimed to be a modern public square.
• It inspired thousands of copies across the country in the decades that followed.

The full dream that was never built

Few people know it, but the stores were only one part of Gruen's plan. He dreamed of Southdale as the heart of a whole community, surrounded by apartments, schools, medical offices, parks, and even a lake. The commercial part was built and was a runaway success; the rest of his urban vision never arrived. What multiplied across the country was not his human square, but only the commercial shell.

I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities. — Victor Gruen, 1978

The creator who disowned his creation

By the late 1970s, Gruen looked at what his invention had become and did not like it. Instead of bringing cities back to life, malls had hollowed out downtowns and multiplied the car-and-parking-lot model he so criticized. In a 1978 speech in London, he delivered that bitter line, disowning the suburban developments that bore his stamp. The father of the shopping mall died convinced that his creation had become the opposite of his dream.

Takeaway

The next time you walk through a mall, remember that it began as the dream of a European exile who wanted to recreate the warmth of a Viennese square in a freezing Minnesota suburb. The story of Southdale is a reminder that ideas grow on their own, and not always in the direction their creator intended. Gruen gave us the roof and the climate, but his real dream, a place to meet and be together, remains an open invitation.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Southdale Center — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southdale_Center
• Wikipedia: Victor Gruen — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen
• Minnesota Historical Society Library — https://libguides.mnhs.org/southdale
• Library of Congress (This Month in Business History) — https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/october/opening-minnesota-southdale-center