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TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
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TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO
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1950
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1994-02-27
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<text>
<title>
(1950s) Pleasure-Domes with Parking
</title>
<history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1950s Highlights</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
October 15, 1956
Pleasure-Domes with Parking
</hdr>
<body>
<p> To the strains of piped music, splashing waterfalls and
clanging cash registers, three of the handsomest and most
advanced shopping centers in the U.S. opened for business last
week.
</p>
<p>-- Three miles from downtown Baltimore, Maryland's Governor
Theodore McKeldin axed the ribbon that opened Mondawmin (from
the Indian name for corn field), a 46-acre, $15 million shopping
center whose 47 stores, linked by graceful promenades on two
levels, expects to gross $36 million in 1957.
</p>
<p>-- In suburban Virginia, five miles west of downtown
Washington, hordes of first-day visitors flocked to Seven
Corners, a 33-acre, $25 million project which compresses the
equivalent of four city blocks of stores into a split-level
building within one block of the shopper's car.
</p>
<p>-- Southwest of Minneapolis, 72 stores opened their doors at
the $20 million Southdale, first U.S. shopping center to be
completely enclosed (largely under glass) and weather-
controlled.
</p>
<p> Parking for Woman. The new centers, like many of the
mammoth suburban shopping areas that have sprung up in the last
ten years, are designed to siphon shoppers from an entire
region. Mondawmin, for example, is the most convenient retail
center for 400,000 people within a 15-minute drive. With huge
free parking lots laid out so that cars are never more than a
few hundred feet from stores, the decentralized centers spare
their customers the fender-bending frustration of wrestling cars
through downtown traffic. With an eye out for women drivers, the
developers of Seven Corners have even allotted 9-ft.-wide
parking spaces, v. the conventional 8 ft.
</p>
<p> Apart from convenience, the new shopping centers have
become so big and diversified that they can vie on their own
terms with city retail districts. Mondawmin, for example, has one
of the first auto agencies to be included in a U.S. shopping
center. At Seven Corners and Southdale, as in many of the new
centers, two rival department stores face each other across the
mall. Nearly all the big new shopping centers are planned so
that the specialty stores can compete, department by department,
with the dominant department store in the same center. Between
them, Mondawmin, Southdale and Seven Corners have almost as much
store space (nearly 2,000,000 sq. ft.) as Manhattan's Macy's.
</p>
<p> Carnival Atmosphere. But the biggest lure of the new
supercenters is what Maryland's James Rouse, No. 1 shopping
center financial consultant, promoter and part-owner of
Mondawmin, calls their "personal, informal, carnival
atmosphere." Frequently screened from the sight, sound and smell
of traffic, their malls and walkways are bright with flowers,
fountains, tropical birds. At Southdale the 82-acre shopping
zone is insulated from suburban Minneapolis by a 240-acre office
belt and a 176-acre lakefront residential section. Like
Detroit's fabulously successful Northland Center (first year
gross: $88 million), a number of the new projects are decked
with sculptures and mosaics.
</p>
<p> How are the pleasure-domes-with-parking affecting downtown
business? In many cases, say downtown merchants, sales are
higher than ever. Despite some 15 major shopping centers around
Houston, businessdistrict sales last year were 7% above 1954
levels. Says the Detroit Retail Merchants Association's James
Dalbert: "Suburban shopping centers have made downtown merchants
better promoters and salesmen, with emphasis on wider assortment
and price range." Most downtown store owners who open shopping
center branches say that they are now able to attract new
customers, most of whom inevitably visit the parent store. In
the fight for the shoppers dollar, downtown merchants have also
been helped by the bad planning and high operating costs which
often plague suburban developments, e.g., Framingham, a
$7,000,000 shopping center outside Boston, which went bankrupt
in less than two years.
</p>
<p> Mushrooming shopping centers have also spurred expansion
of downtown stores. Shortly before the opening last month of
Houston's $20 million Gulfgate, biggest shopping center in the
South (anticipated first-year gross: $60 million), three floors
of a four story addition were completed at Foley Brothers, the
only major Houston department store that has not opened a single
suburban branch. Allied Stores Corp, which owns 32 department
stores (Boston's Jordan Marsh Co., New York's Stern Brothers),
in Eastern cities, is spending $250 million for expansion of
shopping center branches. Allied is also investing $3 in its
downtown facilities of every $1 it is putting into suburban
centers, Board Chairman B. Earl Puckett disclosed last week.
Said he: "We doubt that more than 20% - 25% of our business will
be in the suburban shopping centers."
</p>
<p> Back to the Bazaar. No expert in the field believes more
strongly in the future of shopping centers than Jim Rouse, whose
Baltimore mortgage-banking and research firm has helped develop
33 shopping centers from Toronto to Omaha. Through complex
market research Rouse, who has a part-interest in six of the
centers he has developed, not only decides where to build a new
shopping center but can estimate in advance the revenue per
square foot. It took him seven years and 4,000 separate
mathematical calculations to decide on the exact location of
the Mondawmin, where anticipated revenue is $65 per square foot.
Rouse not only has plans for two huge new suburban shopping
centers in Maryland, but will soon reverse his tried and true
procedure by building two downtown centers, in Easton, Md. and
Charlotte, N.C., to augment central shopping districts that have
never been able to capture their full potential trade volume.
</p>
<p> Despite rapid advances in shopping center design and
location, says Rouse, they are still in their infancy.
Ultimately he predicts, the big retail stores will all be
weather-controlled and glass-enclosed, allowing store owners to
dispense with display windows and open their counters bazaar-
fashion, to passers-by. Says Rouse, who is also one of the
leading urban redevelopment authorities in the U.S.: "The well-
planned, well-managed shopping center is more than simply a new
plan for retail expansion. It represents a massive
reorganization of the urban community.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>