Victor Gruen has been all but lost to history, his name ridiculed when it is remembered. As the designer of Southdale, the world's first fully enclosed shopping mall, Mr. Gruen languishes in the rogues' gallery reserved for those pioneers of plastic consumerism who gave America everything from aerosol cheese to Astroturf.
Yet, Mr. Gruen was thinking more of civics than shopping when he opened Southdale in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina in 1956. To Mr. Gruen, the mall was to have been America's new Main Street, a town common to bring together citizens increasingly displaced from each other by the burgeoning postwar sprawl of freeways and suburbs.
This new town square was to have churches and hospitals. One day, he had hoped, the mall would serve as an all-purpose, cross-cultural destination for the new global village.
He was wrong. And today, civic pride being what it is, visitors to the Twin Cities are not taken to see Victor Gruen's still-standing landmark, but to the coffeehouse where Bobby Zimmerman alchemized into Bob Dylan, the purple house where Prince once pranced and the boardinghouse where F. Scott Fitzgerald pounded out "This Side of Paradise."
Then, this month, the Twin Cities were struck with Victor Gruen's Revenge. "Now," said Emily Goldberg, a local film maker, "people visiting me get off the plane and demand to go right to the megamall. The megamall? This is what we're going to be remembered for?"
Perhaps. For this $650 million fully enclosed shopping center is not only the most grandiose mall in American history. Nor is the complex, known officially as the Mall of America, just a pumped-up Paramus-on-the-Prairie, one more cookie-cutter amalgam of stores, frozen-yogurt stands and packs of free-range adolescents in Guess jeans.
It is also a 78-acre full-sensory smorgasbord of consumerism whose indoor vistas, its builders hope, will redeem Mr. Gruen's misbegotten dream. As such, its consortium of developers projects that the megamall, as it is known colloquially, will draw more customers a year by 1996 than Walt Disney World or the Grand Canyon.
Perhaps. Many industry analysts, however, question the sanity of launching a monster mall in the middle of a recession, at a time when studies suggest that Americans would rather do almost anything with their leisure time other than shop.
According to surveys conducted by Chicago's M.A.S. Marketing, the time spent monthly in malls by the average shopper dropped from 12 hours in 1980 to four hours in 1990. And sales per square foot of retail space in malls nationwide have dropped 17 percent since the peak year of 1978, according to studies by Management Horizons of Chicago.
STILL, as they say in Minnesota, the bait seems fresh. Inside the mall, its 4.2 million square feet have been diced into almost 400 specialty stores anchored by huge renditions of rare-to-the-Midwest delicacies like Bloomingdales, Nordstrom and Macy's. Sears, Roebuck fills the last of the corner anchors of the megamall, which, when everything is counted, takes up the equivalent of 88 football fields' worth of space on four floors. Only 41 of those fields are used for retailing; still, it takes almost an hour to briskly cruise the mall, with no timeouts for shopping.
At first sight, the megamall's sheer footage is so intimidating that some local grumps now refer to the shopping center as "megadeath." Yet, vast sums have been spent here to reduce the number of consumers stricken with shopping-mall anomie.
To beat back claustrophobia, the mall's innards have been remade wherever possible to make shoppers feel as if they were outside. The most notable of these efforts is the mall's seven-acre Camp Snoopy. It sits in a central courtyard and rises from ground level to the fourth floor, stocked with 400 trees, 30,000 plants, a mountain and a four-story waterfall.
Upstairs, around the height of the highest peak on Camp Snoopy's roller coaster, are dozens of restaurants, both fast and fancy, as well as an assortment of nightclubs and a 14-screen movie house. When visitors depart, they exit what may be the world's largest parking structure, containing 13,000 free spaces within 300 feet of the mall.
Can it possibly work? "They'll come," said Michael Dorsey, a mall spokesman. "They're coming."
In the years since the first shopping mall, it became clear that Mr. Gruen's new Main Street was not that far removed from the old one in the days of Sinclair Lewis. In Lewis's novel "Main Street," the heroine finds that on her town's central drag: "It was not only the uninspiring, unapologetic ugliness and the rigid straightness which overwhelmed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy temporariness of the buildings."
Today, this description of downtown Gopher Prairie sounds frighteningly like the blueprint for the malls that America grew up on, where drive-in shoppers browsed in charmless boxes to the accompaniment of Muzak.
Still, mall business remained solid through the 70's. The industry peaked in 1978, when sales per square foot of retail space averaged $197 a year, according to Management Horizons. Then came the downturn, as consumers, experts said, turned off to the shopping monoliths that in time seemed as soulless and over-baroque as a Las Vegas casino. Today, that yield is $163 a square foot.
The fall cannot be attributed solely to the recession. Over the last 10 years, shopping habits have changed. The days of aimless browsing through malls may have passed, as huge department stores are increasingly replaced by one-stop Wal-Mart-like discount chains and mini strip malls. People are increasingly shopping by television and catalogue but, studies show, rarely for pleasure.
And that, said the developers, is where they come in. Looking back to the long-lost vision of Mr. Gruen, they have tried to create a space that can make the megamall a destination, an idealized community, fun.
THE easy part of that job is simple mall science, knowing, for example, to allow 4.5 parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of leasable area inside. The hard part is selling the fantasy.
That fantasy is best expressed in the mall's theme song, written by Robin Batteau, New York's famed "Tarzan of the Jingle," whose resume includes lines like Chevrolet's "The heartbeat of America" and Coca-Cola's "Can't beat the feeling." For the mall, he came up with a wickedly memorable hook line played under the words: "There's a place for fun in your life, the Mall of America. You've got to see it to believe it. Who told you you can't have it all?"
To make that magic, the developers had to configure the mall's foreboding caverns to seem somehow inviting. So the complex was chopped into four winding corridors, each with a different theme. Matching their mood to a corridor, shoppers can start, say, in the gazebo- and wooden trellis-lined North Garden, the hallway billed as Main Street U.S.A.
The mix is critical. Because the megamall needs to appeal to the largest cross section of the population, its planners have planted the place with bonbons for every demographic. For each Abercrombie & Fitch, there seems to be a counterbalancing Filene's Basement.
Even shopping music has been democratized. Enlisting 3M, Muzak's arch-competitor, the mall has opted away from elevator music in favor of less somnolent stylings. Light FM, a radio service heavily inflected with Billy Joel and James Taylor, is piped into the mall's common areas, while current rock hits are heard in stores catering to 12- to 25-year-olds.
More than a million people huffed through the mall in the first week after Ray Charles was paid $50,000 to sing "America" during a grand-opening gala on Aug. 10. Other stars also came out. Larry Gatlin, who with his singing brothers owns a country-music show bar in the mall, was so moved by the spectacle that he could not stop repeating his mantra for business success: "Let's move some meatloaf!" he said to all who would listen.
Then there was pizza-pushing Wolfgang Puck, who went to the Mall of America to open his first restaurant outside California. The chef was chastised by an unimpressed woman from suburban Minneapolis who liked the food but was upset that Mr. Puck was eating as he served. "I don't care who he is," she said. "It's gross!"
As the bodies ebbed, flowed and banged up against each other during opening week, shopping proved a near-hallucinatory experience. From the epicenter near Camp Snoopy, it felt like an ecstatic mall rave, the staccato ka-ching of thousands of cash registers serving as the high-frequency techno-beat for hundreds of thousands of Midwest shoppers.
The mood over the megamall was not always so jovial. Ever since plans were first announced in 1985, developers have had to bull past vehement local naysayers. To bolster their case, the builders utilized an inspirational strategy of if-we-build-it-they-will-come. But the mall's first development script appeared to have been taken not from "Field of Dreams" but "The Music Man," with Nader Ghermezian, an Iranian rug merchant turned mall developer, playing Prof. Harold Hill, the silvery-tongued out-of-towner with a bright idea for civic improvement.
"You will have all the shoppers from New York, Rome, Los Angeles and Paris coming here," Mr. Ghermezian told Minnesota doubters at a 1986 news conference. "I bring you the moon and you don't want it?"
Maybe, said Minneapolis civic leaders as they pondered the models, then hauled up to Canada to see what Mr. Ghermezian and his three brothers, doing business as the Triple Five Corporation, had already done. What they found was the $1.1 billion West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, with 5.2 million square feet, still the world's biggest. Nader Ghermezian called his Canadian creation, which opened in 1981, "the Eighth Wonder of the World" -- and Minnesota decided it wanted the ninth.
Land was acquired in 1985 10 miles from Minneapolis in suburban Bloomington, on a site formerly occupied by Metropolitan Stadium, the demolished, much-beloved home of the Minnesota Twins. The Ghermezians originally planned on a mall even bigger than Canada's, but faced with some opposition and with having to refinance the project, they lured the Indianapolis-based mall kings Melvin and Herbert Simon to join the project in 1987, and the plans were scaled back.
On Aug. 11, the doors finally opened. And they came, in hordes nearing 150,000, to see what the developers said was the largest number of retailers ever to open on one day in one place. The Simon brothers, who own shares in the mall with the Ghermezians and several other silent partners, predict that by 1996 the Mall of America will draw 40 million customers a year, a third of them from more than 150 miles away.
BUT the doubters remain unmoved. For in the years since Mr. Ghermezian first pulled into Minneapolis, American shopping habits have changed.
"I hate to say this, but I think it is doomed to fail," said Therese Byrne, a Salomon Brothers real estate analyst. "I think everyone is shocked that the mall's backers actually went through with this. But I guess you can't back off when you're half-pregnant."
What the developers hope they are on to is the good-willed frenzy that seemed to vibrate through the floors of the megamall during its opening week. Those mobs -- as seen from above in a Camp Snoopy roller-coaster car on a weekday afternoon -- seemed as happy, brisk and surreally well choreographed as the June Taylor dancers.
Down below, however, is a suggestion that the mall may be cursed by the ghost of the major-league ball park that used to sit there. Metropolitan Stadium looms in the Midwest imagination the way Ebbets Field is recalled in Brooklyn, and Camp Snoopy sits directly above where home plate used to be.
"Metropolitan Stadium was one of the most pastoral ball parks ever," said Art Simon, a Minnesota native who teaches film theory at New York University and who not related to the Simons. "To pave that paradise is like building on an Indian burial ground: you tempt the gods."
But mall spokesmen seem unworried by the threat of old ball-park voodoo. To other doomsayers, the Mall of America need only point to its opening figures. In the first week of business, during those scarce gorgeous Minnesota summer days, more than a million people, it is estimated, went inside the mall, and 13,000 pounds of chicken were consumed at Camp Snoopy. At BareBones, a medical-supply store, 20,000 purchases were made, 432 screaming fly swatters were sold, and the line of people waiting to go inside often numbered 200. Only three cars were stolen from the parking area, and nobody died anywhere in the megamall.
And what if it all goes bust, if fancy stores go vacant and little stores unbrowsed? Then, experts in shopping-mall sociology say, the mix of tenants will get even wilder. A church, a car dealership, a casino or a hospital might move in, perhaps finally validating in failure Victor Gruen's prophesy of the shopping mall as America's new Main Street.
But right now there will be no talk of that at America's most grandiose shopping center. "The people will come," said Mr. Dorsey, the mall spokesman, repeating his own mantra: "They're coming."