In history class, we are researching topics from the 1940's till present and explaining to the viewers why it is significant to the history of the United States and how it played a big part during that time period till the present. The topic I chose was the "Birth and Death of Malls," and the starting of my project was pretty up and down because I couldn't find a site that would exactly tell me the birth of American malls and not malls out of the country. During the process of my searching and web browsing, i came to this
article called, "The Rise and Fall of the Shopping Mall," and this article lead me in the right direction of how the mall even started.
The article explained to me on how earlier shopping centers were made or structured and they were often many stores close together on a street or a plaza with multiple stores surrounding a parking lot such as an outside mall. The article mentions how California creates an shopping center in 1947 with many stores and included a big parking lot, so it was labeled as an outside mall. This
picture on the side is a picture of the mall in California created in the 1940's and the center was an outside shopping mall that fitted perfect for the weather. While reading the article i mentioned earlier in my research, I found out that Minnesota had an outside mall but form the cold weather, it wasn't quite stable. Problems with the massive weather lead Victor Gruen, a Jewish Bohemian who created shopping centers, to install a roof over the the mall in Minnesota to fix the problem and after that accomplishment, the mall was born in 1956.
The person in the
picture is Victor Gruen and he is the man that produced the malls in America. The article i mentioned earlier produced me with quite information about Gruen and his accomplishments. Gruen creations was pretty successful because he designed over 50 malls in the United states and some of his work expanded to other countries. Continuing my research and looking for more facts about Gruen, I visited this
website with a bio about Gruen and the website helped me a lot because it was from the German Historical Institute which was reliable. The website mentioned that Victor establish an firm foundation called the "Victor Gruen Foundation for Enviromental Planning" and it consisted of about 300 staff members and also had different office sites in Los Angeles and in Vienna. His foundation still stands today and his staff are continuing to come up with great ideas to improve the world and its appearance.
This is a picture of the first enclosed mall called
Southdale located in Minnesota and it was created by Mr. Gruen in 1956, and stills stands today. Victor emerged the U.S in their appearance because he created so many projects with different styles and one of the things that bugged him most was the position of how cars park around a mall and feels that it needs to be neat or its ugly, said in the link to the picture. The mall had been born by Victor Gruen but then started to come to a downfall because of problems that occured.
The mall experienced a downfall in certain areas that caused the mall to slowly die down in the U.S. Ms. Lawson lead me to a different
article on AVL called "Bye-Bye, Mall Rats," produced by Julie Rawe and she helped me to understand one of the ways the mall died. The article mentions that rules had started to be set for the teens because of the incidents that were occurring such as respecting their elders in public. Some of the malls had produced the Parent Policy which only allowed the teens to be with a parent after a certain time because US teens were not responsible enough as Julie mentions. Advancing in my research i visited
another article about a different reason that caused the mall to die, and the website was like a news feed type of source from a newspaper company in Florida. The article mentioned online shopping and also how many consumers like big single stores and other outlets causing the creators to stop producing enclosed malls. Their were more reasons on how the mall fell but couldn't get all of them down because it was quite a bit. (
Fancy Mall in London)
Coming into my conclusion about the birth and death of malls, I feel that the mall industry has benefited the U.S in a lot of ways. Victor Gruen had brought his ideas to U.S from Vienna and he was quite successful in many different states for his ideas. The creation of the enclosed malls became popular and made almost everywhere because some states have bad weather but overall the structure of the malls are pretty awesome. Wrapping up my project up with my final thoughts, i feel that this project was a great research topic because I didnt know anything about the mall until this research and I really enjoy working on this topic.
The mall experienced a downfall in certain areas that caused the mall to slowly die down in the U.S. Ms. Lawson lead me to a different article on AVL called "Bye-Bye, Mall Rats," produced by Julie Rawe and she helped me to understand one of the ways the mall died. The article mentions that rules had started to be set for the teens because of the incidents that were occurring such as respecting their elders in public. Some of the malls had produced the Parent Policy which only allowed the teens to be with a parent after a certain time because US teens were not responsible enough as Julie mentions. Advancing in my research i visited another article about a different reason that caused the mall to die, and the website was like a news feed type of source from a newspaper company in Florida. The article mentioned online shopping and also how many consumers like big single stores and other outlets causing the creators to stop producing enclosed malls. Their were more reasons on how the mall fell but couldn't get all of them down because it was quite a bit. (Fancy Mall in London)
