 Hello and welcome to Store Stories, exploring the history and design of retail. I'm Emily Orr, Associate Curator and Acting Head of Product Design and Decorative Arts at Cooper Hewitt. I am a white woman with curly brown hair, blue eyes, tortoise-shell glasses, and a black dress. For today's talk, we'll be exploring how aspects of architecture, design, and urban planning have shaped the shopping experiences we know today. I am honored to be joined by design critic and author Alexandra Lange, whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including City Lab, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. On topic for today's conversation, her forthcoming book, Meet Me by the Fountain and Inside History of the Mall, published by Bloomsbury, will be out in June. Before we jump into our conversation, we'll start off the program with brief presentations by myself and Alexandra. At the top of the hour, we'll open it up to discussion from you all from the audience. I'm going to start off today's program with a presentation taking us back in time to the golden age of retail. We're going to look at department stores in the 19th century in New York City and Chicago. So New York City's department store Story starts with the merchant A.T. Stewart, who in 1846 opened a dry goods store on Broadway between Dwayne and Reed Streets. Here we can see how the facade climbs five stories high with an orderly row of windows, and along the street line there, the New York City pedestrians experienced the largest expanse of play glass they had ever seen. In looking at this image, we can also understand why the store earned the name the Marble Palace. A.T. Stewart, like so many retail entrepreneurs after him, used architecture as a branding device and looked to architectural materials to define his spaces. This being the Marble Palace of the 1840s was followed by the Cast Iron Palace in the 1860s. Now the aim of adding show windows and expanding the potential to show at the city street level was one of the main proponents for department stores to move and expand. And this was the case for Lord and Taylor, who in about 1871 opened a new location at the corner of 20th and Broadway. And at the time journalists gave great praise to their show windows, 16 feet high, 7 feet tall. The journalists also paid quite a good bit of attention to the store's facade, which stylistically we can see is entirely different from Stewart's Marble Palace, which was sleek and clean and classicist. This is sending a mix of architectural messages with its stylistic ornamentation that has been cast out of Cast Iron. The material of Cast Iron also supports structurally the show windows at the store's street front level. And we can see how this building occupies a key corner spot, allowing passenger traffic on multiple sides. And the displays in those windows would have hoped to turn passers-by into the next consumers. There were many technologies used in the window display in order to aid window dressers to keep up with the stylistic progression of the fashion system. So just like architects were trying on new styles for retail architecture, window dressers were also continually experimenting in the show windows with new styles of display for their merchandise. Technologies such as this patent by Hamilton Hunter of the early 20th century allowed a quick changeover in the window to occur. We can see how this patent drawing allows for the building of a platform with the window display at the basement level. And a system of pulleys would pull it up ready to go to the storefront level. That meant that the window could keep as a selling space. It wouldn't have to pull its curtains or go dark. Every minute of the day could be used as a selling opportunity. And so technologies like this enabled window display designers to keep up with stylistic change, which of course had a great effect on the overall facade of the department store itself. New York City was a great capital for the training and professionalization of window display design. And in 1913, the Dragon's Economist, a trade paper in the window display trade, published this advertisement for Cubist drapes. This was months following the debut of the Armory show in New York City. And we can see how this training school is directly aligning themselves with the latest in modern art, advertising that they can offer courses in the latest trends in modern art and design so that their stores windows can keep up with the stylistic pace. In this advertisement, we see a cascade of fabrics that is framed with a geometric composition. And at the back is a floral arrangement broken down in shapes and rods. All of this implying that with the onset of Cubism and these Cubistic drapes, display can be broken down into a series of geometrical elements. And New York City was also a center at which major designers of the period were experimenting with window display design. And Norman Belguettis was one of them. This is his window display of circa 1929 for the New York City department store, Franklin Simon. We can see how he's chosen a series of stylistic or Cubistic blocks in a stepped arrangement, radiating around a female mannequin head whose profile is extremely angular. And the shoes are resting comfortably on these blocks and forming a part of this larger geometrical composition at which our visual attraction to it is really about shape and form rather than any superfluous decoration or ornament. By the 1920s display design had become pared down and was really a new platform for designers from across industry and industrial design and theater design, textile design to experiment in this new medium. And stores gained a lot by partnering with these known designers to up the cache of their products. It is rare that we get an interior view of a store of this period. And in this 1880 view of a New York City textile store in downtown New York, we can gain a really clear understanding of how salesmen worked with the tools and technologies of display in order to make a good sale. And after all, the department store grew out of the dry goods trade, the textile trade in New York, which was one of the strongest industries of the 19th century. We can see the two salesmen here standing at center ready to show a customer a textile bolt from these very orderly arranged groupings of textiles around the perimeter of the room. You can see electrical and natural light that would have allowed visitors to acknowledge characteristics like texture and color and pattern accurately. Paintings and a clock and the chandelier all set a very domestic feeling setting. And these were all techniques of the department store. These elements featured on the sales floors of larger stores as these dry goods, and poriums expanded and moved on to take the dimensions of the department store. New York City also benefited from the shop fitting industry being located right here and firms such as CF Beale were manufacturing sophisticated casework for hats at the left with a hat casework with a pediment with four top hats and at the right a table top jewelry display with glass on all sides allowing security but also maximum visibility. And it was through the use of these fixtures in department stores and in world spares, trade spares and museums that visitors started to see alliances between these display spaces. And I'll end my brief presentation with two examples from Chicago, which were it was also a key department store city in the United States. And this first picture postcard shows us how casework can really effectively change the interior experience of a store. This postcard shows us a view quote unquote one block long and expansive open view with short casework rounded with glass viewing panels and low storage for goods that allow the eye to carry. And a view like this was enticing to the potential consumer who received this postcard with none of the individual merchandise brandered carefully but yet the overall visual impression of the store really being the main selling element. And the picture postcard was really in its prime in this era and turned out to be primary medium in which consumers could share their immediate impressions of the store. This scent from Chicago in 1907 allows the reader to get an impression of the overall kind of monolith of the department store set at that corner in the photographic reproduction at the top. But then the postcard also includes a number of series of blanks fill in the blanks at the bottom allowing the center to fill in quick visual impressions. I remember one I can't quite read from here but one indicates their feeling is loafing the setting is divine money is holding out and their plans for tonight might include the theater. I think these are all impressions that we can identify with in terms of the shopping experience and it's interesting to me that at the time you know more than a hundred years ago visitors to department stores felt the need to convey an immediate visual and textural impression of their experience much in the same way that we use Instagram today. I'm a design critic and I'm a short blonde white woman with big turquoise glasses. So I'm going to kind of take over from Emily hand off at both stylistically and typologically. So this is Milleron's department store. So where once upon a time you know A.T. Stewart built his marble palace. Now we're in California in the 1940s and Victor Crouen is building essentially a concrete palace for this new kind of department store in a new kind of development. So the man typically and I think correctly credited with inventing the shopping mall was a man named Victor Crouen. He was born in Vienna and he fled the Nazis and emigrated to New York in 1938. His first job was working for the industrial designer Norman Belgettys who Emily also mentioned on what would become the Futurama Pavilion for General Motors at the 1939 World's Fair. And the reason I'm telling you about the Futurama Pavilion is for two reasons. First of all it housed a 3500 square foot model of what the USA would look like in the year 1960. And the model because it was for General Motors included downtown skyscrapers, suburban housing, teen lane highways and a heck of a lot of cars. The exterior of the pavilion was designed as a kind of streamlined object itself with long ramps snaking up the exterior which guided crowds into the building. And in a lot of the period photos of the Futurama you can see the crowds lining up. I think a million visitors ended up visiting the pavilion to see what their future held. So when a decade later Bruin and his first wife, the designer Elsie Kremich, were asked to design a freestanding department store for the new suburb of Westchester, California, they were obviously thinking back to their Futurama experience. Millerons was a mid-price department store and they were really ahead of the curve in realizing that the market for their wares was moving out of downtown. All the women living in the little single family houses in Westchester were going to need a place to shop. But while they had arrived at downtown department stores by streetcar or by bus, these stores were only accessible by car. So rather than surrounding this brand new store with even more parking lot than it already has that you can see here, Bruin and Kremich turned part of the parking lot into a promenade. Drivers could access the top floor entrance to the store via these dramatic crisscrossing concrete ramps. And they could park on the roof and up on the roof there was a nursery where they could drop off their kids and also a restaurant that had a view. It was still a pretty low-rise suburb so being even up two or three stories met you out of view in Westchester, California. And then at street level they created these shop windows. But as you can see, the shop windows are set at an angle to the street and that was so that the displays could be seen by both pedestrians and by drivers speeding by. The outside is otherwise pretty plain except for the giant millarounds logo. And you probably recognize this kind of boxy building with a giant logo from many, many department stores attached to shopping malls. You have solid boxes with big logos that were scaled to the highway and I always think of them as kind of like a giant version of the shopping bag with that super plain except for the big words. But millarounds was still just one building and one department store and Gruen eventually started thinking bigger. He was contacted by the Dayton family of Minneapolis and their department store, Dayton's, was a traditional downtown anchor store but like the store owners in many other cities by the early 1950s they realized that they were going to have to open stores in the suburbs if they wanted to keep their shoppers happy. But they felt like the suburbs up to that point most of the shopping was in strip malls that were ugly and they wanted to be able to control the design of their environment. That's where Gruen came in and he offered advanced modern design with a European sensibility and a design for the shopping mall that was centered on a plaza that was meant to remind shoppers of Main Street or a town square or Gruen's mine of the kind of bustling cafe-laden streets of Vienna. You can see that design here in Southdale. The black skylight in the center indicates that central plaza and it's surrounded by two department stores and two bands of individual shops. The mall was an improvement on the town square however because of air conditioning technology. The advance advertising for Southdale said that the mall offered 365 shopping days a year in a climate that was known for deep winter snow and also rather unpleasant summer humidity. The central open space in the mall that you can see here was known as the Garden of Perpetual Spring and it featured plants and fountains, a carousel and aviary and two sculptures by Harry Bertoya known as the Golden Trees. So Southdale was a huge hit. It got national and international press attention and the opening was considered like a major urban and suburban breakthrough and Gruen Associates soon had more work than they could handle. Over time however the design of the mall would mature and the pinwheel plan that you could see at Southdale did not end up being the dominant form of the mall. Most malls were shaped more like an eye with at one department store at each end and shops lining the sides and typically planters and benches down the middle. But this simple version also got dressed up and throughout the 1960s the country's best architects experimented with the mall as an architectural type. One obvious model was the shopping arcades and galleries that sprang up in mid-19th century Europe and the granddaddy of all of those is the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan which gets its name and form to dozens of malls that have long barrel vaulted glass roofs like this one. The first of these was the Houston Galleria which was developed by the visionary developer Gerald Heinz and designed by Gio Abbata of HOK. Heinz wanted the mall to anchor a whole new neighborhood in post oak on the southwest side of Houston and the Galleria which also pioneered the mall ice skating rink included a Neiman Marcus which you can also see in the slide with the design inspired by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier's La Tourette. So Heinz was really aiming for a very high level of architecture and the advance press for this mall talked about how it was going to sell Paris fashions and while the Southdale was supposed to bring perpetual spring to a northern climate the Galleria's big selling point was ice in Houston in the middle of the summer. But by the early 1980s the mall formula of shopping plus a pinch of entertainment in the carousel or the skating rink needed an update and that's where the California architect John Jurty comes in. Jurty had built a fair number of cookie cutter malls including the Glendale Galleria and he thought that the entertainment part of the mall should be in the foreground rather than the background. He also decided that the sort of tasteful look of malls like the Houston Galleria was totally out of style and that malls really needed to amp up the fun. His first attempt at this was the Horton Plaza in San Diego which is this indoor outdoor mall and which is designed to resemble kind of a Hollywood version of an Italian hill town with stripes, Italian palazzoes like Sienna and lots of level changes. But he took that idea of the mall as entertainment even further with the Mall of America which for a time was the largest mall in the United States which centered on an actual amusement park and it had four wings themed to different world cities. With its green metal roof and indoor street lamps the West Market Street which you can see here was supposed to look like a European market with stalls on the ground floor selling food and handmade gifts like a quote unquote authentic brick lined street. So a family that was visiting the Mall of America could actually visit Europe, New Orleans an amusement park like Disney all on the same day, all on the same trip. But in adding a market street to the Mall of America Jerdy was also following another trend in mall design which was the return to downtown. The proliferation of malls in the 1960s and early 70s had as those department store owners feared siphoned many shoppers off to the suburbs and those same department stores found themselves with grand old buildings and city leaders found themselves with walkable streets that were empty of people. So this is where the developer James Rouse comes in. And he thought that some of those suburban shoppers along with tourists and office workers could be enticed to shop downtown if it offered an experience that could only be had downtown. And that meant reusing older architecture. Rouse plus the designers Ben and Jane Thompson came up with what came to be called the festival marketplace. The first was in Fanuel Hall Boston which used old market and port buildings as the base for this new kind of indoor-outdoor shopping experience. But New Yorkers will also recognize this from South Creek Seaport which was also a Rouse and Thompson production. And in Baltimore they also created Harbor Place. So this form of adaptive reuse became super popular and spread to cities across the country who suddenly started looking at their old factories and old warehouses in a brand new way. Obviously, like we're here at Industry City like this is also a festival marketplace and I think the Rouse and Thompson formula is totally in effect here. I also want to point out just before Emily and I start our conversation that projects like Essex Market in Lower Manhattan which opened in 2019 might look a little bit different in aesthetics from a place like Fanuel Hall but they're really based on the same idea that Rouse and the Thompson brought to cities which is taking the local and the historical and putting it into a more highly designed, more centralized, more air conditioned and easier to use context. So in the best case scenario this allows local merchants to thrive and to serve both their neighbors and tourists. So now I think we're going to start our conversation. You had a name. Great. So I think one of the themes as Alexandra and I were talking about the long history of shopping from the department store to the mall is change at a very basic level. And in reviewing Alexandra's wonderful latest book I was really struck by one quote in particular and she writes that the mall is an architecture born to be malleable and in that malleability lies its future and at a time when so many people are talking about the death of the department store and the death of the mall I thought it would be worth starting off our discussion by talking about a bit of optimism and what in that malleability leaves you some promise that the mall has a future. Yeah, I mean I really see it I see the model for a lot of the adaptive use projects in things like Fanuel Hall where there was a building that has big windows has big open floors but these things are true of factories they can also be true of old department stores and so taking that structure kind of the skeleton of it and thinking about how else it could be used has a lot of potential and I think just in a way we haven't historically seen either department stores or malls that way but they both have those basic elements that allow them to be reused I wrote an article earlier this year for CityLab talking about the reuse of department stores and there are libraries in department stores like the new Stavros-Niorcos library across from the 42nd Street main library used to be a department store there's a project in Newark where they build apartments around like the interior atrium of a former department store so this architecture really has a lot of potential it just takes somewhat visionary developers to see it Right, and even in our times that we were talking about the 19th and mid-20th century the department store and the mall were always more than a shopping destination and I think now we have new needs new requirements, new possible uses for buildings of such scale that can be modified in the inside and I think about one of the most recent examples of department store reuse and that being the Winter Antique Show which recently took place in the shell of what used to be Bar and East New York so these spaces are very much actively still a part of our urban experience but I think we're figuring out what new uses and what new ways in which they can serve the cultural and artistic community I also wanted to point out that like the just the structure of this shopping mall is actually designed for that kind of malleability and change because the stores that are in the mall change all the time, you know, change with fashion and I think one great example of that that I talked about in the book is the North Park Center in Dallas which was built in 1965 and the architect E.D. Hamilton picked a very kind of minimal supposedly timeless pallet of materials to build it, it has polished concrete floors and these white brick walls and there's kind of a frame around every store front that has the little logo for North Park in the corner and the same family has owned North Park since 1965 and they've taken very good care of it and so the old part of North Park still looks today like this but then in 2006 they decided to expand it and double it in size and they basically kind of took off and updated the old architecture using the same materials but making it look fresh and new and I feel like that's just a great example of how if you pick the right architect and they create this framework it actually has a lot of flexibility and isn't dated, you know, we talk about a lot of times we will talk about fashion and architecture is kind of being in conflict because fashion is disposable, fashion changes quickly but architecture can also create a framework that allows things to change while the frame can still be reused and that's just something that everyone needs to think about in our kind of environmental time score I think we had hope to tell kind of a case story of a long history of a single site here in Brooklyn and I'll just go back for a second because we can tell the story of a building that kind of bridges our topics from the department store to the mall and maybe we're just taking a pause for a few minutes to do that this is a really impressive piece of ephemera that reached a woman in upstate New York in the 1890s when the department store Abraham and Strauss moved into a new building and when she opened the envelope she would have seen this image the front facade of the store and it advertised that this was the model department store it was both a model that could be built by the recipient but this was also sending the message that Abraham and Strauss was kind of the model or the paragon of the department store experience when this was opened the model would have been revealed and at left you're seeing it entirely flattened and at the right assembled and the recipient actually had the opportunity to build the department store experience themselves to set up the walls of the store to give these expansive views then the floor itself had numbers where one could insert these paper dolls and architectural and design elements that made up its full impression of the store and this was all in celebration of the store's new building to show off every element not only from the goods themselves but that clock that stood at the center to tell people the time the plants that were dotted around the sales floor and this building on Fulton Street in Brooklyn was the home of Abraham and Strauss for some years and is now the home of Macy's and the area has even a longer history that takes us up to Alexandra's point in time Yeah, so I mean now Macy's is on what people typically call Fulton Mall and Fulton Mall had the same kind of rise and fall trajectory as some of the other department store districts that we've talked about before in the 1970s people were choosing to go out to King's Plaza to Roosevelt Field to like the kind of close-in Westchester and Long Island malls rather than going to downtown Brooklyn to shop so the powers that be at Fulton Mall decided that they needed to bring some suburban amenities to the city and that's when they decided to pedestrianize the street even today it's still you know, a busway you're not supposed to drive down Fulton Mall and they also wanted to get sort of a sense of climate control that you get in a indoor mall and so the architect Lee Harris Pomeroy designed these sale-like structures that were supposed to cover both sides of the street along with a consistent set of bench designs and also like wayfinding so the idea was once you entered Fulton Street you would feel like you were in this special bubble on Fulton Street that was somehow better than the other downtown street at Brooklyn in the end they did not build these sale-like structures you can still see remains of some of the Pomeroy benches and circular kiosks on Fulton Mall but I think it would have been pretty amazing if they actually built this and it's interesting to see the ways that cities were kind of trying to imitate but not completely like the suburban dynamic so where do we find this of the department store and the mall Alexandra and I have both come to this topic of retail history and design history bringing together a wide range of sources some of which we showed on the screen today but I thought it might be great to take us take you kind of behind the scenes with us on our research experience and Alexandra can you tell us a bit about how you got at the history of the mall and where you found it well in some places it was really easy like I mentioned North Park before the same family has owned North Park since the beginning and they have their own archive and they were more than happy to send me a giant jump drive filled with photos from the opening and photos of it under construction et cetera et cetera but that's actually really rare malls have gone through like many other industries like a huge period of consolidation and if you go to a mall today it's like pretty likely that it will be owned by Simon Westfield or Brookfield properties and Simon you know doesn't even respond to emails like I never like nobody at Simon would ever even talk to me so to do mall history you kind of have to go around the current ownership and go back to the original thing I ended up finding old photos of malls at the historical societies of various cities at the library of various cities and there's also just a huge amount of ephemeral floating around online I mean that's the kind of stuff that you can't put in a book because nobody knows who owns it and you'll get in trouble but you can certainly like look at it on the internet and there are many many subreddits talking about dead malls where people will video malls that are about to be demolished but also then that tends to bring out people from their towns who are like oh I have a postcard of that mall from when I was little oh I have a shopping bag from there I have a sweatshirt so there's a tremendous amount of stuff that's actually brought together by fan communities that turns out to be a great resource if you're trying to get at like what did it feel like back in the day I would say my research took from many of the same sources one of the interesting things I think about retail history is you find the material in so many different types of cultural institutions and repositories and I think that speaks to kind of the liminal space that retail lives in obviously it's a point of civic pride to many cities that kept this material in their historical societies I found shop fitters catalogs in the prints and drawings departments of museums probably never exhibited but still housed there maybe even given by the business at the time and a handful of department store archives still survived today some of the best are Marshall Fields and Chicago's at the historical society there the Macy's archive at the building on Fulton street and the last time I was there now probably ten years ago it was adjacent to the parade department making a very dynamic research experience so and two I mean postcard websites online repositories of historical ephemera are invaluable to this research that captures kind of an ephemeral moment a photograph a picture of postcard these displays and types of architecture came and went so we rely on these historical resources to capture them and tell the story so we both talked a little bit about the materials and technologies and design elements that make up retail architecture and there were a few in a particular overlaps one of them being the architectural framework of the atrium yeah I think that so many of the biggest department stores center on these atrium which had a skylight which usually had very grand staircases wrapping around them and had plants at the bottom and I mean like even in the title of my book meet me by the fountain like that is kind of the central space of the mall so I think you can see the mall architecture is kind of like an exploding outward of the department store like taking over that suburban real estate but still centered on this same desire to kind of enter the mall and have like a place to pause a place to meet and then like go to the various wings from there and that's really related to that idea that I mentioned in Southdale like calling the central atrium the garden of perpetual spring which relates both department stores and malls back to conservatories which were the first glass architecture that a lot of people used in the 19th century and so there's that sense that a leisure space is going to have natural light is going to have plants and is going to welcome you with those kinds of elements of material. Exactly and this postcard on the view here at the left shows us how Marshall Fields has really capitalized on that atrium space and had Louis Comfort Tiffany home which at the time was the largest piece of mosaic in the United States so here the department store almost meld with an art gallery or museum environment and then at the right we also see how they're advertising themselves as the very kind of industrial behind the scenes back of house operations in which the building itself is kind of intrinsically linked to the stratigraphy of the city itself and this is something that we'll see today for instance in Astor Place the old Wanamakers display windows survive and Bloomingdale is the same at 59th Street when you get off the subway so the tie to the geography of the city both kind of physically and metaphorically was super important for the department store. I had this slide in actually so this is sort of like the indoor outer space of the annual hall and one of the things that I was trying to do with my book was to talk about how malls actually like have their own history and like there are periods of mall making and different fashions in mall making because I think in kind of the mind of the public like there's only like one mall and like all malls are like often and one of the things that's interesting about adaptive reuse projects these downtown malls that were built in the 1970s and 80s is that they really emphasized a whole different color palette and a different range of materials like it actually said in the kind of instruction manual for annual hall that nothing would be wrapped in plastic but by this period there is the sense that like the suburban malls were a little bit artificial we're almost like too squeaky clean and so if you were going to make this different kind of space in the city it was going to have brick floors it was going to have scents and like natural scents from flowers not from perfume and they had this whole kind of as I said instruction manual where they everything was in contrast to how they saw kind of mass produced chain store shopping and I feel like this slide just really shows that really well because it's like all of these warm colors it's outdoors there are little carts and wood and Calvin Trillin would eventually write kind of a satirical piece about all of these you know new adaptive reuse market places for the New Yorker and one of the things he mentioned was like you can't you know get a sandwich for under six dollars but you can buy a copper pan and I just think that the whole color palette of this slide and of these places was all about kind of like copper pans and that kind of French chef idea of like what was good and that was meant to be in contrast to the malls where everything would be kind of like white and plastic wrap so it's amazing to see how I'd both kind of malls and department stores these design elements transport the visitor elsewhere mentally even if they're in a shopping space basically they send these cues that you can pick up and fantasize that you're in another space it's a very hybrid environment the space of the department store also overlapped very heavily with that of the exhibition and the audiences for department stores then an exhibition definitely overlapped and the department store capitalized on the allure and great appeal of visiting the world's fair and wanted to embody that experience within the retail environment and one of the most dramatic examples of that is Siegel Cooper here in New York which created a replica copy of the statue of the great republic from the 1893 World Colombian exposition and what you can't appreciate from this black and white photo that shows the statue of the great republic in the center of the object display is that there was changing colored light that cast down upon the statue and there was a pool of water surrounding the sculpture itself creating reflection and Alexandra was talking about the importance of meeting points and this was very much one of them and happens to overlap with the catchphrase that carries the title of her book and so then this was even commodified this experience this importance of the meeting place and this overlap with the world's fair culture here we see the fountain represented on a coin purse that the store sold with the catchphrase meet me at the fountain this being a really ironic object of course because it would have held money of course to go right back into the department store system itself so the store is selling kind of commodifying experience and a memory and making it into an object to use for future sales at the store this is this is my joke but not a joke I feel like all of Emily's slides are so classy right like black and white so elegant etc but you know by the 80s like you're not meeting at the fountain you're meeting at Camp Snoopy at the mall of America like this was the centerpiece of like John Gertie's vision of like what the mall would grow into and I don't know do I really need to talk about this like it's just funny that like how our idea of entertainment changes and kind of how everything just has to be ramped up more and more until there is literally an entire theme park in the center of your mall and you know that's where you're going to start your family vacation I think another thing that is a great point of overlap for both of our work is thinking about the owners of the department stores and then the department store owners that went out to the malls as really power players in the urbanism and design of their cities I don't think this is true so much anymore except in select places but maybe talk a little bit about how influential some of the people that own department stores were on just looking at the larger cultural life in their cities so going back to A.T. Stewart kind of grandfather of department stores here we see on the screen a stereoscopic view of his private booth at people's palace in New York City which was a cultural venue where there was vaudeville theater and industrial fairs and Stewart actually pitched in when this building burnt to the ground to contribute to its rebuilding and as a thank you had a private box at the theater for the rest of his life and he was a great supporter of arts and culture in New York City as were many department store magnets who took on really a leading role I think as thought leaders in their cities and kind of in American politics more generally another great example is John Wanamaker who established his store first in Philadelphia before moving it to opening a branch in New York City but Wanamaker was very involved in the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial exhibition he became postmaster general of the United States he was involved really a big figure in terms of financial support for education as well as arts and culture so these were family names that were known in the culture of their time who had an impact like way beyond the four walls of the department store I wanted to highlight a developer kind of from my period who I mentioned earlier Gerald Heinz in Houston I mean Heinz had started out as an office tower developer and then when he decided to develop the Houston Galleria and subsequently the Dallas Galleria it was not just that he wanted to get into malls but that he wanted to create essentially a whole new section of the city and he wanted the mall to be part of this mixed used neighborhood that would also include a hotel, office buildings new housing so people could kind of drive in there and like have their entire day their whole like 24-7 thing happen with the mall as its center and this is just a brochure that he sent out when he was trying to raise money for the Galleria and you can see that he kind of showed post oak as already a place at that point it was basically just like the side of the highway but you wouldn't know that from looking at this brochure which shows you this kind of wonderful artistic life that you can have at the mall once it's built I think of this as kind of a mall utopia with the ice skaters and the carousel and the fancy circus banners but in doing this Pines was really just following in the footsteps of that previous generation of department store owners who had seen that they needed to move to the suburbs he just did it at a bigger scale which makes sense because it's Texas. We wanted to think a little bit about who built these malls and department stores and Alexandra named a number of architects in her presentation but it's interesting to think about how retail as a aspect of the architectural practice is kind of mixed in its reputation and how in the department store era at least not very many well-known named architects were working in this field but since then retail structures and a lot of commercial structures in our city is if they come built by a named architect that's certainly a large part of their advertising but not to say that architecture at South was not important and one of the primary examples from my period is Louis Sullivan's work on Schlesinger and Mayer in Chicago which became Carsey Perry Scott a few years later and this is an advertisement that came out to market this store all of the copy is about the architectural details none of it is about the merchandise itself but curiously enough Sullivan's name is never mentioned but what we do see is his great design work here takes center stage and the cast iron ornament that he designed for the first two stories of this store was entirely different in its visual vocabulary it was organic it grew across the surface and this became such an important display device to the store that it was actually invoked in their branding and you can see up at the top in the masthead the name Schlesinger and Mayer incorporates some of Sullivan's organic imagery in a monstead John Gertie architect of the Mall of America really had a chip on his shoulder about how he kind of never got respect from the architectural establishment and he was often very snippy about the architects like Yoavata like Caesar Pelle who designed the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center who were considered great architects whereas nobody was paying any attention to him as a mall architect but I think it's interesting to think about like who was innovating in architecture after World War II people are much more likely to see something like all the new airports and jet ports as innovative but malls were in fact equally innovative and touched more lives in kind of their immediate kind of day to day experience than airports did so one of the architects that got kind of tangled up in this question of like whether it was really kosher to design a mall was Frank Gary who designed Santa Monica Place for James Brouse the same the same developer who developed Fanuel Hall Santa Monica Place which opened on Third Street in Santa Monica was basically the west coast version of Fanuel Hall where it's kind of white and beachy instead of industrial and brick and it's asymmetrical and metallic instead of like warm and worn Gary actually designed the shopping mall during the same period in which he designed his famous house and you can see some of the same materials like the chain link which is used on the parking garage to hold that big you know super graphics Santa Monica Place and the angles and indoor plants that were in the indoor part of the mall so I mean Gary did this mall earlier early in his career and he did other work also for Brouse in Maryland and I was really curious like why didn't he do any more malls after this like why isn't there a Frank Gary mall in Manhattan like who knows well basically the like the snobs got to Gary there's an interesting like back and forth of correspondence James Brouse after this was built and Gary was basically like I don't want to do any more commercial work kind of like I'm never going to make it as an architect unless I get my museum product and Brouse very kindly said okay like I'm not going to ask you anymore that's fine I'm not offended but I kind of like to dream about what might have happened had Gary stuck to his guns and like kept making commercial architecture because I just feel like you know I think all the projects that we showed today show that retail architecture is totally innovative and touches people's lives and has gone through all sorts of different periods that change with fashion and technology and so the idea that it's somehow lesser than architecture for houses or for museums just seems kind of absurd to me 100% agree like it might be a great moment to open it up for questions unless Alejandra do you have any last questions to ask of me great well we welcome some questions from the audience hello dying to read the book I can't wait to read it during the pandemic I've had like a bunch of people fell down the YouTube rabbit hole of dead mall videos and they're so engaging but the one that I really was taken aback by was a couple of malls in the southwest the market stores went out of business and were replaced by malls stores that catered to a changing demographic because I mean you can't talk about the mall without talking about the idea that they're kind of come from this white flight mentality really only catered to a certain demographic of person as time changes the demographics of the suburbs change do you have any other thoughts or feelings or stories about any other malls catering now to a new demographic that wasn't there there wasn't the intended audience when they built it yeah thanks I'm so glad you brought that up and that's definitely something that I talk about in my book there are a lot of really interesting urban sociologists doing work now on what are called ethno-burbs which are the many many places across the country including Houston where there are suburbs that are now largely filled with different immigrant groups and the malls in those areas have adapted to that there are a lot of of aging Asian centric malls Latinx malls and there are specific development groups that are taking over malls built in the 1960s and turning them into more specific ethnic marketplaces and one of the interesting things that happens when you do that is that a lot of times there isn't a department store but the department store will be turned into a lot of different little shops because it's more of an incubator for new businesses rather than having this big national chain come in a lot of times food becomes much more prominent it's not just in the food court but it's kind of interwoven with all the shopping experience because food and family is so much more important in the countries where the people have emigrated from and also just in the way that people want to use the mall so I think one of the ways in which malls can live on is by embracing a much wider range of business ideas and kind of business structures so that they're not catering to this idea of the white non-working woman and her children and the suburbs while her husband goes to work I mean like that really exists in so few places anymore and that was what they were originally for but that's not who they're for anymore because that's not who America is anymore so one slide to talk about the faulted mall and having people coming into downtown Brooklyn and shopping more there and have kiosks and sort of the overhead thing that wasn't built I was wondering if you can talk more about it because to me I think faulted mall is not very successful as a mall or it's not as successful as what it could be in a sense is there any design decision there or what it is that make it the way it is today sure fault mall is actually quite successful like it doesn't it's one of those places that actually like generates a tremendous amount of sales per square foot but it doesn't have the kind of like high polish that people tend to associate with like a highly successful shopping street that said the downtown Brooklyn partnership is actually in the middle of creating a new plan for building mall that I feel like definitely partakes of some of the kind of festival vocabulary of that earlier 1970s plan there are designs that are done by the firm big BR gangles group and WXY which is a planning group that are going to kind of paint the sidewalks and put in new curvy benches and add more play spaces and some of the little nooks and crannies off of the main drag on Fulton mall so I think that the idea that Fulton mall could be more is definitely out there and hopefully we'll see some major design interventions because among other things the population of downtown Brooklyn now includes so much more so much more residences like to have shoppers you don't need to come in from like deeper Brooklyn neighborhoods they're right there and so if the mall can cater to more people and also just be a more attractive pedestrian environment it could do even better thank you that was so enlightening I was wondering if you have thoughts on like the next phase of adaptive free use of some of these malls that are not being taken down like the one that comes to mind is Westside Pavilion in Los Angeles it's now life sciences have been there you see or what makes one more adaptable than others for the next generation there's a lot of really interesting work being done in mall adaptive use and universities and community colleges have actually done some of the more interesting projects one that I talked about in the book is Austin Community College in Austin Texas which has a campus at a former mall that also includes a television studio and they've kind of taken over the parking lot and built housing and part of it and like outdoor plaza and another part of it so it also is much less parking lot intensive than it used to be so I think the malls that are most adaptable are really often the ones that are simple and boring because it's just this box with a concrete or brick exterior and a steel structure inside and so architects can kind of go to town like cutting skylights into that box cutting windows into that box sometimes inserting classrooms into the former boutiques as I said in Austin putting a TV studio into the former department store so it's really just a matter of kind of stripping it back to the bones and thinking about what spaces do we have and in many cases how can we get a little more natural light in here because the shoppers and the merchants didn't want that but almost any adaptable youth like you do want more natural light. What is a mall? I ask this because you keep referring to Fulton Mall as a mall and it really is more like a business district because the city owns the street and each one of the buildings has a different landlord so is Fulton Mall really a mall? Well I mean it's called Fulton Mall I'm calling it Fulton Mall because that is its official name but Fulton Mall is called a mall because of this street in London which was called Paul Mall which was a long narrow street of buildings where fancy British gentlemen used to play a game called Palia Malle, an Italian game so at its like etymological route a mall is simply like a long narrow space surrounded by buildings so both Fulton Mall and an indoor shopping mall can be a mall but the root of those two words is somewhat different when I'm mostly talking about Fulton Mall what I'm talking about is an indoor environment with a minimum of two department stores and rows of shops facing each other as kind of conceived of by Victor Groin. That's right so Fulton Mall isn't really a mall? No I mean Fulton Mall is part of a separate movement of pedestrianization in downtown areas which also kind of started around the 1970s and so that was the word that they chose for it but technically I guess you would say it's a pedestrian actually technically it is sorry to be nerdy it's a transit way because it's not a purely pedestrian street because it has the busway on it so technically it is a transit way but Fulton Transit way like is that working for you in the mid-century and then back to some of their reuse in the 70s and I'm kind of wondering if you could explain a little bit more what happened to the department stores in that period of the shopping malls rise like what that decline looked like and the effect that that had especially like on what was once important maybe downtown shopping centers and just like what that what they turned into in that middle sure I can talk a little bit about the transformation of the department store I mean in the period from the late 19th to the early 20th century the department store is really this world of goods that somehow brings everything under one roof and can take care of you as the department stores pitched it from cradle to grave they could cover anything and everything that you wanted and some did do actual funeral services so that's no exaggeration but and that's the standalone department store this idea that it was a sole destination where you could not only shop but you could probably get your teeth done you could go to a medical doctor you could maybe see the latest picture show you could have your children taken care of you could buy groceries all of these things at once and I think the model starts to break down a bit once they're combined with malls and it's no longer a world of goods more of a branded environment that becomes a part of a larger structure so it's lost this kind of isolated destination effect whether it be in the city or in suburbia and the kind of cache of the department store as one building full of many boutiques starts to kind of disappear as more local stores are opening and those goods are going directly to a store that sells that specialty so people are going to the department store for more of a branded experience where as a department store in the earlier years was organized by material and type of good now it's organized largely by by brand pop-ups yeah and it's interesting if you if you read sort of the mall manuals in the 1950s like the downtown department store owners like knew that they were going to cannibalize their own audience like they knew that what was going to happen was going to happen but they they felt like their hands were tied like if they didn't follow their shoppers they wouldn't keep their business but they knew that that was going to kind of hollow out downtowns which in fact is something that did happen and so that's when you see downtown department stores you know trying boutiques to like have something that they don't have in the suburban malls that's when you see a lot of consolidations so they're like okay we're selling less but we can make more money if like Macy's you know suddenly owns like I can't even I don't know many many like they bought up all of these smaller brands that no longer exist there's just there's a lot of like pivoting and flailing and like trying to figure out like how they can still make money in multiple locations um and it's it's the same kind of thing you're seeing today it's like does anyone even want to shop at a department store now a lot of them claim that they're going to have these new kind of like virtual shopping assistants and use technology to make their shopping experience better than you could have in an individual boutique but I don't know I feel like the department store is like the locus of fashion just maybe actually over the department store is certainly an image of transition I mean now we've gotten so used to the customer service that is available online through that chat box or through reading consumer reviews and I don't think department stores have figured out how to kind of bridge that virtual and physical gap because we still want access to all that information when we're in the store and we have to use our phone or smart device to get there and there's nothing in the store that gives us kind of that sense of security or reference as for shopping in the way that oddly enough shopping online sometimes does and stores have tried anything and everything to lure customers that you know department stores were doing a hundred years ago make the space into an art gallery make it into a fashion show make it into a movie theater have artistic collaborations and retail has always kind of glabbed itself on to another form of kind of cultural and artistic expression and I think we're all kind of waiting to see what happens next you had a question here this furniture setup kind of a minefield I know you're kind of discussing this evolution to it I would love to hear both of your thoughts on kind of the role that retailers play versus developers and sustaining the architecture of the building that they inhabit in particular we're talking about Louis Sullivan's building in Chicago it's a target now and the last time I was there was these disgusting linoleum floors it was right across from Marshall Fields this kind of cultural epicenter of old Chicago in this sort of fascinating way so what sort of role do developers play versus retailers in kind of inhabiting these spaces and kind of redefining these like historical city centers like Chicago or you know anywhere else even Hudson Yards in 40 years when we're talking about even that evolution from what I know about Chicago and the target that now occupies Carson Perry Scott is that this is just from here so not the official word but that the company actually did play quite a role in the historic preservation of that building I'm sure some of that is legally oriented but I absolutely agree with you walking into that store in my heart sunk when I was there at the Chicago History Museum not far away digging into the Marshall Field Archive to see you know the interior is entirely stripped of any architectural ornament and the facade itself remains and that's the case with so many of these store buildings that we still live with in New York City the preservation occurs at the facade level on the exterior but as far as the interior goes it's more up for grabs I would say if you something that is worth visiting in New York City are the moving stairways at Macy's which is a great historical survival of people moving in a shopping center and it's just keep your eyes open to kind of the remnants of these stores and you'll see Wanamaker Street downtown your NYU you know at the corner of the master place and see how the store's history is preserved on our city streets in our street way yeah I mean one of the things about the department stores is I think they're a lot more obvious candidates for historic preservation because so many of them are so grand and they have the elements that we associate with historic architecture you know cast iron fancy ornament all of that there's a lot of there are you know many tiers of shopping malls but a lot of them aren't so obviously historic in that way and many of them like the interior materials have been changed over and over again over the years like I know you know I grew up in the 80s and like the mall that I used to go to looked a certain way and then you know like in the 90s like they came through they replaced all the kind of brown tile floors and like quarry tile with you know new brighter tile with like turquoise accents and like neon over the sides so like a lot of malls have been revamped over and over and so it's really hard to find you know quote-unquote historic fabric and I would say the few malls that do have that kind of historic fabric are places like North Park where the developer slash owner has had continuous ownership because they kind of knew what they had and they were willing to put money into preserving that but that's really a fairly atypical story another of the there really lists like a handful of malls that have been under continuous ownership and another great example of that is South Coast Plaza which is north of Los Angeles which is owned by the Siegerström family and they developed that also in the 1960s and you can still visit kind of the original part of the mall but they also have had the money and wherewithal to add a lot of new parts of the mall to get buy new art for it and also to build a performing arts center as part of their mall complex so that's kind of like the gold standard of like mall magnate turning into city maker kind of you know turning into cultural hub I think we have time for one more question there is one from the audience did you have a question is this did you have a question do you want to come up to the microphone oh which mom in the most money you know I think I'm trying to remember my top ten list I think the one that I just mentioned South Coast Plaza in California is at or close to the top of like highest sales per square foot in the country they get a lot of tourists from Asia coming to shop there and they also have a lot of designer boutiques like Louis Vuitton where they have the exclusive 50 mile radius so that allows them to get a higher price per square foot well thanks to Alexandra for your insightful comments and the conversation and thanks to everyone for coming today and we hope that you will all come and visit us uptown at Cooper Hewitt so see you soon