ancient cities

iggest, most elegant department stores used innovative
theatrical lighting and display. Like theaters
that were also built during the late nineteenth century,
and movie theaters, that grew during the
1920s and 1930s, department stores were places of
entertainment for masses of people, stoking their
desire to buy with neon light, lots of plate glass,
and a multitude of colors. Strolling along Main
Street or Fifth Avenue to gaze at the displays in
department store windows became a seasonal
thrill. Moreover, just as men and women in those
days dressed up to go to work in offices, so they
dressed up to go downtown for shopping.
Shopping helped make downtown a city’s major
commercial center. From the late 1920s, merchants
and real estate developers understood that the
more foot traffic (especially that of women shoppers)
downtown drew, the bigger businesses would
grow. More shoppers also led to higher rents, a
dynamic that encouraged local officials to enact
zoning laws that further concentrated high-price
and high-volume stores in the center. As a result,
department stores, five and dimes, and eventually
chain stores were located downtown while small,
individually owned, “mom and pop” stores were
spread out in residential neighborhoods.
From the 1920s, however, downtown’s fortunes
began to change. Shoppers who drove downtown to
shop created too much congestion, and there were
too few parking spaces for so many cars. During the
Great Depression, little investment capital was
available to modernize stores; when the Depression
ended, after World War II, investors turned to new
construction in the suburbs. By the 1950s, middleclass
shoppers had massively moved to the suburbs,
where real estate developers built shopping strips
and malls that they could reach by car. Department
stores and larger boutiques followed shoppers to
the suburbs, opening branches in the malls and
ignoring the needs of their downtown flagship
stores. While land values sank downtown, shops
became less exclusive, and cheaper chain stores
expanded. Ethnic minorities of color, who were not
welcome as homebuyers in most suburban developments,
remained in the city and began to dominate
the downtown as shoppers. This in turn lowered the
social status of shopping downtown.
Shopping malls were anchored by two major
tenants, usually branches of department stores
that still had headquarters in the city. Small stores,
which were also increasingly branches of larger
Shopping
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chains, filled the “street” between the anchors,
with the whole set of stores surrounded by huge
parking lots. By the 1960s, many malls had
enclosed the “street” in an air conditioned shell,
installed landscaping, and built an indoor parking
garage. This provided an almost completely privatized
physical environment: Shoppers drove to the
mall in their own car, shopped indoors in the “galleria,”
and returned to the privacy of their home.
But they clearly preferred the convenience and
sense of exclusivity of shopping among likeminded
suburbanites. The malls, although privately
owned and subject to their owners’ rules,
offered another kind of safe public space for modern
sociability. Until women returned to the paid
workforce in great numbers in the 1970s, malls
were primarily women’s and children’s spaces,
especially on weekdays—both isolating and isolated
from the city’s clamor.
Yet the mall concept won overwhelming acceptance.
When, after the 1970s, developers became
interested in rebuilding downtowns, they seized on
the idea of transforming them into urban malls. In
San Diego, a developer closed off downtown
streets to create Horton Plaza; its enclosed space,
visually coherent theme, indoor parking, and private
security guards led to remarkable success. In
Boston, another developer rehabilitated old warehouses
to create a waterfront shopping mall,
Faneuil Hall, and in Baltimore, the same developer
used a mix of new and old construction to establish
a “festival marketplace,” Harbor Place at
Inner Harbor. These mixed use developments
joined stores with hotels, convention centers, art
museums, sports arenas, and aquariums, drawing
tourists and suburbanites as well as city residents.
This strategy suggested that shopping was too
important a development tool to cater only to a
local population, or alternatively, that downtown
shopping required a larger customer base.
Despite the success of some of these fantasy
environments, department stores lost their power
to anchor development. Shoppers preferred the
low prices of discount chains like Wal-Mart,
whose giant stores were initially located far
from urban centers, and the rapidly changing
fashions of specialized, small boutiques. In retrospect,
shopping at a department store seems
like a golden mean before markets broke into
many different segments and tastes became
polarized.