![]() "For tax purposes, in the early 50s the useful life of a building was held to be 40 years, so a developer could deduct one-fortieth of the value of his building from his income every year," Gladwell writes. As Malcom Gladwell explains in the New Yorker, earlier tax law allowed new businesses to set aside some of its income, tax free, to account for depreciation (the idea that from the instant you build a building or buy a new piece of machinery, it begins to lose value, until you'll eventually need to replace it). In 1954, Congress, hoping to stimulate investment in manufacturing, accelerated the depreciation process for new construction. In the common narrative, the mall's rapid expansion is credited to urban flight and growing post-war wallets-and while the mall's nascent years certainly were marked by suburban growth and economic prosperity-it doesn't tell the whole story. After Southdale's 1956 opening, journalists decreed that the vision of retail it embodied had become "part of the American Way." Before Southdale, malls operated much like traditional store-lined streets, with their entrances facing outward along a single-story-in Southdale, Gruen invented the idea of a two-story, air-conditioned, inward facing mall, rooted at its center by a light-filled square replete with fountains, sculpted trees and a fishpond. ![]() Gruen spent his first few years in America as part of a theatrical group, then turned to designing a few stores (including a 163-acre version of a mall), but he's best known for his design of the Southdale mall in Edina, Minnesota. In its truly modern iteration, the mall was the brainchild of Victor Gruen, a short, stout, unkempt man from Vienna who came to the United States shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Preceded by the Roman forum and the Greek agora and medieval market towns, the mall also owes a debt to the 19th century department store, where brands like Sears and Macy's taught a newly urban America to become very comfortable with conspicuous consumerism. Between 20, 400 of America’s largest 2,000 malls closed. According to one retail consultant, within the next 15 to 20 years, half of America’s malls could die.Ī one-stop-shop where people could pick up a bite to eat or chat with friends from across town was never an intrinsically American idea. The 2008 recession was a gut-punch to already flailing mall systems: at a 1.1-million-square-foot mall in Charlotte, N.C., sales per square foot fell to $210, down from $288 in 2001 (anything below $250 per square foot is considered to be in imminent danger of failure). ![]() The last new enclosed mall was built in 2006 2007 marked the first time since the 1950s that a new mall wasn't built in the United States. For the American mall mogul, the reality is clear: rethink what it means to be a mall, or die. ![]() In 2014, traditional retailers will, for the first time, generate half of their sales growth from the web. But like the pyramids, the culture that the malls once honored-and survived off of-is starting to vanish. Envisioned as perfectly pristine, cast against the gritty danger of urban centers, the American mall became the image of suburban consumerism, the " pyramids to the boom years," as Joan Didion once wrote. For countless Americans-especially those who came of age in the postwar years-malls were the new town square: a place to shop, eat, gather and meander.
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