Kind of interesting to watch the mall trend fold in on itself. They were trying to recreate "towns" all along. I mean that's what a walkable "development" with mixed residential & commercial activity is.
> Gruen had meant well. He wanted to import the pedestrian experience of modernist, European cities like Vienna and Paris into America, where the automobile was king. By creating places for community in the deserts of suburbia, he hoped to lure people from their cars and into contact with one another. The malls would be for shopping, yes, but also offer food, relaxation, and green space. In his original conception, malls would also connect to residential and commercial space, medical care, libraries, and other public spaces. Even though unrealized, this idea was not that different from today’s New Urbanists, who advocate denser, more walkable mixed-use development in cities broken up by the dominance of the automobile.
> Gruen would eventually disavow his creation, expressing disgust for how malls had exacerbated rather than ameliorated urban sprawl—not to mention exporting it globally, infecting the Old World with this land-use virus of the New.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/when-...
Makes me remember how things were very different in malls around here back in the 90s.. not sure when it exactly changed.. but many things changed immensely - and mainly with the types of people that you would be surrounded with.
There was also a different vibe with affordability of nearly everything back then.. that had mass effects I'm sure..
Now I'm trying to decided just what time frame so many things changed where people were more rude all around (customers and employees) - and in order to get the kind of customer service these days you almost need to go to some super expensive places - and even then its not usually as genuine as it once was.
My point being that 'so many people there' I think it relative to the vibe of the people, and not necessarily just place X with Y number of humans density... for example going to a comic-(like)-con these days with 'so many people' there is a totally different vibe than being at average mall (around my part of the country/world) with same number of people in similar spaces.
/random thoughts
Even Chuck D found its charms irresistible: https://imagescdn.juno.co.uk/full/CS537052-01B-BIG.jpg
My apartment is on top of a shopping centre. There's the three major supermarkets, various electronic and fashion retail, a large doctors surgery, radiology and pathology labs, physio, dental, a bunch of pharmacies, and a whole lot of restaurants.
It's incredibly convenient for me. That said, there's been a lot of closures of various stores, and I know other people have repeatedly mentioned that sometimes it feels like a ghost town. I suspect that without the built-in client base living above, that there would have been a lot more closures of stores.
So is the average person's income, in AUS.
It's cheaper to pave everything in sight vs build multi-story parking decks + greenspace.
And local zoning boards / politicians were only happy to hand out passes, as commercial taxes pay for things that get votes.
So I'd say less a willful decision than a lack of powerful opponents.
It's not even clear who sufficiently powerful opponents of that type of development would have been / are? State or federal EPA?
Washington state created the Growth Management Act in 1990. For the most part, urban boundaries have stopped expanding, and coincidentally the mall being used as the poster child for this article is located in Seattle.
It's an interesting co-evolution (or lack of) with dramatically scaled corporations, as well.
Pre-interstate, you didn't have as much consolidation of firms (e.g. local burger vs McDonald's, local inn vs Marriott). The national firms that did exist tended to be in higher-capital industries (e.g. transportation or resource extraction).
So firms grew in scale and power from the 1950s+, but government structures did not. With the end result of pitting Lilliputian local governments against nation-spanning corporations.
On further thought, I wonder what leads planners and leaders to decide that a mall should become a new-urbanist town square or an Amazon fulfillment center?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/48/d2/08/48d2080a4f98b94f877f...
As you can see, it wasn't just a clock, it was a kickass gigantic awesome mechanical clock. It was fun to just hang out and watch the mechanism do its thing. And it had chimes.
One of the original (and longest?) tenants of the mall was a clock shop, located in a suite right by the big clock.
Here's a (low-quality) video showing the clock at about 0m25s: https://vimeo.com/114438477
Some background is available here: https://mb.nawcc.org/threads/howard-tower-clock.33680/
According to that, the clock itself was originally made in 1915 and was installed in a clock tower in a Goodyear building in Los Angeles, but that tower had to be torn down for earthquake safety. So the clock was moved to Texas. After the mall was closed, the clock was put into storage, and some pieces may have been lost, but possibly not the important ones.
There was a naming contest, and the clock was named "D Old Timer". ("D" is sort of a local shorthand for Dallas. There's a "D Magazine".)