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SPEAKER_04: Then in 1999, in a grand effort to revitalize the city and with much fanfare, the Providence Place Mall was opened.
SPEAKER_06: That's Vanessa Lowe, producer of the podcast Nocturne.
SPEAKER_04: The mall, costing $500 million, was what was known as a super regional, a one-stop shopping destination, housing everything consumers could possibly want or need in a totally enclosed space. Partially funded by taxpayer money, it spanned 13 acres, offered 1.4 million square feet of retail space, and dominated the riverfront.
SPEAKER_08: It was the largest construction project in Providence's history, this one building, and we sort of stood in awe watching it get built.
SPEAKER_04: Michael Townsend is an artist who lived nearby when the mall was still under construction in the 1990s. His daily running route took him past the construction site, and Michael says that as he watched it go up, he had an open mind about the project. He was cautiously optimistic that it would be a welcome addition to the neighborhood. But yeah, that didn't last long.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, it's funny, the revulsion to a building like that doesn't really kick in until the skin gets put on. When something is in its erector-set mode, when you're just seeing the skeleton, you're like, oh, that's a pretty cool skeleton, but as soon as the flesh is there, you're like, ooh, not pretty.
SPEAKER_04: Providence Place was going to be a big boxy stack of shops without much in the way of architectural niceties. And on his runs, Michael watched as that big box was slowly filled with the things that make a mall a mall.
SPEAKER_08: As it's being built, I start to sort of do mental maps of spaces. That's going to be a store, that's going to be a storage space, that's going to be parking.
SPEAKER_06: But amidst all the construction, there was one part of the building that kept catching Michael's eye, a weird space in the guts of the architecture that didn't make sense.
SPEAKER_08: I thought that was really odd. It didn't seem to meet the profile of either a storage space or a parking space or a store space.
SPEAKER_04: Michael wasn't sure what the space was for. It seemed to exist only by virtue of the walls intended for the more legitimate spaces around it. But the result was this room.
SPEAKER_06: It was an accidental room, a remainder left over by the long division of the mall's architecture.
SPEAKER_08: I had never seen anything like it. And every time I ran by it, it was something I would think about.
SPEAKER_04: Michael eventually put the strange room out of his mind. He probably would have forgotten about it entirely, except that four years later, a second group of developers, encouraged by the success of Providence Place, set their sites even closer to Michael. This time, they wanted to build right on top of the historic mill district where Michael and a dozen or so other artists lived and worked in an old industrial building they called Fort Thunder.
SPEAKER_06: The developers had used a computer algorithm to figure out where to place a new supermarket so that it wouldn't compete with other supermarkets in the area.
SPEAKER_08: And I got to see this computer printout. And it's sort of like a nuclear explosion map. You can sort of see the radius from each supermarket and their theoretical reach. And in the blank spot that was our neighborhood, they put an X directly on the building we were living.
SPEAKER_04: And that was just the start. The developers wanted to tear down all of the old mill buildings and replace them with yet more retail with little to no pedestrian access.
SPEAKER_08: And it appears that the only mantra they have is, if you see a space that's underdeveloped, you have a God-given responsibility to develop it. And it was basically like having a complete stranger be like, we've been thinking about it. And we think we want to knock your house down. And make it a parking lot if it's cool with you.
SPEAKER_06: Now, normally, this would be the part of the story where we tell you that Michael and the other residents of Fort Thunder banded together to save their home in the face of the relentless march of capital. But no, it's not that kind of story. Granted, they did save some buildings. But as for Fort Thunder... Oh, our actual home?
SPEAKER_08: Oh, yeah, they f***ing leveled that. They came in with bulldozes and crane to knock that sucker flat.
SPEAKER_06: Fort Thunder was gone. The reason we're telling you this story is because of what happened next.
SPEAKER_08: Because when I see something like that, I'm like, oh, really? Game on.
SPEAKER_04: Michael and his friends had lost their home, and in their mind, it had all started with that first mall. That was the original seed of development that had led to everything else. And so talk began of a mall-related action. Call it art, call it a stunt. But a plan started to take shape.
SPEAKER_06: Michael and his friends decided that they would find a way to live in the mall for seven days. Yeah. Live in the mall. And they set a rule for themselves. They couldn't leave.
SPEAKER_08: And without a second thought of thinking of how unfeasible that is, for our own well-being, we really felt that we had to do it.
SPEAKER_04: And if this sounds like a lark, well, yeah, it kind of was. But a secretly serious lark. The four friends, they would eventually number eight, wanted to assert that spaces like the mall could belong just as much to them as to the developers.
SPEAKER_06: To really do this right, they would need to find a space in the mall where they could hide themselves away. And Michael had the perfect place in mind. He began to search for that mysterious room that he'd noticed when the mall was under construction all those years before. He remembered seeing that the room was connected to a kind of crevice, a narrow gap in the building structure that eventually led out to an exterior wall. So one night, Michael went to see if the entrance to that crevice had ever been sealed off.
SPEAKER_04: Amazingly, it hadn't. It was small and sort of hidden, but there was still a crack in the exterior of the mall. And so he and his then wife Adriana turned themselves sideways and slipped inside.
SPEAKER_08: And then once you're in, at that point, you are exploring a system of caverns, long, weird, vertical caverns. And there are places where it just falls down into the lower levels of the mall. So you've got about a foot and a half of cliff, but you're looking into a black abyss. And then this series of chambers ultimately give you access to this space.
SPEAKER_06: The room was tall and wide, filled with the byproducts of the mall's construction from years before. Broken two-by-fours and screws and plastic zip ties that hadn't even been worth removing. The space had literally been forgotten.
SPEAKER_08: And it was big. It was a big space that served no other purpose. It wasn't a storefront and it wasn't a stairwell. It was just big. And it was a thrill to physically find it and be like, this is it. This is what I remember.
SPEAKER_04: The room was in the guts of the building, the part that no one was ever supposed to use or even really see. But Michael and Adriana saw that it could still be accessed by multiple hidden entry points, including from inside the shopping center itself. If you knew how to get there, you could walk there from the Macy's. But as far as they could tell, they were the only people who knew this room existed.
SPEAKER_06: It was at that moment that the Friends scheme started changing. The initial plan had been to spend a week in the mall, but the way they saw it, they were sitting on 750 square feet of underutilized space. And they asked themselves, what would a developer do? Because after all, if you see a space that's underdeveloped, you have a God-given responsibility
SPEAKER_08: to develop it. So we decided that perhaps the absolute best thing we could do is just build a condo. Like that is that is always the that's always the answer. If you're not sure what to do with the space, just make it a condo.
SPEAKER_06: The new plan was no longer to live in the mall for a week. It was now simply to live in the mall for days at a time, using the room as an apartment. And while that may sound like a nightmare to everyone, but a few weird artists from Providence, Michael and his friends got to work on this little project with the excitement of new homeowners.
SPEAKER_04: Step one, of course, was cleaning. They had to get rid of all that debris.
SPEAKER_08: It's sort of like, you know, like in a prison break movie. We were literally filling up our backpacks with just dirt and grime and then and then carrying it out of the mall and getting rid of it.
SPEAKER_06: And for every backpack full of debris they took out, they'd bring a pack full of something in.
SPEAKER_04: Gallon jugs of water for drinking and cleaning, clamp lights and extension cords for illumination, which they plugged into the mall's internal power system, parts for an ad hoc kitchen. They even built a cinder block wall to hide the space from anyone else who might venture into the cavern complex from its various other entrances.
SPEAKER_08: We went and got a door that was an exact mirror of the doors they use in the mall. So if you were to find it, unless you're looking really closely at first glance, it just looks exactly like it had been built originally.
SPEAKER_06: Finally, it was time to decorate.
SPEAKER_08: Anything we could buy at the mall, we would. A low table came in on top of that proudly perched with a television and our PlayStation. But if we couldn't buy it at the mall, we'd have to bring it into the mall. Just for the large pieces like the China hutch or the four piece sectional couch.
SPEAKER_04: Nobody looked twice so that you brought pieces of a couch through the mall. How did you get that in there?
SPEAKER_08: In broad daylight. We avoided the night and sort of worked with the ebb and flow of the mall. We were just part of the living organism of its daily activities.
SPEAKER_06: It may seem risky trying to furnish a secret apartment with a nested coffee table, but to anyone watching, it was just a person walking through a mall with a nested coffee table that they just bought at the mall. There's simply no such thing as a suspicious consumer item in a building that is dedicated to consumerism.
SPEAKER_04: The friends would sometimes stay in the secret apartment for several weeks in a row, just living, watching television, making collages with shadow boxes they bought at Pottery Barn, even cooking in the ad hoc kitchen. Michael remembers burning some waffles with a waffle iron and wondering if the smoke would give them away.
SPEAKER_06: And when the eight friends weren't enjoying their secret apartment, they were enjoying the mall, not as shoppers, but as residents. Thanks to its late night movie theater, the mall almost never closed. So sometimes they would just roam the building with no goal in mind, observing its many moods.
SPEAKER_08: There are times when that entire building probably had maybe 10 people in it, like in the middle of the night. There'd be security officers, there'd be cleaning staff. And it's a really wonderful time because it's like having a public park four levels deep all to yourself. And in those moments, there's a sense of ownership and I just feel really good.
SPEAKER_04: Weeks turn to months and eventually years. Out of the emotional rubble of Fort Thunder, they'd finally found their refuge. And all thanks to the mall's developers, who had accidentally provided a sanctuary from the world they were busy developing.
SPEAKER_06: But as the old saying goes, there comes a time in every man's life when he must stop living at the mall.
SPEAKER_08: Unfortunately, the seed got planted that this whole thing was going to unravel. And that's because we had a break-in.
SPEAKER_04: One day they came back to the apartment only to discover that someone had kicked open the door and stolen the PlayStation, along with several other small items, including the art they had made and a photo album.
SPEAKER_08: But they left the silverware. They left the TV, were like, this is a very odd burglary. Like they didn't take the things of value. They only took the things that were like super personal.
SPEAKER_04: Michael and his friends were spooked. They had managed to hide the apartment for four years. But now someone knew about the room, someone who could come back at any time and who seemed to be interested in them. So they changed things up. They decided from now on, they'd only stay there at night when the chances of being caught were low, never during the day.
SPEAKER_06: And crucially, they would double down on another rule they'd had since almost the very beginning.
SPEAKER_08: Don't share it with anyone. Don't physically bring anyone here who wasn't involved in the making of it. So a lot of my very, very good and best friends never saw the space. And I'm the one who took that rule and broke it.
SPEAKER_04: Michael was hosting a visiting artist from Hong Kong. Her name was Jaffa. He was driving her to the bus station on her way out of town.
SPEAKER_08: And we're driving past the mall and I say to myself, what can it hurt? How could this possibly backfire on me? So I brought her into the space. Her mind was absolutely blown. You got to remember that this is at the peak of its build out.
SPEAKER_04: Michael showed Jaffa everything, the couch, the lights, the television. They were just days away from installing a water tank and a wood floor. In spite of the break-in, after four years of work, the apartment was on the verge of feeling like a real home.
SPEAKER_08: But when we're leaving, I hear a walkie talkie on the other side of the door within two feet of us. And when the door opens, it's three dudes in ties and sports jackets. And I realize in that moment, I internalize that it's over.
SPEAKER_06: It turned out that the earlier break-in had been the work of two of the mall's newest security guards. Instead of removing everything, they had taken the personal items in hopes of figuring out who Michael and his friends were. Now that Michael had been foolish enough to come back during the day, they had their man.
SPEAKER_04: Full Growth Properties, the company that owned the mall, did not take kindly to the secret apartment in its walls. You don't say. After being handed over to the police and interrogated, Jaffa was eventually let go. But Michael soon found himself standing in front of a judge in criminal court, charged with breaking and entering, and felony trespass.
SPEAKER_08: By the time I get to court, the mall has hired a lawyer. And they launch into all these details about the illegal things that I have done. And I keep my mouth shut. But after they've gone through this laundry list of illegal activities, they use the phrase, this gave Mr. Townsend access to an apartment that they had built over several years that had the following things in it, and goes on to list in detail what the apartment looked like.
SPEAKER_06: And the more details this lawyer gives, the more the judge just looks around and he's
SPEAKER_08: like, what's happening here? And the judge hustles advisors close to him and I hear him whispering. And then he looks up, looks me dead in the eyes and he goes, this is not a criminal act. We're not sure exactly what it was, but this is not a crime.
SPEAKER_06: Whether the judge was perceiving a deep legal truth at the heart of this case, or Michael was just the beneficiary of an incredible amount of white privilege, Michael may never know.
SPEAKER_04: In the end, he was slapped with a misdemeanor for trespassing and released. He had lived on and off in a secret apartment for nearly four years, and it was going to cost him almost nothing. But that doesn't mean he got away entirely scot-free.
SPEAKER_06: Just before Michael left the mall, the mall security team handed him a piece of paper, the same piece of paper they hand to brawlers, shoplifters, and anyone else who has overstayed their welcome in this most private of public spaces.
SPEAKER_08: This is standardized manila piece of paper, which has a map of the mall. It has this red line around the whole thing, and you have to sign it, and it says you can't cross that red line. So to make it clear you're never coming back.
SPEAKER_04: Now, over a decade later, Michael still lives right near the mall, but his days of running anywhere near its 13 acres are over.
SPEAKER_08: And the biggest bummer for me is that if I want to go to downtown, the path that you bring your bike through is through the center of the mall where it bridges over the river. And now that I'm banned from the mall, I have to bike around it. And I've biked around it for 10 years. Are you serious? Diligently. I have never broken this rule.
SPEAKER_04: So you really can never go back?
SPEAKER_08: I can never go back.
SPEAKER_06: This story was a co-production with the KCRW podcast Nocturne, which is produced and hosted by Vanessa Lowe. Nocturne is an exploration of the night and the landscape of the unseen. We'll have a link on the website and in the show notes. Coming up, we go back to the mall. Specifically, the mall that started it all. Let's go back to this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Chances are you're listening to 99% invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go. Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions, scrolling social media, or listening to your favorite podcast. It requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between. Because your phone should just work where you are, it's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands, remember, T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile.com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile.com.
SPEAKER_06: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around. I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com slash invisible. Now that we've sneaked into this weird public-private space that is the mall, I thought it'd be fun to revisit the origin story of this incredibly intriguing location, which Avery reported for us a few years ago. We've all done it. You go to the store for a pair of socks and come out with a mega pack of soda. You go out to get shampoo and come back with a fancy razor. It's hard to stick to what's on your list. I challenge you to go to IKEA and leave with only the thing for which you game. Just try to buy a lamp without buying a cutting board. It can't be done.
SPEAKER_03: You absolutely knew this, but retail spaces are designed to do this to you. Producer Avery Truffleman.
SPEAKER_03: The store is trying to look so beautiful, so welcoming, the items so enticingly displayed in such vast quantity that you cannot help but be drawn in and then drawn towards something you don't need.
SPEAKER_06: This is the Gruen Effect.
SPEAKER_07: The Gruen Effect, or sometimes called the Gruen Transfer, it's that moment when you walk into a store and the design of the store is so overwhelming and dazzling that you begin mindlessly consuming.
SPEAKER_06: The Gruen Effect is named after Victor Gruen.
SPEAKER_07: So who was Gruen? He's a complicated, complex, contradictory guy.
SPEAKER_03: Jeff Hardwick wrote the biography of Victor Gruen, who was born Victor Gruenbaum.
SPEAKER_07: Born in Vienna in 1904, and he is Jewish in Vienna, leaves in 1938. Good call, Gruenbaum.
SPEAKER_07: And makes his way eventually to New York City.
SPEAKER_03: Once in New York, Gruen made a name for himself designing shops and retail spaces. And this was a particular challenge during the lean years of the late 30s.
SPEAKER_06: People had no money. They just wouldn't go into shops at all.
SPEAKER_03: But Gruen figured out how to lure people inside, basically by using amazingly appealing window displays.
SPEAKER_07: You would go into these window display areas, look at jewelry or handbags or chocolates, and then you'd be tempted and lured into the store. I mean, that's the Gruen Effect.
SPEAKER_06: Gruen argued that good design equaled good profits.
SPEAKER_07: And he equates those as one to one. If you do more, people are going to stay there longer and spend more money.
SPEAKER_06: Gruen started making storefronts all over the country, and he moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1941.
SPEAKER_03: Gruen was from the beautiful city of Vienna, which is lined with shops and greenery and places to gather. He saw how most Americans were just riding around in their cars all the time, cut off from the city and from each other. And he knew this problem was even worse in the suburbs.
SPEAKER_06: The suburbs lacked what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls third places. Think of home as your primary place, work as your second place. And that third place is where you go to build community, to hang out, to simply feel connected.
SPEAKER_03: Gruen wanted to give the American suburbs that third place.
SPEAKER_00: The image of living in closer communication with other people, the image of having the possibility from one place to another.
SPEAKER_06: That's archival footage of Gruen from the University of Wyoming.
SPEAKER_00: The image of participating in events outside of your own little house has become a desirable factor.
SPEAKER_03: Victor Gruen imagined designing an environment full of greenery and shops, an indoor plaza, a modern forum, an island of connection in the middle of the sprawl, one that would only be accessible to pedestrians.
SPEAKER_06: Because oh man, Victor Gruen hated cars.
SPEAKER_07: He rants and raves against cars continually.
SPEAKER_01: One technological event has swamped us. That is the advent of the rubber wheeled vehicle, the private car, the truck, the trailer, as means of mass transportation. And their threat to human life and health is just as great as that of the exposed sewer.
SPEAKER_06: It's hard to understand him with the tape hiss and the accent, but what Gruen is saying there is, the threat of cars to human life and health is as great as the exposed sewer. So Gruen's objective was to get people to park their cars far away from these third places and walk and stroll within them.
SPEAKER_03: As Gruen saw it, his structure would be an architectural panacea. It would remedy environmental, commercial, and sociological problems with the creation of a single building.
SPEAKER_06: And so Gruen presented his solution for America, the shopping mall.
SPEAKER_03: Gruen actually wanted the shopping mall to be more than just shops.
SPEAKER_07: He wants them to be mixed use. He wants apartments and offices or medical centers attached to the shopping center. He makes cases to have childcare facilities, libraries, bomb shelters, a whole range of different functions.
SPEAKER_06: And Gruen dreamed and wrote about the enclosed shopping center way before he ever built one.
SPEAKER_03: Until he finally lands a commission for the very first indoor climate controlled shopping center.
SPEAKER_06: In Adina, Minnesota, a place not known for its welcoming climate.
SPEAKER_09: Southdale represents an entirely new and dramatic concept in retail merchandising.
SPEAKER_06: Southdale Center opened in 1956 and it was the mother of all shopping malls. Seriously, Gruen's subsequent malls were all mostly based off this original Adina design.
SPEAKER_07: When he's doing the first enclosed shopping mall, Southdale in Adina, Minnesota, what Gruen really emphasizes and what the media ends up celebrating is this massive center court.
SPEAKER_09: This court is enclosed in skylighted so that not only the stores, but the shopping sidewalks. In fact, the whole area in front of the stores is air conditioned and temperature controlled. A year round climate of 72 degrees.
SPEAKER_07: For Gruen, he's creating a town square.
SPEAKER_03: Southdale Center wasn't quite mixed use like Gruen imagined. People didn't live in it and something like a daycare center or a post office couldn't afford that rent. But Southdale did have local shops of all kinds and plenty of shoppers.
SPEAKER_09: Southdale, tomorrow's main street today.
SPEAKER_03: But from the outside, Southdale Center is not much to look at. I mean, it looks like a mall. It's this ominous amorphous boxy shape.
SPEAKER_06: In designing these shopping malls, Gruen ended his razzle dazzle storefronts and window displays.
SPEAKER_03: Southdale hardly has exterior windows at all.
SPEAKER_07: He moves away from the original concept that in some ways they're going to attract by being ostentatious.
SPEAKER_03: The drawn now is what's inside the mall.
SPEAKER_07: In Gruen's mind, it should have pretty much of a blank facade, no signage on it. And then you enter that space and then you walk into the shopping center and that's that sort of transformational Gruen transfer moment.
SPEAKER_06: Malls are designed as these sort of suburban pilgrimage sites, which of course you have to drive to.
SPEAKER_07: It's a commitment. You're driving 20, 30 minutes, you're parking, you're getting out of your car, you're walking and...
SPEAKER_03: Gruen knew that Americans love to drive, so the mall was his compromise. You had to walk and stroll once you were inside, but the customers could drive over.
SPEAKER_07: So he just hates the automobile, but he never will acknowledge that he's creating these shopping centers, which are largely only accessible through cars.
SPEAKER_06: Gruen was right. Americans loved driving to his malls. He got commissions for them all over the country.
SPEAKER_03: But over time, Gruen sees that in erecting these malls, these tiny suburban cities, he's helping to drain the real cities. And so for a while, Gruen shifts his focus to urban planning.
SPEAKER_01: We want to rescue our cities, which because we have neglected are threatening to go to pieces.
SPEAKER_07: And so Gruen ends up being involved in urban renewal projects, where he draws directly on some of the lessons learned in his suburban shopping malls and proposes bringing them back downtown.
SPEAKER_06: Municipalities hire Gruen and associates to make their downtowns more like malls.
SPEAKER_03: Gruen turns city centers into pedestrian-only spaces, full of public art and greenery and lined with shops. He made plans for Boulder, Fresno, Fort Worth, Kalamazoo. Actually, his plan for Kalamazoo became the first outdoor pedestrian shopping mall in the U.S.
SPEAKER_06: He even had a concept to turn Fifth Avenue into a pedestrian mall.
SPEAKER_07: He gets Manhattan to close down Fifth Avenue for a couple weeks as a test.
SPEAKER_03: But a city's downtown is not a mall. It's not so easily quote-unquote fixed, not so perfectly designed and controlled. Cities weren't going to become the pleasant, sterile shopping environments that Gruen wanted them to be.
SPEAKER_07: After the riots of the 60s, he's shocked and sort of taken aback by those and was very much unprepared for them. And I think that may have been somewhat of his reason for the retreat to Vienna.
SPEAKER_06: In 1968, Gruen moved from Los Angeles back to Vienna, back to the greenery and plazas he had been trying to imitate.
SPEAKER_03: But he could not escape his own creation.
SPEAKER_07: There's a shopping mall that's being built on the edge of Vienna, and he points to that as how that shopping mall is destroying downtown Vienna.
SPEAKER_03: In Gruen's mind, Vienna was already perfectly planned. It didn't need a mall like the broken American suburbs did. As he saw it, his original vision had been completely skewed.
SPEAKER_07: After being in Vienna about 10 years, he gives a speech and writes a paper where he says, I refuse to pay alimony for these bastard developments.
SPEAKER_06: Victor Gruen, the mall maker, became the foremost mall critic.
SPEAKER_03: And meanwhile, America's love affair with malls continued. Dude, you want to crush the mall?
SPEAKER_10: What's a pretty girl like you doing sitting alone in the middle of this monument to consumerism?
SPEAKER_05: Let's go to the mall, everybody! I know I remember in my own experience growing up in New Jersey when the first mall opened anywhere near me when I was in high school.
SPEAKER_03: This is Ellen Dunham Jones. She's a professor of architecture and urban design at Georgia Tech.
SPEAKER_05: It was cool to go to the mall, but I mean literally, it was air conditioned. My home wasn't air conditioned. My school wasn't air conditioned. Today most of us are spending our days and our nights in completely thermally controlled environments. A lot of us are craving being able to be outdoors.
SPEAKER_06: In recent decades, our tastes have veered away from climate controlled environments and away from the indoor mall.
SPEAKER_05: Mall construction actually peaked in 1990. It's been declining ever since. And by 2006 is really the last brand new kind of standard conventional mall that's been built in the US.
SPEAKER_03: And a new product has entered the scene. A kind of shopping center that the ICSC, the International Council of Shopping Centers, calls a lifestyle center.
SPEAKER_05: Lifestyle centers started appearing in the 90s and they tend to be open air. So you don't have that roof anymore. But you have a lot of boutiques and a lot more restaurants.
SPEAKER_06: Lifestyle centers are malls disguised as main streets. And even though they're full of chain stores, lifestyle centers are sunny and walkable and bustling and kind of what Victor Gruen imagined.
SPEAKER_03: And some of the old style indoor shopping malls are being repurposed. Several of them are being retrofitted into Hispanic community centers.
SPEAKER_03: Like in Plaza Fiesta outside of Atlanta.
SPEAKER_05: A lot of the stores have been cut up into much smaller mom and pop small shops selling Western wear, selling quinceanera dresses.
SPEAKER_03: Plaza Fiesta also has a steady events calendar of performances. And this too was kind of what Gruen imagined.
SPEAKER_06: These sort of community malls are truly places to gather and spend money in the shell of the failed design.
SPEAKER_07: Most people, architectural historians especially, think Gruen was a horrible architect. And you know, I can see where they're coming from. His exteriors of his building are uniformly boring. But for Gruen, that wasn't the point. It was the interiors that were really the point. Those fountains, the cheesy statues, the elevator music piped in through all those speakers.
SPEAKER_03: Those are all part of the Gruen effect. And they helped turn shopping malls into spaces where we felt comfortable staying and spending time and money.
SPEAKER_06: A lot of the original indoor malls are abandoned now. Seriously, like some of them are growing weeds inside. There's a website that's become sort of a graveyard of dead malls called deadmalls.com. Users can log on and submit stories of the dead malls in their towns. There are around 450 malls listed there, submitted as sort of oral histories.
SPEAKER_05: In particular, what's interesting, I think about deadmalls.com is how nostalgic a lot of this is. And it does make sense. I mean, in so many suburban communities, the mall became the de facto town center. It was really the center of social life other than the school. I would be very sad if all of Victor Gruen's malls were demolished. We should certainly work to preserve at least one.
SPEAKER_06: The most famous mall in Minnesota may be the Mall of America with its roller coaster, its zip line, its aquarium and water park. But the most architecturally significant mall, its grandfather, is the one that's just a 12-minute drive away in a diner.
SPEAKER_06: Jeff Hardwick's book is called Mall Maker. Victor Gruen, architect of an American dream. And Ellen Dunham Jones' book is called Retrofitting Suburbia. Special thanks to Claire Doherty for research help. Part one of 99% Invisible was produced by Vanessa Lowe from Nocturne and Joe Rosenberg. Mix and tech production by Sharif Yousuf. Music by Sean Real. Part two was produced by Avery Truffleman in early 2015. Katie Mingle is our senior producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team is senior editor Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Lee, Taryn Mazza and me, Roman Mars. You can find Vanessa Lowe's haunting show Nocturne at nocturnepodcast.org. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Great sleep can be hard to come by these days and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. Serta's new and improved Perfect Sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions. With zoned comfort, memory foam and a cool to the touch cover, the Serta Perfect Sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days. Find your comfort at serta.com.
SPEAKER_10: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit? Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops, the same way you say studio. That's not how we say it. Fruit Loops, find the loopy side.
