Grand Mall Seizure

By Daniel Alarcon, AlterNet. Posted December 20, 2004.

It is Saturday at the Mall of America, the nation's largest shopping center, and the crowds are thick and expectant. A small brass band of high school students parades by, playing a cheerful version of "Sunshine of Your Love." Above the glass atrium, a bank of heavy clouds bruises the Midwestern sky. Inside, it is incongruously bright and warm. I sit on a bench and take it all in. A group of teenage boys with piercings and baggy black jeans pass me, one wearing a red T-shirt that reads, "I Have No Idea What's Going On." A fat woman trundles by carrying an enormous bouquet of colorful cellophane balloons, literally dozens of them – cartoon characters, hearts, smiley-faces. Her own smile is easy and unforced, and I'm struck for a moment with the image of her floating, the whole of her, above this sprawling panorama, upwards to the steel girders that crisscross the Mall's glass ceiling, and then beyond.

Two older gentlemen sit amidst the din and controlled madness of Camp Snoopy, the Mall's indoor amusement park, focusing on the matter at hand: a game of checkers.

I share my bench with a large human size statue of Snoopy, and it isn't long before a group of women asks me politely if I wouldn't mind moving. "It's for my granddaughter!" one of them says, posing for a photograph with an arm draped affectionately over Snoopy, both human and canine smiling broadly. Cameras flash. I sit again, but every five minutes or so another group poses with the big white smiling dog. Eventually I give up my seat for good. A rollercoaster roars overhead. There are whistles and screams, the ambient noise of fun all around.

The men play checkers.

Robert is retired and lives in Bloomington. He comes most Saturdays to play. His partner Juma is a darker-skinned, more ragged version of Henry Kissinger, and seems unwilling or unable to answer my questions. Though his English isn't good, I understand he comes every Saturday and Sunday to play checkers. "From 10 to 4," he says, without looking up from the game. When he speaks, I can see that he has only a few teeth still holding on.

They do not banter or chat. They tolerate my questions for a moment, but it isn't long before I can sense their patience waning. Robert explains they've been playing together for close to four years. Both claim to do very little actual shopping at the Mall. Do you bring the checkers set, I ask. They do not. They play on a cloth set provided by Camp Snoopy Outfitters, next to a sign that says brightly, "Checkers set on sale inside!"

They are, in other words, living advertisements for a store.

***

To understand the Mall of America, it is helpful to know how this all began. Southdale, the first enclosed shopping in the United States opened in Edina, Minnesota to great fanfare in 1956. It is still in operation today, not even a half hour from the present site of the Mall of America. Its architect was a man named Victor Gruen, an Austrian Jew who fled the Nazi invasion of 1938 and arrived in the US with $6 in his pocket. A man of European sensibilities, Gruen's Southdale was inspired by the covered pedestrian galleries of Milan and Venice. He saw the enclosed mall, with its walkways and open spaces, as a hedge against the corrosive suburban sprawl that was then just beginning to overwhelm the American landscape. He wrote of shopping centers that not only served a community's physical needs, but its civic, cultural, and social needs as well. In describing Southdale, he grandiosely and unselfconsciously evoked the Greek agora and the medieval city centers of old Europe.

All over the country the Southdale model was replicated, simplified, and the money came in hand over fist. Developers bought farmland at the junctions of highways and the building frenzy began in earnest. By 1964, when Gruen wrote "The Heart of Our Cities: Urban Crisis," he had watched his creation grow like a hydra and spiral away from its original intent. He blamed local governments and unscrupulous developers for the decay of America's cities. More to the point, he refused to accept any credit or blame for the invention of the enclosed shopping center. "I have been referred to in some publications as The Father of the Mall. I want to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all."

Gruen left his adopted country in 1968, and returned to Vienna, where he died twelve years later.

Unlike Gruen, the immigrant developers of the Mall of America, four Iranian-born Canadian brothers surnamed Ghermezian, never seemed at all torn about the purposes of their project. They are not urban designers, city planners, or architects. They are showmen. The Ghermezians are mercenary capitalists, no less visionary than Gruen, but certainly less thoughtful. And the Mall of America was created to fulfill their baroque visions of festive shopping, where commerce and entertainment would come together in a profitable union. In 1986, when the Mall was still in its planning stages and meeting resistance, Nader Ghermezian spoke as if he couldn't understand his opponents, as if he were baffled by their short-sightedness: "You will have all the shoppers from New York, Rome, Los Angeles, and Paris coming here," he proclaimed at a press conference. "I bring you the moon and you don't want it?"

Daniel Alarcon has written for Harper's and the New Yorker. His first book of stories, 'War by Candlelight,' will be published by HarperCollins in April 2005.

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