Southdale Center

Southdale Center is a shopping mall located in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of the Twin Cities. It opened in 1956 and is the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall in the United States. Southdale Center has 1,297,608 square feet (120,551.7 m²; 29.7890 acres; 12.05517 ha) of leasable retail space, and contains 106 retail tenants. The mall is owned by Simon Property Group and the anchor stores are Macy's, Dave & Buster's, AMC Theatres, Hennepin Service Center, and Life Time Athletic.

Victor Gruen, the center's architect, designed the mall to challenge the "car-centric" America that was rising in the 1950s. Since its opening in 1956, Southdale has suffered through high vacancy rates and several store closures, but has been able to recover in recent years. Several additions have been performed on the building, including a 2011 renovation which involved the construction of a brand new food court. Southdale Center continues to use much of its original structure despite these renovations, and has been the host of several charity and community events throughout the years.

In 1943, architects Victor Gruen and Elsie Krummeck were asked to submit a proposal to envision a prototype of what a shopping center would ideally look like after World War II for "Architecture 194X", a competition in the Architectural Forum magazine. Prototypes by the pair emphasized the communal aspects of their proposed shopping center where services like the public library and the post office could be incorporated with the functions of retail. They also strived to make the centers visually appealing and inviting to encourage shoppers to stay longer.

While stranded in Detroit during a snowstorm in 1948, Gruen approached Oscar Webber, head of Hudson's, the second largest department store in the nation at the time (behind Macy's in Manhattan). Gruen asked Webber to help fund a shopping center in the suburbs of Detroit with Hudson's as the main draw. Webber initially declined, but a year later Hudson's agreed to finance a set of malls including Northland Center as customers moved out of the city and into the suburbs.

Through Oscar Webber, Gruen was introduced to the Dayton family, who owned an eponymous chain of stores after their father's death and were looking to expand and build a shopping center to accompany one of their stores in Edina, Minnesota. Webber insisted that the Dayton family work with Gruen to assist in their efforts. On June 17, 1952, the first plans unveiled for the shopping center were announced by Gruen and Donald Dayton, president of Dayton's. They estimated the cost to build the shopping center to be around $10 million. Public response to the announcement was generally positive, with many hailing the project as a utopia. In a near unanimous vote by the city of Edina, zoning ordinances were changed to constitute the mall.

Gruen was a European-style socialist; he found individual stores in downtown venues to be inefficient, and the suburban lifestyle of 1950s America too "car-centric" and wanted to design a building that would be a communal gathering place, where people would shop, drink coffee, and socialize, as he remembered from his native Vienna. Southdale Center was loosely modeled on the arcades of several heavily populated European cities and purposely included "eye-level display cases" to "lure customers into stores". Gruen imagined that Southdale would eventually include "a medical center, schools and residences, not just a parade of glitzy stores." In a statement to the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune (now the Star Tribune), Gruen and his economic consultant Lawrence P. Smith described the regional shopping center as a place that could "take care of today's needs and today's living" and would bring the community together by providing "a new outlet for that primary human instinct to mingle with other humans." The neighborhood surrounding the center was specifically built to accompany the mall.

Groundbreaking for Southdale took place on October 29, 1954; 800 construction workers were needed to build the three-story, 800,000 sq ft (74,000 m²; 18-acre; 7.4 ha), 500-acre (200 ha) center, which had 5,200 parking spaces, 72 available tenants, and cost $20 million to construct. Due to Minnesota's harsh climate in the winter, Gruen constructed the center with a roof and air-conditioning system capable of maintaining a comfortable temperature of 75 °F (24 °C; 297 K) year-round. The mall was originally anchored by Dayton's, Donaldson's, Walgreens, and Woolworth. Over 40,000 visitors attended the grand opening ceremony for the center on the morning of October 8, 1956. An additional 188,000 customers visited the mall throughout the following week.

The center was constructed to successfully bring the community together by "gathering art, culture, and entertainment under one roof with retail." The Dayton's store was modeled after Dayton's flagship store in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In November 1956, organic architect Frank Lloyd Wright visited the mall as part of a tour of new buildings in Minnesota; he critiqued Southdale's overall design, stating "[the] garden court has all the evils of the village street and none of its charm", further criticizing several other buildings in nearby Minneapolis. He unfavorably added that Gruen "should have left downtown, downtown."