Latest / Pionerd / The Story of Southdale Center: The World's First Enclosed Mall
Transcript
- Department store leader Donald Dayton and the executive team at Donaldson’s faced a quiet crisis in the early 1950s. Returning veterans and young families were packing up for new suburban developments, abandoning the traditional streetcars that fed their multi-story flagships on Nicollet Avenue. Dayton knew building a standalone suburban branch carried immense financial risk. A simple branch store could cannibalize downtown sales without replacing lost volume. Furthermore, in a state infamous for sub-zero blizzards and muggy summers, an internal study showed Minnesota offered his business barely 126 shopping days a year. To de-risk the investment, Dayton partnered with Viennese architect Victor Gruen and convinced Dayton’s primary Nicollet Avenue competitor, Donaldson’s, to join as a co-anchor. Together, they built the world's first dual-anchor layout, placing two retail rivals at opposite ends to pull foot traffic straight past dozens of smaller shops. On October 8, 1956, 75,000 people arrived in Edina for the opening of Southdale Center, the world’s very first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall. Yet behind its glass doors lay a lasting tension between Gruen’s vision of a social, civic haven and a real estate machine built for pure consumer profit. For decades, two home-grown department store giants dominated Nicollet Avenue. Dayton’s and Donaldson’s built rival retail empires in downtown Minneapolis, drawing shoppers directly to their multi-story flagships. By 1950, the urban monopoly was slipping. Returning veterans used GI loans to buy homes across former cornfields, miles away from the city center. Young families stopped riding streetcars downtown, choosing instead to shop at small local stores near their new neighborhoods. Donald Dayton recognized that his business had to follow his customers into the countryside. Protecting his heavy investments downtown required securing a dominant position in the expanding suburbs. Cold War civil defense plans also influenced his search, pushing development outside the theoretical nuclear blast radius of downtown Minneapolis. The Dayton Corporation selected an 82 acre plot of former Robinson-Day farmland at West 66th Street and France Avenue South in Edina. To design the complex, Dayton hired Victor Gruen. Born Viktor David Grünbaum, Gruen was a Jewish architect, former political cabaret performer, and European refugee who fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938. He arrived in America with $8 in his pocket and no English. Gruen brought a radical vision to Edina, planning an "introvert center" that turned its back on surrounding parking lots to seal out the Midwestern elements. In June 1952, armed with Gruen's blueprints, Dayton unveiled a $10,000,000 proposal that formed part of a grander 484 acre master plan. The development was designed to surround a retail core with apartment towers, medical clinics, schools, parks, and a man-made lake. Crucially, Dayton convinced the management at Donaldson’s to join as a co-anchor. They placed rival department stores at opposite ends of the concourse. This created a steady stream of foot traffic, feeding smaller shops and protecting their massive investment. On October 29, 1954, heavy earthmovers broke ground in the Edina dirt. Over 800 construction workers descended on the site, carving out a massive foundation across two years of relentless Minnesota seasons. Building the facility required radical engineering. Mechanical crews installed custom heating and cooling systems designed to maintain an indoor temperature of 75 degrees year-round. The machinery captured waste heat generated by store lighting and shoppers, recycling energy throughout the enclosed mall. Behind closed doors, a clash of architectural philosophies threatened Gruen’s vision. Donaldson’s selected architect John Graham Jr., the man behind Seattle’s open-air Northgate project. Graham took one look at Gruen’s plans and balked. He viewed the vast central courtyard as wasted leasable square footage that generated no rental income. Graham demanded straight, narrow corridors optimized for high-density retail efficiency. Dayton backed Gruen, preserving the public core. At the center of the structure rose the Garden Court of Perpetual Spring. The two-story atrium climbed nearly fifty feet high, illuminated by overhead skylights and clerestory windows that admitted natural daylight avoiding views of the parking lots outside. Anchored into the courtyard floor stood Harry Bertoia’s Golden Trees, two fifty-foot bronzed wire sculptures that reached up through the atrium. Outside, planners faced a practical dilemma. A sea of 5,200 parking spaces surrounded the complex, making orientation nearly impossible for suburban drivers. Real estate consultant Robert Crabb Sr. and his son Bob devised a simple graphic solution. They divided the massive asphalt lots into parking zones marked by animal symbols, including the giraffe, turtle, camel, and alligator. On October 8, 1956, 75,000 visitors flooded through ten massive glass entrances for opening day, drawing nearly one in ten residents from Minneapolis and St. Paul. Another 188,000 shoppers followed over the course of the first week. Shoppers stepped out of the chilly autumn air into a lush Mediterranean oasis. Beneath the soaring skylights of the Garden Court, mature magnolia and eucalyptus trees grew out of interior soil beds. Families sat at the nation's first indoor Sidewalk Café under patio umbrellas while fifty yellow canaries sang inside a central 21 foot aviary. 72 retail tenants lined the concourses, anchored on opposite ends by fierce rivals Dayton’s and Donaldson’s. Visitors strolled past Walgreens, Woolworth’s, and a Red Owl supermarket, exploring a climate-controlled layout that stretched for nearly a mile. Victor Gruen stood on the second-floor balcony watching the opening crowds, convinced he had brought European civic life to the American heartland. Critical reaction arrived quickly. In November 1956, legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright toured the complex during a visit to Minnesota. Press accounts recorded his blistering critique to local reporters, declaring that the garden court had all the evils of the village street and none of its charm. Despite Wright’s rejection, the financial gamble succeeded beyond expectations, Dayton's sales increased sixty percent in its first year. The massive profits and suburban logistics lessons gained at Southdale gave the Dayton family the capital to launch their next retail giant, opening the very first Target store six years later. Yet even as shoppers celebrated beneath the glass skylights, commercial developers were already preparing to dismantle the civic soul of Gruen’s dream. As retail profits surged, the grander civic master plan evaporated. The Dayton Corporation sold off the surrounding four hundred acres to private real estate developers. The proposed schools, public parks, civic housing, and community lake were abandoned in favor of high-density single-family housing tracts. Developer appetite for the enclosed mall spread across the nation like wildfire. Real estate companies copied Southdale's climate-controlled, windowless shell, but they systematically stripped out the public art, lush foliage, and community gathering spaces. They realized that disorienting inward layouts kept shoppers focused strictly on spending money. As capital and foot traffic migrated out to suburban strip corridors, traditional city centers withered. The urban downtowns Victor Gruen sought to preserve were hollowed out by the model he pioneered. Disillusioned by the commercial monster he had unleashed, Gruen left his firm and returned to Vienna in 1968. He spent his final years publicly condemning suburban malls as bastard developments that had destroyed American cities. Addressing a London audience in 1978, Gruen bitterly disowned his creation, refusing to take credit for the sprawl he had accidentally unleashed. The utopian planner who set out to bring European civic life to the Minnesota prairie watched his dream get swallowed by pure consumer capitalism. Today, Southdale Center stands as a testament to the endless evolution of our shared spaces. The original department store giants have faded, but the landmark on France Avenue continues to reinvent itself. A $400,000,000 transformation has remade the site, bringing luxury retail wings, athletic clubs, grocery markets, and residential apartments directly onto former parking lots. Victor Gruen never saw developers build the complete European community he had planned for Edina. Yet the fundamental human desire he tapped into remains unchanged. We still look for places to step out of the isolated cold, gather together under a common roof, and share the vibrant life of our community. In the quiet endurance of Southdale, we find proof that while commercial trends come and go, our need for connection always finds a way to build a home.