The antecedents of the modern shopping center were the ancient agoras and medieval piazzas of European cities. The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century produced the department store but made cities crowded and dirty, and the desire to improve life by moving away from the city gave birth to the suburb and shopping mall. Today the shopping mall or centre plays an important part in our social lives becoming ingrained in popular culture.
500 BC - The Greek Agora at the foot of the Acropolis in ancient Athens was one of the first urban marketplaces, with a central open square surrounded by buildings.
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100 BC - The Republican Forum at the base of Capitoline Hill was the commercial and government center in Rome.
Medievil Times
1174 AD - The Market-Place developed in the city of Brussels on the site of a dried swamp dried, with buildings constructed by guilds and craft corporations along a rectangular square. Similar market squares would appear during the Middle Ages in European cities, and would become the location for the construction of cathedrals, clocktowers, and city halls.
14th - 17th Century Renaissance
1400 - Sturbridge Fair near Cambridge England was one of the largest medieval fairs that were market centers for merchants.
1461 - The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Turkey, grew from two small warehouses during the ea of Mehmet the Conqueror to 4400 shops today, known locally as the Kapalicarsi ("covered bazaar").
1500 - London Bridge was lined with shops across Thames River in London England.
1666 - After the London fire, great rectangular market courtyards were built to remove markets from the city streets. The largest market in Europe was Leadenhall in London with courts and rows of stalls selling all types of goods.
1753 - The Stock market was built in London.
1771 - Bear market developed in New York City on land donated by Trinity Church. This old market was replaced by the new Washington Market that dominated lower Manhattan throughout the 19th century. An observer in 1862 wrote that this "market is without doubt the greatest depot for the sale of all manner of edibles in the United States; it not only supplies many thousands of our citizens, but I may say, many of the surrounding cities, towns, villages, hotels, steamers (both ocean and river) and shipping vessels of all descriptions."
1789 - One of the first enclosed shopping galleries was built in Paris in a former royal garden near the Palais Royal. This was replaced in 1830 by the more elaborate OrlÈans gallery.
Late 18th Century - Industrial Revolution.
1800- During the Napoleonic wars, John Trotter in London transformed a former warehouse into a new shopping place called a "bazaar" for the widows and daughters of British soldiers. The Soho Bazaar flourished, as did the Baker Street Bazaar and the Pantheon Bazaar on Oxford Street. The bazaar and the enclosed gallery represented the transition from open air markets and individual merchant shops to the centralized department stores of the mid-1800s.
1819 - The Burlington Arcade opened in London's West End on Piccadilly, designed by Samuel Ware for George Cavendish, the 5th Duke of Devonshire, in the garden of the duke's Burlington House, with 72 shops along a single walkway covered by a glass ceiling. This "arcade" style would inspire similar galleries in Brussels and Milan, early arcades in the United States such as the Providence Arcade in Rhode Island built 1828 and the Cleveland Arcade in Ohio built 1890. These 19th-century arcades would be a model for the enclosed pedestrian mall of modern urban America.
1865 - Architect Giuseppe Mengoni designed the Galleria Vittoria Emanuele II, one of the most beautiful galleries in the world, built in Milan, Italy, and open by 1877. It was an enclosed pedestrian arcade separate from the traffic of the main streets, connecting the Duomo cathedral with La Scala opera house.
Department Stores.
1838 - Aristide Boucicaut started the Bon Marche store in Paris that evolved into the first department store by 1852, displaying a wide variety of goods in "departments" under one roof at a fixed price, no haggling or bargaining, with a "money-back guarantee" allowing exchanges and refunds, employing up to 4000 with daily sales of $300,000. The department store and the restaurant would become anchors of downtown urban centers in the 19th century.
1858 - Rowland Hussey Macy was a Nantucket Quaker and whaler who failed several times as a store owner until he founded a "fancy dry goods" store in New York City on 6th Avenue near 14th Street in 1858. He began selling at a fixed price for cash, discounted and advertised his merchandise. The new Macy's store was proclaimed "the largest store on earth" with 9 stories and 33 elevators and 4 escalators and pneumatic tube system. This structure grew 30 stories covering an entire city block by 1924. With a "6% less for cash" policy it attracted thousands of customers.
Garden City.
1888 - The electric streetcar developed in Richmond VA made possible "streetcar suburbs" and decentralized commercial centers.
1891 - Edward Bouton built Roland Park near Baltimore that included a "store block" arranged in a linear pattern along a street to serve the commercial needs of a planned residential community. Similar store blocks were built in Los Angeles 1908 for the College Tract on West 48th St.
1898 - Ebenezer Howard in Britain published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform on garden cities to escape the industry and crowding of large urban centers, led to the building of Letchworth.
Automobile City.
1916 - Chicago architect Arthur Aldis persuaded wealthy residents of Lake Forest, Illinois, to form the Lake Forest Improvement Trust to build Market Square, an integrated shopping complex of 28 stores, 12 office units, 30 apartments, gymnasium, clubhouse and landscaping. According to Richard Longstreth, "The automobile was a central factor in this planning, since most Lake Foresters had cars at an early date. Market Square was perhaps the first business district to be laid out specifically to accomodate motor vehicles." The National Register of Historic Places has listed Market Square as the first planned shopping district in the United States.
1922 - J. C. Nichols created Country Club Plaza on the outskirts of Kansas City, Missouri, as an automobile-centered plaza built according to a unified plan rather than as a random group of stores, owned and operated by a single entity who leased space to tenants. Nichols would make the term "shopping center" popular to describe such commercial sites built for to the automobile.
1939 - The Wisstein Brothers and Surval project opened on South Broadway in Los Angeles, a neighborhood center that appealed to chain stores such as the drugstore (Owl, Sontag, Thrifty) and the supermarket (Von's, Ralphs) and the variety store (Kress, Woolworth, Newberry) seeking to build away from urban congestion on well-travelled streets accessible by automobile, each center providing a small parking lot for 100-300 cars.
Suburban Centre.
1950 - Northgate opened near Seattle on April 21, the first regional shopping center defined as a "mall." Anchored by a Bon Marche department store, it provided 800,000 sq. ft. for stores arranged in a linear pattern along a 44-foot wide pedestrian walkway, or "mall" that would become the center spine of all future regional shopping centers. The word came from the British game of pall-mall, or "ball and mallett" combining elements of croquet and golf, played since the 1500s on a wide fairway green.
1954 - Austrian-born Victor Gruen designed Northland, near Detroit, with 110 stores in 1,192,000 sq. ft. on 2 levels, in a cluster arrangement surrounded by parking lot, modeled on the agora, the town squares of ancient Greece. "Gruen, a refugee who had fled the Nazis and arrived in New York in 1938 with $8 in his pocket and little more than his T-square in his luggage, had worked on some of those early open-air shopping centers. Then Detroit's J. L. Hudson department store chain commissioned him to design a center 8 miles away from its flagship downtown store to take advantage of the recent suburban developments spawned by the city's postwar expressways. In 1954, when it opened, the Northland Center was the world's largest shopping mall." (US News 12/27/99)
1956 - Victor Gruen's 95-acre two-level Southdale Center Mall opened Oct. 8 in Edina, MN, near Minneapolis, the first fully enclosed shopping center, with a constant climate-controlled temperature of 72 degrees, inspired by the design of the Galleria Vittoria Emanuele designed and built by architect Giuseppe Mengoni 1865-77 in Milan, Italy. In Maryland, James Rouse opened in October the Mondawmin Mall west of Baltimore.
Festival Marketplace.
Entertainment Centre.
Source: http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/soc/shoppingcenter.html
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