History of Shopping Centers
Shopping centers have existed in some form for over 1,000 years as ancient market place squares, bazaars and seaport commercial districts. The present day shopping center, which contains every thing from small suburban strip centers to the million-square-foot superregional malls, had its genesis inside the 1920s.
The notion of producing a shopping district away from a downtown is usually attributed to J.C. Nichols of Kansas City, Mo. His Nation Club Plaza, which opened in 1922, was constructed because the organization district for a large-scale residential development. It featured unified architecture, paved and lighted parking lots, and was managed and operated as a single unit.
Inside the later half of the 1920s, as automobiles began to clog the central organization districts of substantial cities, smaller strip centers were built on the outskirts. The centers were generally anchored by a supermarket as well as a drug shop, supplemented by other convenience-type shops. The typical style was a straight line of retailers with space for parking in front. Grandview Avenue Shopping Center in Columbus, Ohio, which opened in 1928, included 30 shops and parking for 400 vehicles.
But several professionals take into consideration Highland Park Shopping Village in Dallas, Tex., created by Hugh Prather in 1931, to become the first planned shopping center. Like Nation Club Plaza, its stores had been built having a unified image and managed below the control of a single owner, but Highland Park occupied a single site and was not bisected by public streets. And its storefronts faced inward, away from the streets, a revolutionary design.
Inside the 1930s and 1940s, Sears Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward set up huge, freestanding stores with on-site parking, away from the centers of big cities. Nighttime shopping was inaugurated at Town & Country Shopping Center in Columbus, Ohio, when developer Don Casto hired Grandma Carver (a woman who dived from a 90-foot perch into a 4-foot pool of flaming water), to perform her act in the lighted parking lot, bringing shopping center promotion to a new level.