Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
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54 S C T / J u n e 2 0 1 5 designing and building department stores, hotels and a few small centers. But in 1953 it got the chance to de- velop its first big shopping center when it took over a troubled project in Flint, Mich. Taubman's experience with North Flint Plaza, a collection of 26 stores anchored by a department store, gave him the confidence to undertake additional large-scale retail projects, starting in the Detroit area. Although he developed projects t h r o u g h o u t t h e M i d w e s t , T a u b - man was also quick to go beyond his home turf, tempted in the late 1950s by Northern California's popula- tion growth and expanding freeway system. Despite the fact that he was a newcomer to the state, Taubman un- dertook some of his most ambitious projects ever there in the 1960s. His Southland Mall in Hayward was the first enclosed mall in Northern Cali- fornia when it opened in 1964. Three years later Taubman opened Sunvalley in the growing San Francisco suburb of Concord. The 1.25 million-square-foot mall was billed as the world's largest air-conditioned shopping center when it opened. Its three anchors included a 200,000-square-foot Macy's, the result of a successful effort by Taubman to lobby the chain to open a store that was unusually large for a suburban location at the time. With projects like Sunvalley, Taub- man sought to create malls with the criti- cal mass to dominate their regions. At the same time, he continually perfected design planning techniques intended to make the retail behemoths exciting and user-friendly and to give tenants as much exposure to foot traffic as possible. "Planning is everything," wrote Taubman in his 2007 memoir Thresh- old Resistance, a title that refers to the obstacles he overcame during his life- time, including his quest to develop malls free of the "physical and psycho- logical" barriers that stand between shoppers and merchandise. "Screw that up," he wrote, "and a retail development will never realize its fullest potential. Get it right and every- body wins." Beginning with Sunvalley, Taub- man was one of the first developers to build malls on two levels. The idea was to create a comfortable walking distance between anchor tenants, equiv- alent to about three city blocks, and a non-repetitive shopping experience. He also went to great lengths to en- sure shoppers circulated throughout his two-level malls, creating unobstructed site lines between floors and placing escalators and elevators at the ends of corridors. Working on the assumption that people are more inclined to move downhill than uphill, he fed more shop- pers onto the second floor by designing two-level parking lots with more capacity on the top. He was also among the first developers to put a ring road around a mall, distributing cars to multiple en- trance points. Taubman was no less methodical when it came to interior design details. For instance, to keep shoppers from noticing any change in daylight, which might shorten their stay, he installed artificial lighting units in skylights. He also insisted on tiling his floors with ter- razzo to making walking comfortable, es- pecially for women in thin-soled shoes. As a mall owner, he believed his role was to create an optimal tenant mix rather than simply filling space. He grouped stores with the intention of fostering impulse shopping, a novel concept in the early years of the industry. p C i t y C e n t e r h a s r e v i t a l i z e d d o w n t o w n s a l t l C i t y s i n C e o p e n i n g i n 2 0 1 2 . a l f r e d t a u b m a n ' s f i r s t p r o j e C t s w e r e i n m i C h i g a n . t h e f i r m s o o n e x p a n d e d t o o t h e r s t a t e s .