28 C i t e 3 I 1 9 9 4

The mall before the roof was added in 1966.

Gulf gain, view from loop 610 oaQtfga^ The

BRUCE C. W E B B C i t e 3 1 : 1 9 9 4 29

Gulf gale in ihe lot e 1950s.

HI-; PROJK.T of relocating vintage center - 's first regional America's urban life into shopping center, located at Houston's entirely new, free-floating sub- first freeway interchange - was designed urban forms, begun after and built before the ubiquitous mall for TWorld War II, was accomplished in such mula had been fully developed and codi- short order and is now so pervasive that it fied. Gulfgate defies expectation by being is difficult to see it as a process at all. lopsidedly organized: its two anchor stores, Sakowitz (emptied out when the Particularly in a city such as Houston, 1 whose character was established along the Sakowitz chain folded in the early eight- lines of a suburban model, growth has ies) and Joske's (now Dillard's) were become synonymous with sprawl, and the located side by side at one end of the Gulfgate: view from the southeast showing entrance to underground servke tunnel an right. automobile orientation is so deeply woven center, whereas the usual plan forms the into the spatial fabric that even coherent mall into a dumbbell, with the two high- remnants of the city past, when they are volume "magnet" stores at either end of preserved at all, are splintered and frag- an inside street. A Weingarten's grocery mented so as to appear as simply another store (also gone) anchored the other end, roadside attraction. For the new and an unusual tenant in shopping centers of growing generation of Americans it's no the generation to follow, A second axis in longer a question of Main Street versus the L-shaped plan was anchored by the mall, but one mall versus another. The Newberry's, a glorified Woolworth's in social cohesion that a generation ago was the prediscount, pre-Wal-Mart days, built into the concept of the downtown, then led off to a pedestrian bridge that where all the institutions of the society crossed a highway right-of-way (now were together in a public place, is by now Loop 610), The site across the bridge, Disney-fiction, existing only in hyper-real originally reserved for a health-care facili- simulations almost as distant as the agora. ty, was developed first as a nursery and then as twin 1,000-seat theaters joined by I listorv seems to fix us interests in pro- a central lobby, the first of that type in portion to temporal distance, reserving the Southwest. little fascination for things close in time. \\ Ink then is .i commi in respect and even The pedestrian bridge extended the site, longing for the charms of the architecture taking advantage of the man-made hill on and city forms of a hundred or more years which the mall sits, a cut-and-fill forma- ago, more recent developments are evalu- tion required to create the basement that ated in Darwinian terms, sacrificing earli- the John Graham Company and Irving R, er models for the newest. This rule applies Klein Associates, architects and planners Gulfgate Shopping City during opening week in 1954. nowhere more ineluctably than in the of the complex, employed as a way of highly competitive world of commercial servicing the center. The resulting subter- The earth section was made even more department stores, to the side of the architecture, where the rewards go to the ranean section, visible on the south and complex because of the necessity of stores. Graham's idea was to turn single- latest and most I ishionable. What lies east ends of the center, gives the mall an accommodating the ill-behaved Plum destination shoppers into impulse buyers between the historically revered and the uiiusual presence for a building of its Creek, a problem the engineers solved by by making a whole precinct of individual novel becomes the detritus of the in- type, especially in Houston, which has burying the stream 15 feet underground stores behave like a single, unified depart- between. Commercial buildings of the last few basements and even fewer hills. in an enormous box culvert that runs ment store. To do this he created a 30 to 40 years often are a lost generation; Customers can still enter the basement of perpendicular to the Gulf Freeway for double-loaded interior pedestrian shop- because appreciation of them is obscured the present Dillard's store through some 1,000 feet, from Woodridge to a ping corridor and moved it away from by emerging new forms and conflicting entrances fitted with water-tight, sliding point under the freeway at Reveille Road. the street, so the entire center was like an theories, they fall victim to changing tech- bulkhead doors designed to prevent island surrounded by parking. This solu- nologies and ever newer forms of con- flooding during Houston's frequent Guifgate's architect, John Graham of the tion was the one that worked best for sumption. But even as they lose their rain squalls. John Graham Company, was a pioneer in developers and shop owners, but currency and drift into the untended mar- the development of the modern shopping it offered little in the way of building the gins, they continue to mark the landscape Part of the sublevel is tamed space: two center. His 1950 design for the Northgate urban street. Graham's designs, while not with what Anthony Vidler describes as of the stores had basement levels, and the Center outside Seattle was closely studied highly regarded by the architectural pro- evidence of the uncanny, "erupting in mall offices and a bowling alley were also by other early shopping-center planners fession, caught the attention of shopping- empty parking lots around abandoned or located underground. The remainder of and developers, among them Victor center developers, who recognized that run-down shopping malls, in the screened the basement was developed into a com- Gruen, William Wurster, and Welton his formulas contained the right ingredi- trompe I'oeil of simulated space, in, that plex network of truck-serviced delivery Becket. The problem, as it was inherited ents for commercial success. Many ol is, the wasted margins and surface appear- runnels and storage rooms, a neater ver- from the early strip center, was to bal- Guifgate's design strategies were first ance of post-industrial culture."1 sion ol how to sen ice .i mall than the ance the center between pedestrian shop- tried out at Northgate, including the more common strategy of alternating pers and the cars that brought them underground service tunnels, the relative- There is something of the uncanny in public entrances and service entrances there. Up until the 1950s, shopping cen- ly narrow mall corridor (which Graham Gulfgate Shopping City, a feeling engen- along endless blind walls that mask the ters were structured by the street; as felt encouraged shopping both sides of dered, in part, by the fact that this 1956- perimeter storerooms within. parking requirements grew, the lots were the "street"), even the designation of the located behind or, in the case of some mall not simplv as a suburban incident 30 C i t e 3 I : I 9 9 4

J05KEm5

John Graham Associates, architects, rendering of the Gulf gate design, 1953, showing a proposal for a Lautrec store in the location later occupied by Sokowili.

Gulfgate's location, along Interstate 45 tions of our culture. When the first malls where the proposed Loop 610 would were erected, people thought they were "low Sokes Alive! What Are You Doing, Soijf?" Oil painting by Charles Markham depicts a 19lh-eentury New York foreunner of the modem shopping moll. intersect, was a commercial real estate no more than another way to organize a speculator's dream. The same developers, shopping district. By lifting shopping out Theodore Berenson and Allied Stores of the tangle of downtown traffic and Corp., used identical marketing criteria ancient infrastructure, the shopping cen- to select the site for Houston's second ter created a common-sense compact major shopping center, Northline, along with the consumer: plenty of free park- 1-45 where the North Loop would pass. ing, security, and control; the efficiency The two points were defined in terms of of having all those shops side by side in a Houston's growth vectors in the 1950s, neat row; and the comparatively low but as the freeway system expanded and overhead and lower costs of suburban the Loop and radial connections were land. Shopping-center developer Fdward completed, the analogy that says a free- DeBartolo said it this way in the New way interchange is like an urban cross- York Times in 1973: "I wouldn't put a roads was sorely tested. While the latter penny downtown. It's bad. Face it: why is a diagram of convergence and gather- should people come in? They don't want ing, the former is more like a cyclotron, the hassle, they don't want the danger. accelerating vehicles into and out of com- You would need fantastic government plex centrifugal spins and hurtling them subsidies, amazing subsidies. No individ- off to distant points on down the road. ual or corporate set-up can make a dent While Gulfgate with its big orange sign in these problems. So what do you do? was clearly visible from the concrete Exactly what I'm doing, stay out in the roller coaster, it was also at a point of country. That is the new downtown."'' greatest congestion and complexity, demanding the most of driver concentra- From the beginning, the shopping center Gulf gate's home-grown food court set up in the mall. tion. Further, exiting and re-entering the was the most successful land-use, devel- freeway at the point of a major inter- opment, real estate, and retail business change is never easy despite a bewilder- concept of the 20th century. Enclosing ing abundance of access roads. In them and filling them with conditioned addition, as the freeway system pushed but rather as a gateway to the city. Gulfgate attracted more than 150,000 air was like playing a trump card. further into exurbia, the city's affluent people and sent reporter Louis population followed, spawning new, Gulfgate began life without a roofed Blackburn of the into To understand the next generation of rival malls in the burgeoning suburbs. By central court, one of several unseleeted metaphorical orbit. Emitting the kind of malls requires a small leap of imagina- the l9H0s, Gulfgate and Northline had rapturous journalistic excesses that tion by which the mall becomes the variations in the evolution of the shop- both become inner-city malls, positioned seemed to accompany the opening of idiom for a broad range of building pro- ping center present in Houston. These in a no-man's-land between downtown grams, from museums (Robert Venruri's include Town and Country Center, a set anything larger than a cottage in and ever farther flung aggregations of proposal for the National Football of detached buildings in an asphalt cam- Houston during the period, Blackburn households with plush incomes. The League's Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio) pus setting, now mailed together under a wrote: "It looks like a castle. It makes Gulfgate Sakowitz store made money off to city halls (Robert Stern's appraisal has canvas tensile roof structure; Meyerlaiul even places like New York's Rockefeller and on until about 1984, according to Stern, the television impresario, pushing Plaza, a half-empty strip center married Center seem a little shabby by compari- former chairman Robert Sakowitz in an a shopping cart through Wright's to a paradigmatic open-roof mall that is son. When 1 stepped into the magnificent interview in the , but ground-scraping Marin Counry Civic anchored by a Penncy's department store; mall at Gulfgate, I felt as thrilled as "the demographics had changed. Instead Center to illustrate the analogy to a , Houston's first mall-con- when I stepped out of a gondola and into of being a homogeneous middle-income shopping mall). Deyan Sudjic described cept center (1955; Irving Klein & St. Mark's Square in Venice." area, it had become a multi-ethnic mix the Houston Galleria as the original Associates), built to serve the Riverside and a multi-income m i x . " ' Construction model for the second generation of out- community but now buried under a new Gathering steam, Blackburn's prose of and later of-town shopping centers: with a public while paint job that converted it into a became more convoluted - "Gulfgate farther south also cut into Gulfgate's ice-skating rink its center, " community service center and "small Mall is St. Mark's Square with its face sales. In its last few years of operation, is the place people want to go, even if business incubator" (a project presently lifted. Venice has its canals and Gulfgate the Gulfgate Sakowitz store was a only because in Houston there isn't any- under investigation for misspending of has its Plum Creek, and the engineering harbinger of the future, turning its sec- where else to teel the element of the federal community development funds); job of making Plum Creek disappear and ond floor into a dump shop (called the unpredictable that city life is meant to and , the almost- flow under the 20 million dollar shop- G.l.T.O.F.F. - Give It To Our Faithful offer. What makes [the Galleria] interest- emptied-out, Disneyesque version of a ping center is something to make Frank Friends - Shop), where the pricey mis- ing is the way Gerald Hines tried to give thinly replicated European piazza that Lloyd Wright heave a sigh for his hotel takes of the chain's fashion buyers could the place more than the bare minimum developer Ir.i Heme (with architect with shock absorbers in Tokyo" - before be had at 70 percent off retail. ot amenities." *• This idea that the mall William F. Wortham, Jr.) devised as a he ran out of allegorical gas, concluding, could become the focus tor publii life centerpiece for his Westbury subdivision, "The landscape architects did a job to begot the Galleria and after it the giant Gulfgate's roof was added in 1966, coin- soften the heart of Michelangelo,"2 Older malls have been forced to confront West Edmonton Mall and Mall of ciding with the center's tenth anniver- not only changes in demographics but America. A trip to these latter-day ver- sary. Roofed or not, on opening day also changes that redefined the institu- 31

A billboard mural of a store • interior now covers the entrance to the empty Sakowiti store.

sions, far from being a routine shopping fair, at the same time allowing the mall on the commercial ground. Bur the hefty foray, is reconstituted into something to recover some of its costs by selling chunk of Sakowitz space is still empty, like a minivacation. The complex rides and making people pay for the pub- its entrance pasted over with a billboard Decoding of things, which is at the essence lic life. But not every mall can afford photograph of a busy, upscale depart- of the newer malls, builds back a even this modest level of re-rheming and ment store interior while it waits for new sense of publicncss and evenrfulness retro-fitting. Other, less extravagant tenants. Jefferson says the mall is out of the routines of a commercial mar- (and more direct) ways of recovery are healthy; protesting the observation that keting machine. needed. This is the task of Ron Jefferson, the center has become a low-rent regional manager for Wilder Manage- In the fifties and sixties the function of ment Associates, Inc., properly managers things was still being defined with a con- for both Gulfgate and Northline malls. •* T-shirt stand and siderable amount of direcrness; buildings From his offices in the basement of discount clothing Gulfgate, Jefferson acts as both mayor even 20 years ago retained their allegiance store, Gulfgate. -lOTHING S T O R E to the tenets of modern functionalism, and chief planner for a mini-urban- although they were not so bound by renewal program at rhe two malls. orthodoxy and the inherited patterns of Jefferson, who has 25 years of experience ideal forms portraying ideal functions. in retail and property management, five Framed in these terms, the shopping mall ot them with O'Connor Management at is a particularly awkward architectural the San Jacinto Mali in Baytown, sees his model. Lacking any distinction on the role as identifying new markets and outside, it wants to be interior only, with assembling a collection of tenants to its tigurated insides buried in urban m.isv reach them. During his tenure, Gulfgate Since the 1960s architecture has been has been transformed into a liquidators' obsessed with the transitory nature of its row: the Dillard's store has been shorn of tenets, evolving building types whose all its former decorator pretenses and turned into a giant warehouse for unsold primary characteristics are neutral. The district, he insists that merchandise gleaned from the entire shopping mall, like the speculative office the change is just a faff Dillard's chain. The atmosphere is building, has evolved into an architecture result of new marketing of cquipotentialitics, being essentially a department store realism, with few strategies. volumetric, air-conditioned building site, amenities and endless racks of clothing piled up or strung out. The designations on its way to oblivion. Even the bags at Northline has been pur- TTW of the tenants are deliberately ephemeral. the supermarket-style checkout counters suing another recovery paper-thin stage sets hung into the con- .ire seated with bright yellow tape, much strategy, converting struction frames. like the kind police use to secure a crime scene, warning what will happen at the 73,000 square feet of door if the tape has been tampered with. tiinner commercial A new attitude emerging in rhe seventies National Apparel Liquidators has taken space into classrooms rejected the modernist preoccupation with up residence in another corner, vending and offices for a branch integrity and clarity of intentions, folding slashed-price men's clothing, but only on "campus" of the Harris Religious wares, Gulfgate Wall. together simulated settings and thin the weekends - to save on overhead, as Counry Community imagery that all but erased the underlying their radio ads s.n . And the old College System, an ad hoc version of the turns, finally perhaps being reincarnated architectural construction. I bis meant Weingarten's grocery has been colonized campus mall schemes developed by .is .i (lea market before being entireb that the older malls seemed comparatively by the Mac Frugals simu-clan, a discount Canadian architect Arthur Erickson in unplugged and becoming what the mall is empty, as though they had come out of chain dealing in an ever-changing collec- his 1970s designs for the University of at its heart: a speculative grid of three- the new town-planning policies of tion ot devalued merchandise winnowed l.ethbridge (Alberta) and Simon Eraser dimensional, climate-controlled building European socialism rather than the out of rhe commercial killing fields. University in Vancouver. Approximately sites, hatched out of the anxieties of excesses of byped-up consumerism. To 900 students study at the campus in future shock. But for every marginalized keep up, the older malls have had to emu- the mall, using rhe food court .is their building, whether it's a malt, a strip cen- late their newer and more elaborate Gulfgate has also beefed up security. The student center. Alas, among the ter, or a former upscale yuppie apartment rivals. Almeda Mall installed a replica of mall has been treated to a new paint job remaining commercial tenants there is complex, there is a marginalized popula- Philip Schneider's first double-decker that favors vivid purple, salmon red, and no bookstore. tion waiting for space on one of these air- carousel at center court, replacing a lazy aqua, outfitted with a hanging space- conditioned streets of last resort. • fountain and gazebo; the same treatment frame of banners. At one end a few cot- Places like Gulfgate and Northline bear was used to revivify Wesrwood Mall in its tage-industry food concessions have been witness to the fact that growth in the 1 Anthony VidJer, Tin- Architectural Uncamty: Ussiiys w the Modern Unbomeh [Cambridge 19X9 transformation. Like the Galleria's gathered together, taking over a corner modern city is often really a matter of MIT Press, 1992),p.3. skating rink or the hyperversion ai West nt iIK- in.ill space with temporary tables displacement, and places that once 2 "Here'ja ["our cil (•ijlfj'.itt.-, One of America's Edmonton Mall - which includes, in addi- and chairs that are reminiscent of a enjoyed healthy periods of amortization Vmiik-rs," llituilim Prettt 14 September Wfi. tion to the now ubiquitous skating rink, church bazaar. Along the blank side and have now moved to the margins, an amusement park, the world's largest walls of the Dillard's store is a newly while they may disappear from our cog- 1 (irt-fj 1 lassell, "City's Oldest M.ills Try to Shed Ragged Image," Himsltni Chronicle," 2) indoor water park, an operating subma- built row nt thin shops, similar in street nitive maps, do not simply go away. In April 1991. rine ride, the Edmonton zoo, and other vendors' stalls in the poorer sections of a the case of the mall, the decline may be 4 Quoted m Dcyan Sudjic, Tbv 10!) Mile City rn illsidc attractions - the Almeda Mall Middle Eastern market, creating inexpen- measured in steps, from luxury mall to version marries rhe consumer atmosphere sive space for very small entrepreneurs ordinary mall, then to liquidators' row with some of the ambiance of a county and fledging shop owners to get their feet and assorted little commercial opera-