Winter-Spring 1994

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 - Houston'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.

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