One of the reasons the critics raved over Gruen’s original Southdale Center was the simple fact that no one had seen a space like that before, particularly in suburban Minnesota. But as the developers standardized Gruen’s original plan, and as the big chain stores grew more powerful, malls became interchangeable: a characterless cocoon of J.Crew and the Body Shop and Bloomingdale’s. They were not quite “avenues of horror” but something equally soulless: avenues of sameness. Eventually, our appetite for novelty and surprise overcame the convenience and ubiquity of mall culture, and people began
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