Post Modern or Post-Mortem? The Kalamazoo Mall Revisited

By Greg Flisram
Copyright by the author

When it was completed in October 1998, the reopening of the Kalamazoo Mall to vehicle traffic marked the final chapter of what is generally considered to be a failed experiment in U.S. city planning. The reopening of Burdick Street, as it had previously been known, came at a substantial psychic cost for the City of Kalamazoo, which for over 40 years boasted the nation's first of its kind pedestrian mall — a fact that found its way into most of the city's promotional literature, and gave rise to the city's dubious moniker, "Mall City." So it was with muted fanfare, and even some lament, that the mall was reopened in October 1998. The Mall, it seemed, had finally surrendered to the inexorable force that it had stood as a symbol against for so many years. The city, it appeared, had lost its major claim to fame.

Built at the modest cost $60,000, the Kalamazoo Mall was seen as marking a new paradigm in American city planning when it was constructed in 1958. The two-block-long prototype represented a new era of city building premised on the recognition that the automobile had irreversibly changed the physical fabric and social dynamics of the city. Adapted from European vernacular tradition, the pedestrian street, it was thought, would return to downtown a degree of civility and decorum that had all but vanished with mass automobile ownership and the reclusive habits it encouraged. From a more cynical standpoint, the concept of the pedestrian mall was viewed by some as little more than a thinly veiled attempt to make traditional commercial streets look and function more like the suburban "shopping courts" they were increasingly competing against during the period after World War II.

In the beginning

The initial fanfare caused by the Kalamazoo Mall spawned a flurry of copycat pedestrian mall construction throughout the U.S. In communities as diverse in morphology and climate as Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Santa Cruz, California, the ubiquitous pedestrian malls of the 1960s and 1970s stood as the Piazza Del Campo of the new American downtown. Serving as both fashion statement and town commons, the primary beneficiaries of these new public spaces were to be the legions of downtown merchants whose livelihoods were being undermined by he frenzy of commercial "motor plaza" construction taking place on the urban periphery.

As originally conceived, the Kalamazoo Mall was to be the centerpiece of Victor Gruen's 1958 plan for the city entitled Kalamazoo 1980. The watershed plan was underwritten by Kalamazoo's progressive-minded and increasingly desperate downtown merchants, whose successors, nearly 40 years later, spearheaded the effort to remove it.

Gruen, best known for his plan of Fort Worth Texas, sought to introduce provincial Kalamazoo to a brand of European modernity inspired by the likes of LeCorbusier and his "Radiant City" school of planning. As with Forth Worth, Gruen conceived of the downtown as a primarily pedestrian district accessed and surrounded by superhighways and massive municipal parking garages. Perhaps fortuitously, a lack of available funding prevented the entire plan from ever coming to fruition. Only a reduced scale version of the pedestrian mall was ever built; although the argument could be made that redundant system of one-way streets and surface highways that plague the city today also owe their existence to his vision.

In the first several years of its existence, the Kalamazoo Mall seemed to deliver on its promise to reclaim the downtown for the pedestrian, and to bolster retail activity. In fact, supported by complementary projects such as Kalamazoo Center—a mixed use convention and hotel facility developed in 1975— business along the Mall, for a time, held its own against the region's persistent tide of suburbanization..

By the end of the 1980s, however, it seemed that the Mall, as in most other cities, had become an anachronism; a tired piece of urban design fashion whose novelty had long worn thin. Worst still was the reputation these spaces were earning throughout the country as being magnets for the urban underclass—a situation no doubt made worse by the high number of social service agencies and thrift stores that took up residence on the malls when no one else would.

Because of their variety of concrete surfaces, and by the chronic lack of night-time activity, recent years have also seen these spaces used as de facto skateboard parks — a use that has done little to enhance their already tarnished image. Acknowledging failure, many of the 200 or so cities that rushed to build malls in the 1960s and 1970s in the name of downtown revitalization have been in even a greater hurry to remove them for the same purpose.

Opportunities

As with other cities, persistent business failures, a chronic lack of nigh-time activity, and pressure from the downtown business community signaled the beginning of the end for the Kalamazoo Mall in its original form. Along the way, there were also many missed opportunities, including the decision of the local community college (which anchors the northern end of the Mall) to relocate most of its classes to a distant satellite campus. Lost were the many students who helped enliven the Mall during the day and early evening.

Even the construction of the handsome new Kalamazoo Valley Museum building, also at the northern end of the Mall, has not been enough to reinvigorate the space leading to it. The building's off-axis orientation does not provide the street with a strong visual end statement to help draw curious visitors across the chasm formed by the state highway that slices through the middle of the city. With few students pouring in and out of the campus area, the Arcadia Commons (as this area is referred to) has taken on the limpid appearance of another dated leftover of the modernist tradition, the civic center.

Recognizing that something had to be done, but not wanting to completely part with its piece of urban planning history, Kalamazoo planners have employed another imported planning concept — the shared street or "woonerf" — in their new treatment of Burdick Street. Still more a pedestrian space than a conduit for traffic, the newly reclaimed street retains many of the pedestrian appointments of the original Mall, including a new snow-melt system, but now features a central alley and parking bays to accommodate the formerly forbidden automobiles.

A consistent paving treatment, and shallow rollover curbs, help to blur the distinction between pedestrian and vehicle spaces. Twin pairs of 12-foot-tall monuments, designed in an Art Deco motif, mark each end of the Mall, and serve as symbolic traffic bollards to ward off most through traffic. With its narrow "cartway" and head-on collision of one-way streets, the reintroduction of vehicle traffic is more a matter of perception than of function, and clearly this was the intent.

What next?

It is too early to tell just how successful a reclaimed Burdick Street will be in breathing new life into downtown Kalamazoo. Anecdotal evidence suggests that activity on the Mall has picked up slightly since its reopening. However, if recent closure of the former Mall's (and downtown's) last remaining department store is any indication, the future of the street seems somewhat less than sanguine. Gilmore's closure, coming less than nine months after the Mall's reopening, follows that of Jacobson's Department Store two years earlier.

These closures leave the city with enormous holes in its retail base that will be difficult to fill under any circumstances. Ironically, it was Gilmore's and Jacobsen's that were the most vocal proponents of the theory that the key to a revitalized downtown rested in the reopening of the Mall. Apparently unsure of its own conviction, Jacobson's closure came well after discussions concerning the Mall's reopening had begun in earnest. Gilmore's, whose president was a key member of the planning task force that spearheaded the redevelopment effort, closed less than a year after the street was reopened to traffic. Both cited changes in national retailing trends in their decision to abandon downtown Kalamazoo.

Smarting from the recent closures, the city seems to be pinning its hopes on the new Epic Center, a half-block long, mixed use project directly along Burdick Street, to infuse new life into the erstwhile mall. It is hoped that the activities generated by this project, which includes space for the performing arts, will help to animate the street in the evening.

Despite these efforts, it seems that the downtown's center of gravity is shifting away from Burdick Street to the city's Haymarket and Arcadia Creek districts to the north of the historic commercial district. However, until more housing is developed in the city's core, it seems that it will be difficult for any renaissance to take hold anywhere in the downtown area despite the best efforts of planners.

In the final analysis, the failure of pedestrian malls in the U.S. says less about the supposed infertility of European planning ideals on American soil than it does about a lack of understanding of the ingredients of their success. The few pedestrian malls that have fared well generally share certain characteristics including: shortness, mixed uses, a large population of "captive" users (including residents), heavily programmed activities, incorporation of public transit, and strong anchors that both serve as pedestrian generators and help enclose the street space. Again, features not dissimilar to those of the regional shopping malls that they were a response to. The Kalamazoo Mall managed to survive for many years because it did have many of these characteristics; however, few exist to support it now.

In some respects, the notion of banning vehicles from a major downtown street in a state whose economy owes its existence to the auto, and where winter can last for up to six months, may have been simply nave. Many local residents were undoubtedly ambivalent toward the Mall from the outset, and saw it as the frivolous work of a small group of high-minded dilettantes, set out to Europeanize middle-America.

This cynicism is likely to continue with the street's new "user-friendly" gesture, if not all out embrace of automobile traffic. To others with loftier aspirations, it represented a statement about a higher order of civilization that our cities should strive to become. The Mall is gone, but the lessons it taught will remain with us for some time.

Will Flisram is a planning consultant with Langworthy Stader LeBlanc & Associates in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

March 2000