How malls can become the midtowns of the future
Mall and office park redevelopments are a generational opportunity to create new nodes of urbanity.
Since it opened in 1960, Lloyd Center in Portland, Oregon, has been a living mall history textbook.
Lloyd Center’s initial open-air design was inspired by that of Northgate Mall in Seattle, widely considered to be the first mall in the U.S. when it debuted a decade prior. In 1972, Lloyd Center was the subject of a landmark Supreme Court ruling that affirmed malls’ status as entirely private spaces where protests and pickets could be prohibited. In the 1980s, it was converted to a covered galleria, reflecting the latest trends in mall design.
As if to cement this legacy, a photo of Lloyd Center’s old outdoor promenade graces the cover of Meet Me by the Fountain, Alexandra Lange’s authoritative mall history from 2022.
Today, Lloyd Center, like many of its peers around the country, is struggling with high vacancies and low foot traffic. In response, its owner, Urban Renaissance Group, hopes to usher in its next evolutionary phase. A proposal is working its way through Portland’s planning process to redevelop the mall into a neighborhood with new open spaces and through-streets, ground floor shops, and as many as 5,000 homes rising in slender towers.
Once again, the Lloyd Center mall is a reflection of prevailing trends. Ambitious mall redevelopments are moving forward in practically every major metro area in the U.S. It’s an under-appreciated, under-reported transformation unfolding in American cities in real time.
This could be much more than a real estate hype cycle. It’s an opportunity to create new urban centers where homes, shops, offices, and civic institutions can cluster in a walkable radius. This urban development model is as old as cities themselves. The mall model was a half-century aberration.
At places like Lloyd Center — urban shopping centers in the principal city of a metro area, easily accessible to transit and other important destinations — transformed malls can become their city’s next midtown. In more suburban areas, we’ll need other terms for mall and office park redevelopments: Call them “metroburbs,” or “fifteen-minute malls.” Perhaps, over the decades that this transition will play out, these places can be stripped of their privateness, with streets and green spaces reverting to public control.
In order to understand the opportunity at hand, it’s essential to look back at how urban commercial centers previously developed, and how that model changed.
In the late 19th century, Midtown was still an upstart neighborhood, challenging Downtown’s primacy as New York’s commercial, entertainment, and shopping hub. Midtown’s rise started with the migration of wealthy people uptown, followed by the businesses and institutions that served them. Bergdorf Goodman and Lord and Taylor stores turned Fifth Avenue into the “Ladies Mile” shopping district; Macy’s made 34th Street a destination with its block-long flagship store; and a new theater district blossomed at the intersection of Broadway and 42nd Street, where the New York Times established its headquarters.
A parallel process was taking place in late 19th century Boston. Copley Square became the downtown of Boston’s fashionable Back Bay neighborhood, attracting major institutions like the Museum of Fine Arts and the Central Library along with office buildings and hotels.
Other big cities got their midtowns in the 1920s and ’30s. In Chicago, the Magnificent Mile shopping district stretched from the Loop toward the city’s upscale north side neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, Hollywood emerged as a new business and entertainment district closer to the hills where movie stars and moguls were settling. The Central West End in St. Louis, New Center in Detroit, University Circle in Cleveland, and Midtown Atlanta developed similarly during this era.
These midtowns all more or less resembled traditional downtowns, with a broad diversity of commercial, residential and civic buildings, minimal provision for parking, and easy transit access. But subsequent outlying centers would diverge more and more from this mold.
Midtowns went out in favor of the commercial strip, an urban environment whose design was wholly defined by the need to accommodate the car. It is, poetically, from the gas station that the architecture of the commercial strip flows. In the early 20th century, enterprising gas station owners began offering a greater array of services, including oil changes and tire replacement. The key to the “super service station” was its drive-in architecture, which enabled motorists to navigate the complex and its various offerings in their cars. Instead of facing outward toward the street and sidewalk, as pre-car storefronts so conspicuously did, super service stations faced inward toward their own interior motor court. It may not have looked like much, but it was a revolution in urban design.
The continued innovation of parkitechture eventually led to Washington, DC’s Park and Shop, completed in 1930. This L-shaped, parking-lot-hugging development anchored by a Piggly Wiggly supermarket established the architectural conventions of the strip mall. Larger and larger malls followed from this design template. Regional shopping centers were even more hostile to street life. Buffered from the outside world by expansive parking lots, these malls faced entirely inward with shops lining an internal promenade or atrium. They were aggressively single-use environments, isolating shopping and entertainment from homes, offices, and civic infrastructure.
A similar process played out with office parks. Instead of being integrated in the street grid of a downtown or midtown, offices would increasingly be set in pastoral “corporate estates.” These ultra-secure campuses were inaccessible by design: All the better to keep out undesirables and keep workers focused and productive. The form reached its apotheosis with Bell Labs in exurban New Jersey, a two million square foot reflective rectangle reached by a half-mile driveway. The show Severance makes use of its foreboding qualities as the headquarters of the fictional Lumon corporation.
Planners tried their hardest to import these principles into downtowns. In the 1950s and 60s, urban renewal initiatives replaced vast swaths of the historic urban fabric with fortress-like office towers, malls, housing projects, and parking garages. The walkability and mixture of uses in these neighborhoods was severely diminished, if not destroyed entirely.
There’s been no shortage of criticism of these environments. As early as the 1930s, writers decried the nationwide spread of the placeless “hot dog trail,” stretching “its vulgar, desecrating length over hill and valley, beach and cliff.” Decades later Mike Davis described Universal CityWalk, a mall-theme park hybrid just beyond the gates of Universal Studios in Los Angeles, as “the architectural equivalent of the neutron bomb: the city emptied of all lived experience.”
But in their cultural laments, critics missed the most vulgar attributes of these places: their relationship to the rest of the metropolis. No longer would shopping or office districts be integrated with the rest of the city. Commercial areas would be for commerce alone. This pattern of urban development has profound drawbacks, no matter the quality of the architecture or the authenticity of the experience.
By separating shopping and workplaces from homes and civic infrastructure, the mall/ office park model effectively eliminated the urban virtue of proximity. It is this development model, as much as any other factor, that explains why it’s so difficult to walk anywhere in American neighborhoods constructed after World War II. The mixture of businesses, institutions, and land use types that organically emerges in human settlement — and which was such a prominent feature of midtowns — was not permitted to take root.
Now, cities have a chance to correct this historic mistake. It starts with mall redevelopments.
Lloyd Center is already, effectively, Portland’s midtown. The name refers to the mall as well as the surrounding neighborhood, which includes a few office towers and a major hospital. The Oregon Convention Center and the Trailblazers’ arena are a short walk away. Just beyond that, on the banks of the Willamette River, is the Lower Albina District, a historic Black community that was destroyed during the urban renewal era, which the Albina Vision Trust now plans to rebuild as a high-density eco-district. (Plans to build a cover on top of I-5 through the Lower Albina District are on ice following the Trump administration’s termination of the Reconnecting Communities program.) Portland’s light rail system runs directly through the area, offering easy connections to downtown, the airport, and lots of other important destinations.
But with a dying mall at its center, this neighborhood lacks a focal point. Turning that mall into a mixed-use urban place will give the neighborhood its central crossroads, its Copley Square or, at the risk overstating the case, its Times Square. Because of its location and transit access, Lloyd Center is among the most promising mall-to-midtown transformations in the works. But it’s not the only one.
Country Club Plaza in Kansas City is, like Lloyd Center, already effectively a midtown. But with the recently opened streetcar link to downtown, it could be much more so. While I would never dare envision the redevelopment of Country Club Plaza itself — an architecturally significant proto-mall — there’s plenty of strip-style development nearby that could be redeveloped to make this a more walkable, urban neighborhood. It’s the same story in Midtown Phoenix, a transit-accessible row of office towers that is a few strip mall redevelopments away from becoming a genuinely urban center.
Santana Row in San Jose and the Galleria District in Houston are relatively dense, mall-anchored neighborhoods, but they lack walkable streets and good transit connections to their downtowns. Adding those elements — in addition to redeveloping the surrounding strip malls and parking lots — would enable these neighborhoods to come into their own as midtowns.
Some mall redevelopment plans fall between midtowns and isolated nodes of urbanity in the suburbs, what I call “fifteen-minute malls.” Stonestown Mall in San Francisco and the pioneering Northgate Mall in Seattle are on the edges of their respective cities. Redevelopment plans there make use of their proximity to transit, while still being scaled to their relatively low-density surroundings.
In more outlying locations, these projects are designed more around internal walkability. Developer Ralph Zucker, who led the transformation of Bell Labs, calls these places “metroburbs,” or “a little metropolis in suburbia.” Ironically, Bell Works, as it’s now called, is not the best illustration of the metroburb phenomenon. The historic superstructure was entirely preserved (as it should be) and converted into a shopping center with office space. Yet a NIMBY outcry prevented dense housing from being built around it, meaning practically nobody can walk to the complex.
There are countless other, better examples. In places with high land values, malls and office parks are increasingly being recognized as poor uses of real estate. In Silicon Valley, Southern California, Northern Virginia, South Florida and the New York area, projects and proposals abound to convert malls and office parks into dense, mixed-use developments.
The most urbanistically intriguing metroburbs are those being built right next to transit stations. White Plains, New York, two old malls near the Metro North station are being transformed into residential towers with publicly accessible green space at their base, in the eco-district mold. In Menlo Park, California, redevelopments of the USGS and SRI office parks will add over 1,000 new homes within walking distance of the Caltrain station. Facebook and Google had plans to redevelop some of their Silicon Valley campuses into mixed use “villages,” but they appear to be on hold for now.
Very understandable concerns flow from all of the aforementioned proposals. When a single entity builds a multi-acre mega-developement, there’s a risk of creating an architecturally bland, pleasantville atmosphere. Mike Davis would be no fan of the Disneyfied streetscapes of Santana Row, a sterile, profoundly inauthentic environment under the top-down control of the mall owner.
It’s important for cities to demand high standards of architectural quality and variety from these projects, perhaps by limiting building girth and requiring different architects for different buildings in a complex. Beyond that, it can be valuable to adopt a long historical perspective. Much of America’s finest architecture can be considered “inauthentic” in some sense; aping the styles of other cultures, copying from storybooks or movies, reaching back through time to claim authority and legitimacy. Many of the builders and companies that created great urban neighborhoods were themselves unsavory characters. And yet the neighborhoods they built have endured and evolved, taking on identities that the original developers could have never dreamed of. Governance and policy can adapt to a changing built environment, as they always have, albeit imperfectly.
Conjuring new urban neighborhoods, in a country that has by and large stopped building them, will be no easy feat. The urban growth machine is broken down and rusty. Mall and office park redevelopments can be the proving grounds to get the machine going again.
This essay was adapted from The Unfinished Metropolis. Chapter 10, “Fifteen-Minute Malls,” elaborates on these themes in more depth.
Great piece (as is the rest of the book!). One quibble: “It’s important for cities to demand high standards of architectural quality and variety from these projects, perhaps by limiting building girth and requiring different architects for different buildings in a complex.” Take the point on wanting “nice places,” though adding on lots of place making design conditions can add greatly to costs and seems to work against the main objective of getting things redeveloped. I’m happy to waive (or even better, eliminate) as many design standard requirements as possible in order to get things built. At least make things flexible. I think developers will have an incentive of their own to do good design to attract residents, buyers and tenants without a heavy regulatory hand.