A shopping mall or shopping center, according to Wikipedia, “is a building or set of buildings that contain a variety of retail units, with interconnecting walkways enabling visitors to easily walk from unit to unit.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Go to Hunt Valley. Originally constructed in 1981 with Sears and Bamberger’s as anchors (“Mom, what’s Bamberger’s?”), the mall flopped. Many alternatives were discussed, including turning it into a collection of big-box stores. In the end, most of the mall was demolished and refashioned into a retail and restaurant village. There are no interconnecting walkways; it’s like a more advanced version of The Avenue in White Marsh.
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Hunt Valley Town Center, as the place is called nowadays, is jumping. Its anchors include Wegmans, the upscale New York state-based grocery store, which boasts a huge cosmetics counter, even books. And its future looks bright because Cockeysville/Hunt Valley is among the county’s growth areas.
De-malling is occurring across the country. Naturally, Internet sites track the trend. One is called deadmalls.com. No kidding.
Mondawmin Mall is the latest Baltimore-area shopping center to de-mall. Legendary developer James W. Rouse built it on lands once belonging to the estate of Alexander Brown, America’s first investment banker. When Mondawmin opened in 1956, it was one of the East Coast’s earliest malls, a distinction also claimed by Harundale Mall near Glen Burnie, which opened two years later.
A book could be written about Mondawmin. It’s an extraordinary story: The cutting-edge mall bombed before its doors opened, caught amid unanticipated racial change.
The Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision unleashed such rapid change in the surrounding neighborhood that the previously all-white Gwynns Falls Elementary School became 92.8 percent African-American two years later, when the mall opened. Promised crowds of white middle-class shoppers never materialized, and big out-of-town shops bailed out.
For a while, Mondawmin did nicely. Quality stores included a breakthrough fashion boutique operated by Pauline Brooks. She was an African-American business pioneer, but not Afrocentric. The store was a rage among the wives — and girlfriends — of black doctors, dentists and ministers. But gradually the mall became shabby.
Mondawmin is now emerging from a $70 million reconstruction. Its new Shoppers supermarket is probably the biggest grocery store in the city. A Target, the city’s first, opened recently, and A.J. Wright will open Thursday. More is to come.
Mondawmin’s new design is most peculiar. It is a retail application of the late Oscar Newman’s philosophy of “defensible space.” He was famous for retrofitting a community in Columbus, Ohio, with design elements discouraging crime. The jumble was so effective I almost couldn’t find my way out. Baltimore’s Guilford copied all those one-way streets and dead ends.
At Mondawmin, “defensible space” is achieved by not connecting anchors to the mall’s other stores. They also do not connect to the Metro station or transit bus terminal. And while Shoppers at least faces a street, Target overlooks a parking lot near the Motor Vehicle Administration building.
For underserved Baltimore, Target is one amazing store, full of items one previously could only find in the county. It even has a respectable-sized grocery section. But that grocery is located against the back wall, as far from the store’s single entrance as possible. Another “defensible space” move, no doubt.
Is this the way of the future? Or could Mondawmin turn out to be a design oddity from the days when architects disregarded mass transit in the belief that gas would always be cheap?
Maybe, as in 1956, they didn’t see the change coming.
Antero Pietila is a Baltimore Examiner columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
