Writer Malcom Gladwell called him the most influential architect of the 20th century. He’s considered the inventor of the American shopping mall. And in the early 1960’s Fresno leaders asked him to redesign the core of their city. The story of architect Victor Gruen, today on KVPR’s Central Valley Roots.
Gruen was born in Austria in 1903, and like many Jews, came to America amid the rise of Adolf Hitler. Gruen was a practicing architect, and specialized in retail stores. But he was also something of a social scientist, with bold ideas about the crisis of America’s mid-century urban areas. He burst onto the national scene in 1954 with the Northland Mall in Detroit, the nation’s first suburban shopping mall. Soon Gruen was building malls across the county.
Cities also brought him in to remake their downtowns in the image of these new malls, starting with Kalamazoo in 1959, which turned its downtown retail street into a pedestrian mall. Within months, Fresno leaders hired Gruen to do the same, but even bigger.
Inspired by Vienna’s Ringstrasse, Gruen’s plan called for a six-block pedestrian-only zone in downtown Fresno, enclosed by a ring road. But his plan wasn’t just for downtown Fresno, but for the entire city. Fulton Street was to be Fresno’s sole regional shopping district, with freeways bringing drivers from suburbia downtown.
The centerpiece of Gruen’s Fresno plan emerged in 1964 when Fulton Street became the Fulton Mall. The remainder of Gruen’s plan was largely delayed. But when Fashion Fair Mall opened in North Fresno in 1970, it was clear that Gruen’s vision for Fresno would not be realized.
