Why America Buried the Largest Mall on Earth

My book, The Times You Grew Up With, takes you back: https://paulmcallister.store In 1976, Randall Park Mall opened outside Cleveland as the largest enclosed shopping mall on earth — 2.2 million square feet, 200 stores, seven anchors, $175 million to build. Twenty-six years later it sold for $6 million. Then it closed. Then they tore it down. An Amazon fulfillment center covers less than half the original footprint today. The story starts with Victor Gruen, a Viennese architect who fled the Nazis with eight dollars, invented the enclosed mall at Southdale Center in 1956, and envisioned a walkable community — not a shopping center. Only the shops got built. A quirk in the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 made new construction irresistible and renovation financially pointless, draining investment from every downtown in America. Edward DeBartolo Sr. followed the logic to its limit and built the biggest mall the world had ever seen in a village of a few hundred people. The 1996 DeBartolo–Simon merger turned the crown jewel into a line item in a portfolio. The anchors left. Everything else followed. Sources: M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) Thomas W. Hanchett, “U.S. Tax Policy and the Shopping-Center Boom of the 1950s and 1960s,” American Historical Review, Vol. 101, No. 4, October 1996 Victor Gruen, The Heart of Our Cities: The Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure (Simon and Schuster, 1964) The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), reporting on Randall Park Mall, 1976–2015 Internal Revenue Code of 1954, § 167 — Depreciation Cuyahoga County Fiscal Officer, property and tax records