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Rivals by Invitation. Shopping-center growth is now concentrated among ever larger "regional centers" dominated by two or more major department stores. "Six or eight years ago, 40 stores made a good-size center," says Detroit Developer Alfred Taubman. "Today, we want a minimum of 80 stores and average from 125 to 150." That puts a premium on compact use of land. To squeeze a potentially rival department store (Stix, Baer & Fuller) into their Crestwood Plaza near St. Louis, Developers Louis and Milton Zorensky erected a building on stilts above the parking lot. In a sharp departure from the norm of the '50s, department stores themselves provide the impetus nowadays for most regional centers; they pick the site, arrange for zoning and utilities, invite one or two competing stores to share the center with them, and then call in a developer to locate the other tenants.
Now, many planners feel that shopping centers are approaching what Los Angeles Architect Victor Gruen, a pioneer in the field, calls "a new wave of innovation." With realty taxes, land and construction costs constantly escalating, says Vice President Andrew L. Murphy of Allied Stores, "the future of the shopping center is vertical." He foresees the demolition of many of today's thriving centers and their replacement by towering retail-office-apartment complexes. Some centers are already growing into such minicities. Developer Raymond D. Nasher has begun work on a "platform city" in Atlanta, and he expects to expand his handsome NorthPark center in Dallas into a similar amalgam of rental housing, hotels and parks. A Cleveland developer this week is announcing plans for a $300 million "Metro City" shopping mall in suburban Euclid; it will include 1,000 apartments, a 400-room hotel, a motel, and a 22-story office building.
Inexorably, the shape of tomorrow's shopping centers will come to resemble that of today's downtowns. The resemblance will have some of the old drawbacks, too. Though only a few centers now impose a charge, developers are virtually unanimous that free parking will disappear long before the year 2000.