No Wonder MALLRATS Sucked

The shopping mall was invented by a socialist:

Austrian architect Victor Gruen brought the mall concept to this country and designed the first enclosed American mall, drawing on ideas from socialist theory. He saw malls as the new source of American community, though later in his life he became more skeptical.

It's also no wonder that I usually feel uncomfortable when I'm in a shopping mall.

Of course like all socialist schemes, the shopping mall didn't work out as planned:

The shopping centers were even supposed to contain sprawl by rounding up all the strip development and corralling it into a single planned environment. But of course they had the opposite effect, hastening the demise of old-fashioned urban neighborhoods, increasing dependence on the car and, in the ultimate indignity, fostering even more strip development, like dreadnoughts drawing barnacles.

For Gruen, as for any other socialist attempting to treat human society as an engineering problem, the actual results are usually the opposite of the goals.

Gruen's life appears to be as interesting--and paradoxical--as his work. A tireless self-promoter and pamphleteer, he started out as a simple store designer and managed, over the course of his career, to repackage himself as the guru of urban salvation. In theory he embraced the automobile as fervently as most Americans did, yet personally he hated driving, hated the suburbs and eventually, it seems, hated even the vulgar, sprawling, profitable nation whose landscape he helped to shape. Among his many bad ideas was saving downtowns by banning automobiles from key streets and building giant malls and parking structures at city centers--in effect making them more like suburbia. He also ran through four wives.

When I was growing up Downtown Minneapolis had an interesting (not always nice) collection of shops, restaurants, and cinemas. I had an afterschool job cleaning two Fanny Farmer candy shops. I bought a large part of my early collection of Science Fiction novels, along with magazines such as ANALOG, STARLOG, CINEFANTASTIQUE, and CINEMAGIC at Shinder's on Seventh. Thanks to Comrade Gruen and like minded drones in the city government all of the neat parts of Downtown Minneapolis have been replaced, through the abuse of eminent domain, by a collection of dull and souless structures whose primary function is to generate property tax revenues.

Feh!