Threshold Resistance Read Online Free PDF

foot traffic, buses, streetcars, and increasingly, automobiles. The irony? If department stores had not excluded competitors like Sears and JCPenney from downtown locations, fewer new retail developments would have been built to splinter the markets and challenge the flagships’ dominance.
    The automobile and the mobility it provided to America’s growing middle class changed everything for the downtown department store. By 1930, 23 million cars were registered in America. And after World War II, federal programs offering affordable financing for new home-buyers and historic expenditures on highway construction accelerated the exodus of formerly captive customers. By the 1960s, major downtown department stores had no choice but to join the outcast family of chain stores in major new suburban centers like Southland and Sunvalley.
    Of course, the department stores themselves played a significant part in the migration of retail to the suburbs. Some people credit Northland Mall, which opened in the Detroit suburb of Southfield in 1954, with being one of our nation’s first regional shopping malls. What made the 1954 opening of Northland so pivotal to development patterns in southeast Michigan was the size of the Hudson’s department store that anchored it. Now, it’s understandable that Hudson’s, the region’s dominant retailer, would make the decision to build its second store beyond the city limits. All major department store operators were beginning to build branch stores in the suburbs by this time. What was unusual, however, was Hudson’s decision to build such large stores—a 600,000-square-foot store at Northland and, in 1957, a 400,000-square-foot store at Eastland in Harper Woods. These were not branch stores, which typically were between 150,000 and 200,000 square feet. And they gave shoppers another reason to make purchases closer to where they lived instead of downtown.
    I certainly wasn’t alone in building large projects in different states. This period of explosive growth saw the formation of several shopping center companies that grew to be national firms, and there was plenty of room for all of us. On the West Coast, Ernest W. Hahn started his business in 1947 as a general contractor specializing in carpentry. Ernie handled the carpentry for me at Eastridge, which opened in San Jose in 1971. His first center, La Cumbre Plaza in Santa Barbara, opened in 1967. For a few years in the late 1990s, Taubman Centers owned the property along with the Paseo Nuevo center in downtown Santa Barbara. Hahn was one of the first mall developers to form a public company—the Hahn Company—which was ultimately acquired by Canadian real estate giant Trizec in 1980.
    For whatever reason, the Midwest bred several mall pioneers. Matthew and Martin Bucksbaum, brothers originally from Iowa, formed what is today the very successful General Growth Properties in 1954 after trying his hand at managing a supermarket business. I made an offer to buy the Bucksbaums’ portfolio in the late 1960s. They turned me down. And while the discussions were entirely friendly, I think I hurt their feelings. I didn’t mean to, and to this day I deeply respect the family and their business.
    Melvin Simon, along with his brothers, Herbert and Fred, started in the construction business in 1960 in Indianapolis. The Simons were from New York, but Mel’s job as a leasing agent for Albert J. Frankel Co., a strip center developer based in Indianapolis, brought the family west. Edward J. DeBartolo of Youngstown, Ohio, formed his construction company in 1948 and soon branched out into retail development close to home and later in Florida. The DeBartolo Company was acquired by Simon in 1996.
    Philip M. Klutznick, also a product of the Midwest, was born in Kansas City, in 1907. His father, Morris, was a cobbler. Philip and his family lived above the store—literally. A lawyer by training, Philip became a