America's First 'Walking Mall' Was a Michigan Experiment

Long before suburban shopping malls took over America, a Michigan city tried something radical: it kicked the cars off its main street and invited people to just… walk.

In 1959, Kalamazoo closed two blocks of Burdick Street to traffic and turned it into the Kalamazoo Mall — the first outdoor pedestrian shopping mall in the United States. It opened on August 19, 1959, and the celebration drew about 50,000 people, with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra playing. The whole thing cost about $60,000, split between the city and downtown business owners. Kalamazoo earned a new nickname: “Mall City.”

Here’s the delicious irony. The man Kalamazoo hired to design it, Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen, was the very same person who had invented the modern enclosed shopping mall just a few years earlier (his Southdale Center near Minneapolis). Downtown merchants, terrified of losing customers to the suburbs, hired the mall’s own inventor to help them fight back.

The pedestrian-mall idea caught fire — it was copied in more than 200 cities. But most couldn’t beat the pull of the suburbs. As Governing magazine put it, “of the more than 200 of these creatures brought into existence, nearly 90 percent had failed and been shut down by the early 21st century. Of the 10 percent or so that survived, most were in cities with populations under 100,000.” Kalamazoo reopened part of its mall to limited traffic in 1998. Still — it was first, and that pioneering spirit started right here.