Pedestrian Modern: Shopping and American Architecture, 1925–1956 by David Smiley (review)

Disneyland’s drawing power, according to Jean Baudrillard, was its comforting simulacrum of the American way of life that reimagined the pedestrian experience at the dawn of postwar suburbanization. He observed, “You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit.”¹ The theme park was a finely tuned machine that through advanced technologies structured and filtered experiences of “the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd.”² Baudrillard argued that only by visiting Disneyland could one understand how the “real” America was structured around this binary of solitude and crowds. After traversing countless Southern California freeways and roads by automobile, the Disneyland “guest” would park in a surface lot covering approximately the same amount of land as the theme park itself. Arrival by tram at the expansive brick-lined plaza, which faced an elevated railway with a mansard-roofed train station, marked the transformation from individual to crowd as guests lined up to purchase tickets and enter the park. Disneyland’s main axis, a miniaturized version of Main Street, U.S.A., circa 1910, greeted visitors with brightly colored façades—full scale at the ground level, three-quarters scale at the upper levels—that fronted retail and eating establishments such as the Carnation Ice Cream Parlor. These stores exemplified the decorated-shed approach to building: aerial photographs revealed warehouse spaces extending behind the gaily decorated street wall. This pattern of shopping and eating nodes repeated in each of the theme park’s lands. A trip to Disneyland, therefore, not only provided an opportunity to mingle with crowds in a fully designed pedestrian space but also offered countless opportunities to spend money. Nearly forty years after Disneyland opened, Margaret Crawford noted that the utopia of consumption had reached its apotheosis with the West Edmonton Mall in Calgary. At this megamall the theme park and the enclosed shopping mall converged to create “controlled and carefully packaged public spaces and pedestrian experiences” in which space, time, weather, and reality were suspended.³

In Pedestrian Modern: Shopping and American Architecture, 1925–1956, David Smiley explores shopping centers and urban designs that focused on the pedestrian as both entertained consumer and community participant—much the same design concept as underlay Disney’s parks. The pedestrian has figured prominently in shopping centers as well as in urban design projects such as historic preservation districts, downtown redevelopments, and new suburban communities. Walking and shopping, or walking and people watching, are the primary activities of these places, yet the majority of them require some amount of travel, most notably via the private automobile. Walking has therefore been conceptualized and packaged as a leisure-time activity that takes place at a special destination.

The irony of driving in order to walk has not been lost on historians of the built environment. Moreover, the association of walking and community has become entangled within competing associations of crowds. The crowd is, on the one hand, energizing and urbane yet, on the other hand, dangerous to one’s health and well-being. Planners, architects, politicians, and business owners countered the negative connotations of the pedestrian crowd by seeking physical and social control over the environment. The concept and function of the pedestrian also shaped the morphology of individuals and crowds at Disneyland and its contemporary enclosed regional shopping center. The seemingly paradoxical combination of nostalgia and modernity at work at theme parks and malls is key to Smiley’s engrossing and illuminating examination of how pedestrianization was a “hallmark of modern architecture” (249).

Pedestrian Modern begins and ends with the same example—the first enclosed shopping mall built in the United States. Designed by Victor Gruen, Southdale Center opened in 1956 in Edina, a suburb ten miles southwest of Minneapolis. In a wintry place like Minnesota, the lush tropical plants and fountains of Southdale presented a...