The Sculpture of Marshall Fredericks and the Rise and Fall of the Midwestern Mall

On March 22, 1954, Hudson's Northland Center opened to great fanfare in suburban Southfield, Michigan. On the day of its opening, Northfield's architect, Victor Gruen, proclaimed that Northland Center was the world's largest shopping center—with the largest department branch and the greatest number of stores, and located on the largest property site.¹ Designed as "a city within a city," Northland's empire included its own power plant, water tower, police force, 8,344 parking spaces, colonnaded walkways, fountains, courtyards, and even some sculptures. During the 1950s, and in the following decades, the mall was designed to work in harmony with automobiles, as any mall parking lot today reveals. Detroit spawned American car culture; not surprisingly, when it opened in 1954, Northland—the largest shopping center, with the largest parking lot in the world—was built in a Detroit suburb. In fact, the Automobile Manufacturers Association exclaimed that Northland Center was "a complete, integrated, one-stop shopping center tuned to the Motor Age."²

On the day Northland Center opened, near the entrance of Hudson's, the shopping center's flagship department store, stood a massive limestone sculpture of a bear with a small boy astride it. The sculpture, Boy and Bear, was created by the metro Detroit-based sculptor Marshall Fredericks. Working in concert with the art-conscious Gruen, Fredericks created the sculpture to bring joy to the cement shopping center.

Boy and Bear stood seemingly unchanged, near the Hudson's store entrance at Northfield, even as the shopping center and its flagship store (initially Hudson's, followed by Marshall Fields and eventually Macy's) continued to transform during its six decades as a commercial enterprise. This article explores Boy and Bear, likely one of Fredericks's most beloved and (literally) embraced works; though the focus here is not solely on the limestone sculpture. Rather, it is also important to understand the transformation of the space around it. This is the story of a sculpture of a bear and a boy in a midwestern mall, but it is also a story of the transformation of the mall itself, the transformation of mall culture in midwestern suburbs, and the transformation of Southfield and even Detroit—a city Gruen's Northland Center attempted to both escape and reconstitute ten miles away. A common mall, the critically overlooked sculptor Marshall Fredericks, and Fredericks's playful and uncomplicated Boy and Bear all matter to the history of the Midwest because they offer a way to make sense of the transformation of everyday life in the region during the second half of the twentieth century.

The Mall Matters to the History of the Midwest

The Midwest bore the omnipresent mall and the lifestyle that came with it. In fact, Gruen, the architect of Northland, pioneered the suburban mall and its consumer culture. "As a result of his architectural projects," M. Jeffrey Hardwick explains, "it is no overstatement to say that he designed and built the popular environments of postwar America. Americans of all classes and races have encountered Gruen's architectural dreams. Gruen created the spaces that postwar Americans lived in, moved through, and longed for."³ Since Gruen was the pioneer of the mall, and his first architectural designs were located in Michigan and Minnesota, it is important to note that midwesterners were the first consumers in the United States to accommodate and then assimilate the mall lifestyle that began to permeate American culture. The ubiquitous mall and the consumer culture it helped create was a critical chapter in the history of the twentieth century because it helped create a suburban consumer culture that partnered leisure and spectacle with consumption.

Gruen explained that Northland, with its ample parking, could meet the cultural, civic, and social needs of Detroit's suburbanites. The historian Delores Hayden explains that the tax laws of 1954 allowed commercial property owners to write off the depreciation of a building after seven years, which created a hidden subsidy for cheap new commercial buildings. "Shopping mall developers were among the biggest beneficiaries of accelerated depreciation," Hayden writes...