Festival modernism : downtown plans & pedestrian malls, 1956-1974

Abstract

Between 1956 and 1974, many cities in the United States pedestrianized their main shopping corridors in an effort to revive retail, draw middle-class white consumers back to the central city, and emulate the increasingly popular and profitable suburban shopping centers burgeoning at the fringe. By the late 1980s, pedestrian malls, once a panacea for struggling downtowns, had become the quintessential failed urban project. The rise and fall of the pedestrian mall marks a critical moment in the trajectory of modernism and the history of the American city. The recent and controversial demolition of one of the era's foremost pedestrian malls, Fresno's Fulton Mall (1964), planned by Victor Gruen Associates and designed by the landscape architect Garrett Eckbo, calls for a critical reappraisal of this overlooked chapter of city planning, especially as U.S. cities and downtown partnerships embrace pedestrian plazas, "complete streets," tactical urbanism, and "better blocks" as a strategy for economic revitalization. By coding the visual material of downtown plans published from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, this paper traces the evolution of critical motifs, themes, and ideas embedded within plans that featured pedestrian malls. Four case studies, including Victor Gruen's seminal plan A Greater Fort Worth Tomorrow (1956), Gruen's CentralArea Fresno (1960), I.M. Pei's central business district plan for Oklahoma City (1964), and the plan for downtown Buffalo by Wallace, McHarg, Roberts, and Todd (1971), demonstrate how different plan makers conceptualized pedestrianization as part of downtown renewal. This thesis makes two contentions. First, it identifies the pedestrian mall as a critical precursor to the postmodern, festival marketplace and an expression of a "festival" or "townscape" modernism that represented a middle ground between the oppositional paradigms of clearance and preservation. Pedestrian malls reveal the humanism embedded within aspects of late modernism, and the modernism cloaked by the historicized festival marketplace. The second contention, based on a close reading of downtown plans from the era, is that pedestrian malls were rarely accompanied by broader programs of reform, infrastructure building, and regional planning that might have made them successful. In many cases, their implementation coincided with a nadir in downtown retail and failed as a cosmetic resolution to embedded economic problems. Together, these findings provide planners and policymakers reshaping cities today with a critical historical context for revitalization efforts and important lessons relating to the scale, scope, and challenge of rebuilding downtowns.