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Shopping Centers Today -> September 2002
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BOOK CHRONICLES HISTORY OF INDUSTRY FOR FIRST TIME
By Debra Hazel |
The pioneers and visionaries of the shopping center business tell their stories in America’s Marketplace: The History of Shopping Centers, to be published by ICSC and Greenwich Publishing Group on Sept. 23.
The book, fully illustrated in coffee-table size, is the first detailed history of the shopping center industry ever published. It traces the evolution of the shopping center from the ancient Greek agoras and European arcades to the first strip centers and regional malls to today’s megamalls and lifestyle centers.
Pioneers Melvin Simon, General Growth Properties co-founder Matthew Bucksbaum and the late Roy P. Drachman speak openly about the industry’s earlier days, while contemporary players look at the current state of the business and its prospects for the future. Even the famously press-shy A. Alfred Taubman, founder of Taubman Centers, granted author Nancy E. Cohen a rare interview.
“The level of cooperation was extraordinary,” said Cohen, who conducted more than 50 interviews for the project. “Everyone was very generous. Certainly, the pioneers are proud of what they’ve accomplished, and this story has never been told.”
The idea of creating an official biography of the industry had been floating around ICSC for more than 10 years after the organization videotaped several founders giving an oral history for the first World Congress of Shopping Centers in 1990 in Hong Kong. But the growth and consolidation of the business during the next decade put the project on the back burner.
“When you’re involved in a living, breathing industry, it’s hard to step back and take a look, to place it in a broader social context,” said ICSC Editorial Director (and SCT Publisher) Mark J. Schoifet, one of the supervisors of the project along with Staff Senior Vice President Rudolph E. Milian, SCSM, SCMD, and Patricia Wolf, ICSC’s director of publications.
With the passage of time, however, the need to record the industry’s history while many founders were still alive became evident.
“The people with the memories and the documentation of the early years were beginning to pass on,” noted ICSC Vice Chairman John T. Riordan, ICSC’s chief staff officer from 1986 to 2001, who spearheaded the project before turning it over to his successor, Michael P. Kercheval, the organization’s president and CEO.
Such giants as Martin Bucksbaum, Edward J. DeBartolo Sr., Ernest Hahn and James Rouse died during the 1990s. More recent passings include Sylvan M. Cohen, co-founder of Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust, the industry’s first REIT, and Drachman, a pioneer in Arizona shopping center development.
Throughout the project, ICSC worked closely with Greenwich, a publishing company known for corporate biographies about such entities as Adolph Coors Co., Eddie Bauer and the New York Stock Exchange.
“We felt comfortable turning it over to them, having them hire an author who could step outside this industry,” Schoifet said.
In addition, the project entailed the painstaking collection and coordination of an immense amount of archival material, such as photographs of early centers, back issues of magazines and newspapers, and personal memorabilia from industry professionals, a task best done by an outside company, Schoifet said.
Greenwich in turn hired Cohen, who had authored a book about the Bon-Ton department store chain for Greenwich and has been a contributor to SCT.
The book is divided into a foreword and six chapters that take the industry’s history by decade, from the 1940s to the present day, through some 160 lavishly illustrated pages.
“The goal was to make it not technical, to make it readable,” Cohen said.
Cohen conducted her interviews during the spring and summer of 2001. Much to her regret, however, this was not early enough to catch the memories of some industry founders who had already died.
“I was sorry not to have had a chance to talk to Ernest Hahn, though [Hahn protégé] John Gilchrist did a great job of bringing him to life,” Cohen said. “Also Edward DeBartolo and James Rouse — though Rouse at least wrote a great deal.” Cohen used some of Rouse’s contributions in the book.
But even without all of the founders being involved, the survivors portray a business that has both adapted to and driven social change, and that has endured despite repeated declarations of its imminent death.
“What I find interesting in looking at the span of the modern shopping center industry is its incredible ability to reinvent itself,” Cohen said.
The book will sell for $39.95 with discounts for volume purchases. To order, call (301) 362-6900 or go to ICSC’s Web site, at www.icsc.org.
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