Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Elizabeth Keslacy
The pedestrian mall became a fixture in declining American cities from the 1960s to the 1980s when landscape architects, municipal officials, and business associations created it as a design strategy to help downtown business districts compete with ascendant suburban malls, importing many of their spatial and programmatic strategies into the fabric of the city. Recent reassessments of pedestrian malls in planning journals have argued that factors such as tourism, climate, and even length contribute significantly to their ultimate success or failure. However, few have historically situated the mall-building phenomenon explicitly within the context of the civil rights movement, urban renewal, desegregation, and white flight—all factors that underwrote suburbanization and urban decline. This paper reads one pedestrian mall—the Mid-America Mall in Memphis, TN (1976)—within the context of the city’s racial politics. The Mall was one of the longest in the United States at its construction, stretching ten blocks along the city’s Main Street and terminating at the pedestrianized Civic Center plaza. Utilizing abstract, repetitive forms first popularized by the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, Memphis architects Gassner, Nathan and Browne designed the mall with a block-long water feature at its center, surrounded by “performance platforms” of varying sizes and heights.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.110.50
Volume Editors
Robert Gonzalez, Milton Curry & Monica Ponce de Leon
ISBN
978-1-944214-40-1
