The Cherry Hill Mall turns 50 on Tuesday, so let's pause to remember Victor Gruen, the socialist from Austria who revolutionized shopping in America.
Gruen (1903-1980) was the original architect of South Jersey's iconic mall -- the first in the Northeast --as well as other pioneering prototypes of the "climate-controlled" collections of stores that became the nation's dominant retail destinations.
"(He) designed and built the popular environments of postwar America," M. Jeffrey Hardwick writes in the biography Mall Maker, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). "Americans of all classes and races have encountered Gruen's architectural dreams."
The dreamer immigrated to the United States in 1938 and quickly established himself as the creator of innovative retail spaces in Manhattan and elsewhere. One of his dramatic facades is visible at 1020 Market Street in Center City, and the swooping, futuristic hangars his firm designed for the Penn Fruit supermarket chain still can be found across the Philadelphia area.
But the suburban shopping mall remains Gruen's signature achievement.
A cosmopolitan man who grew up in Vienna, Gruen believed meticulous planning could yield a new, improved version of downtown in the suburbs, or in existing downtowns: his Midtown Plaza in the heart of Rochester, NY was the best-known example of the latter, opening in 1962.
Most of Midtown has since been demolished.
But the mall he built on the former Jaus Farm in what was then called Delaware Township, NJ lives on.