The First Pedestrian Mall in America

On August nineteenth, nineteen fifty-nine, the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra played in the street while fifty thousand people walked on two car-free blocks of Burdick Street in downtown Kalamazoo. The occasion was the opening of the first outdoor pedestrian shopping mall in the United States. Kalamazoo had, in a single stroke, invented a concept that hundreds of American cities would copy over the next forty years.

The idea came from necessity. Suburban shopping malls were pulling customers away from downtown Kalamazoo's established merchants. In nineteen fifty-seven, the city commission hired Victor Gruen, an Austrian-born architect who had already designed the country's first enclosed shopping mall in Edina, Minnesota. Gruen's vision was drawn from European pedestrian zones, particularly Vienna, where street life and commerce mixed without automobile interference. In Kalamazoo, he proposed closing Burdick Street to cars and redesigning the pavement for walkers, with benches, planters, and fountains.

The project cost sixty thousand dollars, shared between the city and local business owners. A third block was added in nineteen sixty and a fourth in nineteen seventy-five. At its peak, the Kalamazoo Mall inspired urban planners from across the country to try the same experiment in their own downtowns.

The concept worked better in theory than in practice for many cities. By the nineteen nineties, many pedestrian malls had become quiet corridors bypassed by shoppers who had simply moved further out to the suburban alternatives they were supposed to displace. Kalamazoo partially reversed course in nineteen ninety-eight, reopening two of the four blocks to vehicles. The remaining pedestrian sections survive today as a downtown commons. The experiment that failed in many cities partly succeeded here. And the blocks of Burdick Street you might be passing now are, in a technical sense, the original model for a national experiment in how cities share their streets.