Victor Gruen’s Retail Therapy: Exiled Jewish Communities and the Invention of the American Shopping Mall as a Postwar Ideal

Abstract

This article examines the role of e¤ migre¤ architectVictor Gruen in advancing a social-democratic ideology that would find an unlikely application in the context of consumer capitalism in the United States. It argues that Gruen was able to channel the ideals of social democracy into his vision of the shopping centre, intended as a recreation of the best aspects of urbanity in a suburban ‘desert’ that lacked any community centre. The article focuses on the formation of Gruen’s values in interwarVienna and his early experiences in the US in the late 1930s and early 1940s, where he embraced his identity as aJewish refugee by managing a theatre troupe of exiled Viennese, and where he established himself as an architect and designer in part through his contacts in the community of e¤ migre¤ Jews in NewYork. In the spring of 1949, theWarner Brothers studio assembled about 250 architects in Los Angeles for a preview screening of its new ¢lm, an adaptation of the 1943 Ayn Rand novel The Fountainhead. Among those in attendance was Victor Gruen, a Viennese e¤ migre¤ and architect who would become best known as the inventor of the regional shopping centre. He was appalled by what he believed to be a gross misrepresentation of the work and values of his profession, and was disgusted by the antisocial, egotistical message of the ¢lm and book. Gruen channeled his anger into a devastating review of the ¢lm, which was published in the May 1949 issue of Arts and Architecture. Gruen charged that Rand did not know that the very purpose of the contemporary architect was service to society and to the client; his mission was to ful¢ll the needs of a communityçnot to erect monuments to his ego that stood in complete disregard to human needs. Gruen worried that the nonconformist ideology of Rand’s hero would be so deeply attractive to young people 1 ‘Hollywood’s Fountainhead: All dynamite will be charged to clients’, The Architectural Forum, June 1949, pp. 13^14. Victor Gruen,‘Mountain Heads from Mole Hills’, Arts and Architecture, May 1949, p. 32. Leo Baeck InstituteYear Book Vol. 61, 219^232 doi:10.1093/leobaeck/ybw001 Advance Access publication 3March 2016 TheAuthor (2016). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Leo Baeck Institute. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article-abstract/61/1/219/2669594 by guest on 26 July 2018 that they would overlook the ‘anti-social, anti-democratic and anti-humanmessage’ of the novel. Gruen reacted so strongly to the message of The Fountainhead because it was a perverse representation of his profession, but also because Rand’s libertarian ideology was an a¡ront to his deepest values as a Social Democrat. Gruen had come of age amidst the radical political transformations of interwar Vienna as a prominent member of an agitprop theatre troupe which thrived despite being forced underground when fascism took hold in the 1930s. As aJew and as a socialist, he had no choice but to £eeVienna in the wake of Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria in1938, ¢nally emigrating to the United States. Although his most famous invention, the regional shopping centre, would become an emblem of American postwar consumer capitalism, Gruen himself always retained the sensibilities of a speci¢callyViennese Social Democrat: he believed in the potential for large-scale social planning enterprisesçeither in physical forms as architecture or in institutional forms as social programmesçto improve the lives of the masses of working people. He chafed at the ideology of ‘free enterprise’ and its concomitant celebration of the individual independent from society. His shopping centres were intended to create a centralized community space, free from the interference of motor tra⁄c, where before there had been no centre: in the sprawling, unorganized suburbs. Gruen’s socialist, Jewish background and his experience in the world of Vienna’s political theatre have been noted but not closely examined in secondary accounts of his life and work in the United States, notably in book-length biographies byJe¡rey Hardwick and AlexWall. While Hardwick focuses principally on the social and cultural impact of Gruen’s work, Wall is most interested in Gruen’s design innovations in architecture and urban planning. Other accounts have tended to focus on Gruen’s achievements as an architect, or they have considered him as one of several important shopping mall developers or urban planners. Relative to Hardwick,Wall, and other secondary considerations, this essay takes a closer look at Gruen’s personal history in theJewish milieu of interwarVienna in forming a socialdemocratic ideology that would ¢nd an unlikely application in the context of consumer capitalism in the United States. I argue that Gruen was able to channel the positive ideals of social democracy into his vision for the shopping centre, which On municipal socialism in interwar Vienna, see Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture, 1919^1934, New York 1991; Anson Rabinbach,The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927^1934, Chicago 1983; and JanekWasserman, BlackVienna:The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918^1938, Ithaca 2014. On the experience of the Jews in Vienna, see Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism, Chapel Hill 1992; Steven Beller,Vienna and the Jews, 1867^1938: A Cultural History, Cambridge 1989; and George E. Berkley, Vienna and Its Jews:TheTragedy of Success, 1890s^1980s, Cambridge, Mass. 1988. M. Je¡rey Hardwick, Mall Maker:Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream, Philadelphia 2004; Alex Wall,Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City, Barcelona 2005. See, for example, Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920^1950, Cambridge, Mass. 1997; and chapter 6 in Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’Republic:The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, NewYork 2003. More recently, Gruen’s achievements as a speci¢cally modern architect have been examined by David Smiley in Pedestrian Modern: Shopping and American Architecture, 1925^1956, Minneapolis 2013. 220 J.Malherek Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article-abstract/61/1/219/2669594 by guest on 26 July 2018 was intendedto re-create thebest aspects of urbanity in a suburban‘desert’that lacked any community centre. This essay focuses on the formation of Gruen’s ideology in interwarVienna and his early experiences in the United States, where he embraced his identity as aJewish refugee by managing a theatre troupe of exiledViennese, and where he found jobs and established himself as an architect and designer in part through his contacts in the community of e¤ migre¤ Jews in New York. The communitarian spirit of Gruen’s cabaret performers, combined with the progressive social vision of the Viennese Social Democrats and the entrepreneurialism of immigrant professionals, coalesced in the person of Gruen, who channeled those energies into his vision for the shopping centre, a distinctlyAmerican manifestation of a central European ideal. It was an architectural form that expressed both the idealism of social democracy and the optimism of postwar America; it was the product of one e¤ migre¤ ’s stubborn progressivism and determination to transcend a traumatic past by realizing a positive vision for the future. Yet ‘the mall’ would ultimately succumb to commercial imperatives that compromised this vision, much to the dissatisfaction of its inventor. GRUEN’S EARLY YEARS IN VIENNA Viktor Gru« nbaum was born on 18 July 1903, the son of Adolf Gru« nbaum and Elizabeth Lea Levy. His was a liberal, modern, well-to-do Jewish family that did not regularly practice its religion. His mother came from a well-o¡ Hamburg family, and his father was a prominent lawyer and a lover of art, theatre, and satire who instilled his passions in his son.YoungViktor would accompany his father on foot or by horse-drawn carriage as he travelled around the Innere Stadt, Vienna’s central district, on business. Many of his father’s clients were involved in the theatre; while he was consulting them backstage young Viktor would watch rehearsals of plays and musical comedies,‘letting the theatrical life of Vienna soak into my bones’, he later recalled. The intellectual atmosphere and architectural environment of Viennaçwhich merged the traditionalism of Camillo Sitte and the modernism of OttoWagner, the city’s great architect-plannersçwas complemented by Gruen’s institutional training. He was a good but not excellent student, and he graduated from the Realgymnasium in 1917. Inspired by the austere modernism of Adolf Loos and others, Gruen went on to receive technical training in building construction at a state trade school. Gruen was horri¢ed by the anti-intellectual atmosphere of the school, and he remembered that many of his classmates were ‘proto-Nazis’ who 6 ‘Geburts-Befugnis’, 5 August 1903, box 22, folder 4, Victor Gruen Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,Washington, D.C. (hereafter,‘Gruen LOC’). Victor Gruen, ‘Biographische Notizen’, 2 April 1975, pp. 1^15, box 76, folder 7, Gruen LOC; Walter Guzzardi Jr., ‘An Architect of Environments’, Fortune, January 1962. On Sitte andWagner, see Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Sie' cleVienna: Politics and Culture, NewYork 1981, pp. 25^100. Hardwick, 9; ‘School Papers, July 1910^May 1925, n.d.’, box 23, folder 8, Gruen LOC. Victor Gruen’s RetailTherapy 221 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article-abstract/61/1/219/2669594 by guest on 26 July 2018 regularly subjected him and his close friend, Rudi Baumfeld, to antisemitic harassment. As a boy, Gruen’s Jewish heritage had made him a target for beatingsçan unfortunately common experience for young Jews.While the polite bourgeois atmosphere of the Realgynasium had provided some p