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Northland had 8,300 free parking spaces and a crew that would help you find your car and jump the battery if it was dead.
Parking was not a problem, like it was at the downtown Hudson’s. Once shopping began, attendance was 40,000 to 50,000 a day for the first several weeks. Dorothy Thompson, the famous journalist, covered the opening for Ladies Home Journal, calling Northland “the most ambitious of such mercantile centers in America or the world.” Reporters from news media outlets from across the country covered the events, recognizing that Northland was a novel concept that would impact not only shopping, but cities and lifestyles as well. There was so much buzz surrounding the center that officials staged five inaugurals, for everyone from neighbors to employees. A week before stores unlocked their doors, traffic was gridlocked on a Sunday from gawkers seeking a glimpse of the much-hyped center. Architectural Forum called Gruen’s plan “a new yardstick in shopping center design.” One journalist wrote that the approach to the main Hudson’s store “has a temple-like quality.” The main courtyard, in front of Hudson’s, was structured to hold such public events as concerts, dances, Easter parades, exhibits and even circuses, with elephants.
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Hardwick wrote that Gruen based Northland on a concept of a pre-automobile European city, creating a series of urban spaces of various sizes plus raised gardens, artwork and fountains that would reward wandering and exploring, exposing shoppers to “new experiences, new surprises.” Cost: $250 million in today’s dollars. Many of the stores competed with Hudson’s. He made space for nearly 100 stores and restaurants, with familiar names such as Hughes & Hatcher, Himelhochs and Winkelman’s. In planning his centers, Gruen sought to separate auto traffic from pedestrians and keep trucks away from both cars and people. The Korean War delayed Eastland, but before long, Gruen was mapping out Northland on 460 acres of farmland near 8 Mile and the Lodge Freeway, 10 miles from Hudson’s downtown store. “Webber emphasized that the center will in no way affect the downtown store,” the Free Press reported. Hudson's President Oscar Webber acknowledged the company’s decision had been affected by the push to suburbia, and he made a prediction that time would prove incorrect. “The biggest and best shopping center in the United States will be built by the J.L. The front page story in the Free Press did not mince words. Cost: More than $131 million, adjusted for inflation. Hudson’s hired him to design them.Įastland originally was scheduled to be first, and executives announced it in 1950: 100 stores in nine buildings dominated by a circular Hudson’s store with parking for 6,000 cars.
He called them Northland, Eastland, Southland and Westland. Gruen came back with the idea of building four centers filled with retail outlets that would be anchored by a large Hudson’s store. They decided to hire Gruen as a consultant with an assignment to scout out possible locations for exurban shopping centers that Hudson’s would control. While that advice went against their philosophy, executives listened. Upon his return to New York, Gruen wrote an unsolicited 10-page memo to the Hudson’s leadership, saying that while the store impressed him, its setting in the central business district was declining rapidly, “showing all the signs of deterioration which had started to appear in all American city cores.” He told the Hudson’s board that it should build branch stores in the suburbs. “Avenues of horror,” he called them, according to author Steven Johnson, “flanked by the greatest collection of vulgarity - billboards, motels, gas stations, shanties, car lots, miscellaneous industrial equipment, hot dog stands, wayside stores - ever collected by mankind.” An avant-garde intellectual, Gruen despised cars and the car culture of commercial streets such as 8 Mile, Telegraph and Livernois.