The rise and fall of Grande Boulevard Mall

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The story of Jacksonville’s Grande Boulevard Mall is one that can be described as a retail dream gone horribly wrong, and yet the end result achieved the original vision of Victor Gruen, the architect of the first modern mall.

In 1956, Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota, opened its doors as the first enclosed modern shopping mall in the United States. Designed by architect and urbanist Victor David Gruen, the enclosed mall concept was intended to serve as a centralized mixed-use epicenter of pedestrian scale activity for autocentric suburbia.

While the shopping mall concept was a success, the retail-only focus stimulated sprawl and sucked life out of central cities, leading to Gruen disavowing the concept altogether in the 1970s.

While Gruen refused to pay alimony to what the shopping mall had morphed into, Nathan Rosenfield had a vision for an enclosed mall of his own in Jacksonville. During the mid-1970s, the dream for Grande Boulevard Mall originated in the mid-1970s, with the chief executive of Jacobson's department store desiring to cash in on the maturation of the city’s Southside into a viable upscale suburban retail market.

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