Monday, September 04, 2017

CedaRound: Westdale's Brutalist Past

When Cedar Rapids' Westdale Mall was built out in the middle of nowhere, Iowa, right before Christmas of 1979, I thought it was so far away from us it might as well have been next to my grandma's house in Denver. We already had Lindale Mall with its mirror-clad sunken food court right in the middle of the main concourse between its two anchor stores -- Younkers and Sears, which gave us a nice, simple spectrum of shopping in one straight line -- so what on earth could Westdale Mall have that could make this city any better? Nothing, that's what.

Plus it was HUGE. So huge it was disorienting from the outside. It was laid out in a giant cross with four -- FOUR! -- anchor stores on two floors with sloped landscaping on the outside so in some places you actually entered on the second floor. Cra! Zy!

Plus it was inescapably ugly -- even to my 11-year-old eyes. I didn't yet know anything about architectural styles or aesthetics or the way buildings and public spaces should behave on a human scale, but I recognized right away that Westdale Mall was essentially a massive concrete scab at the edge of the city ... an unimaginative jumble of angles and exposed building materials and raw, unpainted textures surrounded by an uneven sea of yellow lines on cracking asphalt. It was cheap, lazy architecture that only furthered my disinterest in traveling clear across town to shop in it:
Of course, it didn't take long for me to discover that Westdale Mall was home to Chess King and The Gap -- which, in my little inchoate gay mind were equal wonderlands of fashion discovery -- so I eventually got over my architectural snobbery and ended up spending all my paper route money at our big new concrete mall building a wardrobe of considerably wide-ranging ... um ... taste.

One of the anchor stores there was Petersen Harned Von Maur, an ultra-high-end -- it had a live piano player! -- department store with a European-or-for-all-we-knew-Caribbean-sounding name that was so exotic to Cedar Rapids that I, as a one-teen representative of Cedar Rapids' entire shopping demographic, barely felt worthy to shop there. Not that I could even afford the stuff on their sale racks.

Fast forward to now. I'm an adult with an enthusiastic passion for architecture with a lifelong career in retail and consumer marketing. The mighty mall -- once the promised land of retail shopping across America -- is with few exceptions dead. And Westdale Mall -- with the exception of three of its four anchor stores -- has been demolished. Those anchor stores are now free-standing buildings, and the rest of the entire concrete-scab-on-a-cracked-asphalt-wasteland is quickly emerging from its ashes into a mixed-use shopping complex filled with tons of pre-fab chain stores and fast-food restaurants -- which is unavoidable for survival -- but also small clusters of stores and sloping landscaping styled inventively with referential, lightly thematic architecture ... and now a boutique-concept hotel is going up and many of undeveloped lots are starting to be graded and plotted. Westdale -- now it's just Westdale -- is reinventing itself with robust enthusiasm, and I see something new and frankly exciting every morning when I drive by it on my way to work.

I now recognize that the exposed building materials, corrugated concrete exteriors and egalitarian lack of adornment of the original Westdale Mall were perhaps just the last gasps of the easy-to-build-but-past-the-point-of-extinction Brutalist architectural period, which had merged the efficiencies of post-war pre-fab construction with the ideals of creating serious, durable architecture free from adornments that could potentially fall out of style or alienate certain classes of people.

And as for those anchor stores: Montgomery Ward has been torn down. Younkers and JCPenney have been handsomely re-clad and are operating as giant -- and hopefully successful -- stand-alone stores with a new anchoring purpose. And Petersen Harned Von Maur -- that intimidatingly fancy-pantsy department store with the pan-European name (Wikipedia tells me it's German and Austrian) and its live piano player -- is as we speak getting a new paint job to gussy up its corrugated-concrete backside (which you can see on the left of this photo) and a bricked, corniced façade on its front (which you can begin to see on the right) to transform itself into a not-so-intimidatingly-fancy-pantsy Ross Dress for Less.

And I feel no snobbery about any of it.
 

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