Suburbia: Movies on the Mall

The day may soon be at hand when a shopping center in some sub-suburban location will incorporate itself, elect a mayor, and become a city on its own. The ingredients are all there—stores, restaurants, banks, a post office (one center outside Manhattan has its own hospital). And it would be only logical. For the shopping center is the first and only urban unit to be devised specifically and exclusively to accommodate that bugaboo of older cities, the automobile.

Scrunch, Twang. Already the shopping center has begun to replace the courthouse square as the center of the community’s cultural and recreational life. In many a new suburban center, auto-borne families are taking advantage of a busy schedule of attractions—pop concerts on the mall, choral recitals and amateur plays in a center-provided auditorium. The rattle of bowling pins is accompanied by the scrunch of ice skates, the twang of archers’ bows. There are fashion shows, cooking schools, art shows, and folk-dancing classes. Now the movie theater operators, who have been shuttering one downtown palace after another, have latched on to the shopping center as the place where the people are (or can get to).

Of 183 new hard-tops (the industry term for indoor, non-drive-in theaters) built in the past two years, approximately 65 are located in shopping centers, and another 50 will probably be in operation by early 1963. General Drive-In Corp. of Boston, which helped launch the boom in drive-ins after World War II, began switching to shopping-center hard-tops when it opened one of the first in 1951 at the Framingham, Mass., Shoppers’ World. It now has ten shopping-center houses flourishing from Florida to Massachusetts, and 20 more under construction or on the board, and has not built a drive-in theater in more than seven years.

Cry, Dry. With typical enterprise, one shopping-center theater has encouraged car-borne family attendance by installing a 40-seat, glass-enclosed “cry room” for mothers with fractious children. And as a daytime lure, the $1,000,000 Golf Mill Theater in Niles. Ill., invites housewives to bring their dirty laundry to the movies with them and drop it off at the box office. The wash is whisked to a nearby automatic laundry, and when the women leave the theater, their clean clothes are waiting for them, dry and neatly packaged. In fact, the shopping-center theater has revived the old habit of family movie night. It is not uncommon to see whole groups of parents and children arrive at the shopping center as soon as Daddy gets home from work, to buy shoes, browse for books, check on coming cultural attractions, eat dinner—and go to the movies.