Anchors of Civic Life?
Shopping Centers Not All They Could Have been

The regional shopping mall is so much a part of modern American culture it is easy enough to forget how much more was expected of it with its introduction in the 1950s than simply being an “engine of commerce.” Taken together with David Sullivan’s entry on department stores, Matthew Smalarz’s essay on shopping centers suggests some of what has been lost in the geographic shift of retail activity over the past half century.

Regional shopping centers cropped up precisely at that point when the dispersion of metropolitan population introduced the phenomenon of suburban sprawl. The idealists behind the regional centers hoped their structures would help anchor new communities and give shape to ex-urban land use. As a writer for the Department Store Economist proclaimed in1954, “…no construction is more dynamic than the shopping center or as likely to influence a reform of the usual urban and suburban hodgepodge….A new generation of department store men and women…are showing the same high responsibility to the communities that their grandfathers showed when they helped to create the great downtowns which we know today in hundreds of cities.”  

In their early days, suburban malls hosted fashion shows, opportunities for children’s play, high school proms, and even classical music concerts. If food courts lacked the grandeur of the tea rooms that female shoppers once gathered in downtown department stores, they nonetheless offered opportunities for sociability among women beyond the privacy of their homes, where so much of their attention was otherwise directed if they did not hold down fulltime jobs. For years the Cherry Hill Mall in New Jersey served as the gathering point for a number of former Camden residents whose dispersion outside the city in the 1950s and 1960s left them hungry for familiar faces and an opportunity to reminisce about their former lives.

Over time, these facilities became increasingly privatized, as community-oriented events aimed at generating a sense of loyalty to place as well as the crowds to animate them gave way to simply enticing paying customers. Shortly after her important book, A Consumer’s Republic appeared in 2003, I invited author and Harvard University professor Lizabeth Cohen to do a talk and sought to locate it in the courtyard of the Cherry Hill Mall, which received a good deal of attention in her book.The managers of the property said she could do so, but only after paying a $5,000 fee to gain access to the mall’s customers. As an alternative, they suggested the mall’s only bookstore, which we rejected after the manager failed to recognize the name of the publisher: Knopf.

Garden State entraceThe great irony of the commercial redevelopment of the Garden State Race Track nearby was the argument that it would fulfill Cherry Hill’s need for a town center. Apparently no one remembered, let alone imagined the mall once had been touted for serving just that function. As the site developed into an amalgam of different pods—for big box stores and clusters of housing—it served less of a model of “new urbanism” and more of an illustration of the basic problem critics point to in suburbs: physically induced social isolation.

Given the chance to create better communities on relatively open land in suburbs in place of urban centers that had evolved over time, developers fell well short of creating communities that integrated effectively the needs that enable thriving communities. We all have our favorite shopping destinations, but it’s hard to think of them today as the civic investments they were originally intended to be.

Art Museum Joins Civic Advisory Board

We are pleased to welcome the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Encyclopedia’s Civic Advisory Board.  Staff members from the Museum’s Center for American Art participated in the Civic Partnership and Planning Workshop that launched the project, and we look forward to working with them next year on a public program to explore Philadelphia’s reputation as “Athens of America.” 

Bibliographic Survey Expanded

Our survey of recently published works about Philadelphia now covers books, articles, and dissertations since 1982. To find the most up-to-date research on numerous topics, link to the survey on our Bibliographic Survey page.

Bibliographic Survey Expanded

Looking for the latest word on Philadelphia?  We are pleased to offer a newly expanded bibliographic survey of scholarship, public history work, and public policy studies about Philadelphia published since 1982.  The survey is approximately one-third larger than the previous survey, with a significant expansion in entries related to public policy as well as updated coverage of scholarship published during 2009 and early 2010.  Our thanks to bibliographer Hillary S. Kativa for her work on the survey and to the University of Pennsylvania Press for making this project possible.

Call for Authors: 2016-17

The editors of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia seek to make 50 additional assignments to complete our current phase of expansion. Now is the time to add your expertise to a resource used daily by teachers and students, journalists, scholars, and general readers.

To view the list of available assignments, link here:

Call for authors

To join more than 350 leading and emerging scholars who have already contributed to this peer-reviewed, digital-first project, let us know your choice of topics. Authors will have the opportunity to select feasible deadlines between January and March 2017 and will have the option of volunteering or receiving modest stipends. Prospective authors must have expertise in their chosen subjects demonstrated by previous publications and/or advanced training in historical research. To express interest, please send an email describing your qualifications and specifying topics of interest to the editor-in-chief, Charlene Mires, cmires@camden.rutgers.edu. No attachments, please. Graduate students, please include the name and email address of an academic reference.

The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia’s expansion is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mayor’s Fund for Philadelphia, and Poor Richard’s Charitable Trust. The scope of the project includes the city of Philadelphia and the surrounding region of southeastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey, and northern Delaware. 

Guidelines for writers:
https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/about/guidelines-for-writers/

Roster of authors:
https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/category/authors/

Editors and staff:
https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/about/editors/

Call for Contributors: Summer 2014

The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia seeks authors for its next phase of expansion. A wide range of topics is available, including subtopics related to communications, transportation, business and industry, the built environment, civil rights, literary works, holiday traditions, and key events in the region’s history. The scope of the project includes the city of Philadelphia and the surrounding region of southeastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey, and northern Delaware.

Prospective authors must have expertise in their chosen subjects demonstrated by previous publications and/or advanced training in historical research. Authors will have the option of volunteering or receiving modest stipends, and all submissions will be peer-reviewed. Deadlines will be set in consultation with authors; it is expected that most will range from end of summer to the end of 2014. To express interest, please send an email describing your qualifications and specifying topics of interest to the editor-in-chief, Charlene Mires, cmires@camden.rutgers.edu. No attachments, please. Graduate students, please include the name and email address of an academic reference.

Guidelines for writers are available online:

https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/about/guidelines-for-writers/


(Readers on the Encyclopedia blog, click here to see the list of topics.)

  Continue reading “Call for Contributors: Summer 2014”

Call for Proposals: Community Voices Gallery

Building on the widespread interest in our recent “City of Neighborhoods, City of Homes” program at the Philadelphia History Museum, we’re pleased to call the following opportunity to your attention: 

The Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent has reopened with a new exhibition concept, a community history gallery featuring exhibitions designed and curated by neighborhood organizations about the work they do and the contributions they have made to the fabric of life in the city. One goal of this new exhibition gallery concept is to give Philadelphians an active voice in presenting the city’s history based upon historical, social, cultural, intellectual, or political concepts. The Philadelphia Voices Gallery will present three compelling exhibitions each year that give voice to the ways that Philadelphia’s community and neighborhood based organizations address issues including hunger, violence, homelessness, discrimination, housing, education, immigration, health, environment, and work.

For information on how to participate in this exciting opportunity, visit this web page:
http://www.philadelphiahistory.org/communityhistorygallery

Call for Volunteer Authors – Summer 2012

Help us grow! During the summer of 2012, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia seeks volunteer authors to contribute essays related to the themes of City of Neighborhoods, the Cradle of Liberty, and the Workshop of the World. Prospective authors must have expertise in their chosen subjects demonstrated by previous publications and/or advanced training in historical research.  For further information, visit our list of available topics.

Call for Volunteer Authors, Spring-Summer 2013

We are grateful to all of our volunteer authors and editors who are making The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia possible.  Every day we receive hundreds of page views from information seekers, including teachers, students, and interested readers not just locally but also across the country and around the world.  Our authors include the most prominent historians of Philadelphia as well as young scholars making their marks with new research and other subject experts.

For our next expansion, we seek volunteer authors to contribute essays related to the built and natural environment and regional events and traditions.  We also seek volunteer authors to write about counties in the region, and some topics remain available to continue expansion of the themes of City of Neighborhoods, the Cradle of Liberty, and the Workshop of the World.  For more information and to see a list of available topics, click here.

Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy