by Joel Garreau
What it turned out to be, of course, was a 900,000-square-foot mall.
Susan Gruel grins broadly when asked if there was an epiphany in the late 1960s, a moment of truth when the people of Bridgewater rose as one and marched on the town council, carrying torches that flickered on their faces as they swayed in the moonlight, chanting, “Mall! Mall! Mall!”
Well … Gruel was chairman of the local redevelopment agency in the mid-1980s, when the final contract for the mall was signed. She now smiles. No, it was not like that. But, she cheerfully admits, the whole thing did seem “peculiar” at times, even to her. Peculiar or not, the people of 287 and 78 went from dreaming about Boston Common to building Bridgewater Commons. The process by which this came about demonstrates how, in this country, we constantly reinvent ourselves by the choices that we make.
Political authorities have called cities of governance into being—Washington and Ottawa, for example—for centuries. Granada and Madrid were primarily governmental cities, as were Paris and London. Bridgewater Commons is in the same tradition as Brasilia.
Bridgewater Commons was also a reaction to the mistakes of the past. It was created by people who had seen the land around them burned in ways they vowed would never be repeated.
The first mistake they rued was in the earliest days of suburbanization. The land in the middle of the township was carved up for country getaways into lots so tiny as to be almost unbuildable. Over the generations, these phantom streets and weed-filled lots became legally choked on ownership mysteries. So the site slept despite becoming a Golden Triangle location in the eyes of the real estate industry: it was served, not to mention landlocked, by three major roads—Routes 22, 202–206, and I-287.
It was the late 1960s when a new horror loomed. A developer scraped together just enough land on the Route 22 side to demand the right to build the one thing the locals loathed even more than the weeds—a strip shopping center. “We just did not want another strip development nightmare, what we had seen east of us,” remembers Al Griffith, who was mayor in the mid-1970s when the winning proposal for Bridgewater Commons was picked. “It was ugly. And we didn’t want this to be a honky-tonk town. We even had an ordinance that you could not have flashing lights on stores.”
So to allow something serious to be created, the citizens of Bridgewater up and condemned all the land, as if it were an inner-city slum, taking ownership onto their government. They created the first area in New Jersey with no history of being urban—or even much occupied—to be declared legally blighted. They then advertised in the Wall Street Journal, seeking large-scale proposals from redevelopers. They got thirty-seven.
Another reaction to the evils of the day that created Bridgewater Commons was that Bridgewater Township was less a township by any practical standard than a centerless thirty-three-square-mile legal fiction of disconnected neighborhoods. Mayor Griffith had to battle personally for Bridgewater Township to get its own Zip Code. But Bridgewater did not want a traditional downtown either. Although everybody realized that “a town center has a retail component,” says Griffith, “the downtowns were not in the best of health. Sure it was a consideration—all the problems. Plus lack of parking, lack of coordination. If you allowed people to put up individual stores, we wouldn’t have been able to get them to put forth the money to do the absolutely essential road improvements.”
Traffic lights were the reason road improvements were essential. Traffic lights were abhorred. If this town center was going to have one thing, it was going to have overpasses. “We realized that there was a tremendous cost involved, even without the Commons. The state did not have the resources to do the job. So we realized that you would have to get the funds from a developer. To make it attractive for a developer, it had to be one piece. You would never be able to get it from individuals if you sold it off in pieces”—like an old downtown.
At the same time, by the mid-1970s a strong environmental movement had grown up in Bridgewater. Again, that was a reaction. Developers building residential subdivisions on the sides of the Watchung Mountains had caused serious erosion and drainage damage at tremendous costs to both homeowners and the township. In fact, Griffith originally got into politics to fight the flooding of his neighborhood’s homes. Ultimately the politics of Bridgewater turned on which candidate could out-environment the other. The result was a demand for greenery in the new town center—for trees, for parks, for berms to hide the traffic and the buildings. The Rouse Corporation, which has a reputation for being a class act, had a plan for the Golden Triangle that, whatever its virtues, was deemed to cover the area with too much asphalt. It was rejected. “People running our town were very sensitive to keeping the town a quality town, which meant a lot of greenspace, environmental sensitivity,” said Griffith.
But there was one thing worse than parking lots—and that was anything that smacked of traditional urbanism. The Taubman Company, another quality developer, came up with a plan to maximize the greenery in the Golden Triangle by concentrating a hotel, conference, and retail center into an enormous structure fourteen or fifteen stories high. That too was rejected. “We were not happy with tall buildings,” Griffith recalls. “It reminded us of cities.”
So, by a process of elimination that took more than a decade of dickering and contract renegotiations and lawsuits and elections, what resulted was the Bridgewater Commons that rises today—a mall with a Sheraton and two huge office towers surrounded by $23 million worth of road work paid for by the developer.
The mall’s a doozy. The first floor (The Commons Collection) caters to the affluent with Brooks Brothers, Laura Ashley, Go-diva, and major-league indoor trees. The third floor, by contrast (Campus), is neon “under-twenty-five” heaven. It has an enormous Sam Goody’s record store, a store that sells nothing but sunglasses, a store that sells nothing but artifacts from cartoons, a seven-screen theater open until 1 A.M., and a sixteen-restaurant food court called Picnic on the Green. (You want village green? You got it. Squint a little. This is what it looks like in the late twentieth century.) I made the mistake of wanting to use the pay phones on this floor. Forget it. They are tied up by teenagers. For the rest of time.
In the great—appropriately enough—middle of this three-level mall is the “home and family” floor (the Promenade), which includes two quiet, grown-up, sit-down restaurants, one with a liquor license. They even attract a business-lunch crowd. Thanks to the people of Bridgewater, who cared about things like this a lot, the restaurants actually have windows and the windows offer a view: the county’s Watchung Mountains.
Around this complex, in classic Edge City fashion, more hotels and office complexes are growing. But what is far more unusual, the people of Bridgewater have clustered their political and public institutions here, too. Their City Hall is across the road, as are their playing fields, lighted for night games, their housing for the elderly, their library, their low-cost housing, their vocational education center, their mental health facility, their Martin Luther King, Jr., social center for the disadvantaged, their schools, their courts, their highway maintenance yards, their animal shelter, their state police, their local police. The community rooms, where the Boy Scouts meet, are in the mall, facing the parking deck. And yes, there is greenery. A stream still flows through the middle of the property. It is called Mac’s Brook. Nobody remembers who Mac was. And it is indeed a brook, not a mighty torrent. But it flows with the blood of citizens who fought to make sure it was not covered by parking lot. Says Griffith, “I am not a big mall person. I go out there four or five times a year.” But his daughter loves it, so “my daughter and I have a tradition—she’s a sophomore in college now—where we go out there at Christmas. To buy something for my wife. The development has gone better than I thought it would. I feel very good about it.”
At that, Griffith has really put his finger on something. Even the former elected official recognizes that whatever the public and political functions of 287 and 78, they are at best ancillary to
the identity of the place. For all its groundbreaking politics, 287 and 78 still has no overall leader, no political boundaries that define the place. It is governed only by a patchwork of zoning boards and planning boards and county boards and township boards like Bridgewater’s, swirling like gnats—not any elected ruling structure.
Of course, this has not always been bad for cities. For thousands of years, Babylonia was ruled by a Council of the Gods—what Americans would call an Establishment. Perhaps as Edge Cities age and mellow, they will push for formal incorporation to gain powers and perks and titles like Lord High Mayor.
But right now, as Griffith’s new Christmas tradition with his daughter indicates, what really shapes the Edge City of 287 and 78 is the historical force of commerce more than governance. After all, Bridgewater Commons is a mall. Not that that is any disgrace. Venice, Milan, and Marseille all originally were monuments far more to commerce than to industry. No less an authority than Jane Jacobs, in her landmark work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, notes how commerce is the measure of urbanity: “Diversity is natural to big cities. Classified telephone directories tell us the greatest single fact about cities: the great number of parts.”
In fact, if you have any doubts that commerce is a definer of “city,” I commend to your attention the retail establishments in the next several hundred miles west of 287 and 78. “There really is no fashion whatsoever from here to Pittsburgh,” says David Richmond, Bridgewater Commons’ general manager. “I’m not kidding. Lord & Taylor basically has a free swing. People drive tremendous distances. We pull from three states.” Nor is this attraction the only source of diversity. The carts set up at the center of the mall are the incubators of the shops of the future, Richmond hopes. Local one-of-a-kind operators sell clever toy blocks in fantastic shapes or hand-made fashions crafted from old tapestry. If they succeed, these entrepreneurs will graduate to renting serious boutique space, Richmond figures. If they go national someday, he knew them when.
For that matter, the most discussed harbinger of civilization when I was in 287 and 78 was the expansion of the King’s supermarket chain. If you faxed in your order, the groceries would be waiting for you when you arrived. Its fresh prepared foods were so oriented to the two-career couple that one working woman said with a sigh, “I live there.” Most important, the gourmet delicatessen and bakery spread was shockingly close to ethnic-neighborhood quality. (The bagels and lox were “as good as New York—as good as Zabar’s,” claimed one devotee, not entirely hyperbolically.) One February at a King’s at the foot of the ramps to 287 and 78 I encountered soft, fragrant strawberries near a substantial display of crème frâiche. You don’t see a lot of crème frâiche in Harrisburg or Altoona. Or, for that matter, in Pittsburgh.
More interesting than the actual commerce that occurs in Edge City is the way its institutions shape our lives. Take the city-shaping category “safety.”
For all its newness, Edge City is in some ways more faithful to city traditions than the old downtown. Believe it or not, one of the founding premises of cities—from the beginning of fixed settlements eight thousand years ago—was that you were safer inside one than out. First, people clustered around leaders with a successful track record against wolves, alligators, and big cats. “The archetypal chieftain in Sumerian legend is Gilgamesh: the heroic hunter, the strong protector, not least significantly, the builder of the wall around Uruk,” writes Lewis Mumford in The City in History. Those evolved into the medieval walls of Vienna, raised against the Turks, as well as walled cities from Avignon to Fez. Walled cities with gates that closed at night existed in China in this century. In America, the walled city was immortalized by frontier stockades like Fort Laramie, Wyoming.
Edge City functions very similarly. “The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers,” writes Jane Jacobs, stressing the importance of safety in her very first chapter. For better or for worse, there is not an endless number of such places today in America. Two that come to mind are our sports stadiums and Edge City’s village square—the enclosed shopping mall.
Actually, William Jackson is not so sure about the sports stadiums. “Only when they’re winning,” he says, thinking of the last time he was at a Giants game at the Meadowlands. “And only when you’re in the stadium.” Jackson is the senior project manager of 287 and 78’s Bridgewater Commons, the man who oversaw its design and construction. “I’ve walked from the parking lot to the stadium and not felt safe at all. When you walk across the turnpike, there’s a very narrow crossover bridge. It’s like when you get off the subway in New York and all of a sudden everybody’s on the staircase. You don’t know who’s behind you and who’s beside you and what he’s going to pull out of your pocket and what he’s going to pull out of his pocket. You just kind of go with the flow and hope that nothing happens.”
Jackson’s professional analysis is germane because state-of-the-art Edge City design pays overwhelming homage to one principle: making women—specifically women—feel safe. In fact, that concern has evolved beyond “safe” and into the art and science of “comfortable,” and how people can be made to feel that.
That it works at a place like Bridgewater Commons is unquestionable. Women don’t wear their purses in the cross-chest, football-carry, urban-guerrilla mode unless they’re doing it for fashion reasons. That’s downtown behavior. One crowded Sunday afternoon, toddlers could be seen straggling from their parents much farther than would be comfortable even outdoors in a park, much less a supermarket.
This is not for lack of crime. Shoplifting is always an issue, and some of the mall rats without question deal drugs. One mother recently reported a pair of people at Bridgewater Commons attempting, unsuccessfully, to snatch her stroller with her child and her purse still in it. However, this foiled attempt was viewed as sufficiently unusual to merit major newspaper attention. In such places, there is generally not much violence. Nine million people a year come through the doors of Bridgewater Commons. In the first two years of its existence, the number of assaults reported to the police was two.
This is because Edge Cities have privatized the domains in which large numbers of strangers come together. Edge Cities grew up in the midst of what originally had been residential suburbia. No matter how heterogeneous the population is becoming, the values of the territory’s settlers survive. Sociologists who lamented the flight to suburbia claimed the middle class had abandoned the concept of city. They were wrong. The middle class simply built a new kind of city that functions in a Spanish style. It brought its quasi-public spaces in behind high walls, into the atria, open to the sun streaming through the skylights of the courtyards. There, patrol and control can operate at a high level.
“It’s pretty hard to walk on my property without seeing some sort of highly visible security,” says Jackson. Guards wear uniforms that look like those of the Marines. “I don’t want them to be shy and subtle. I want them to be very overt.” The gumball-machine lights on the patrol trucks go on at the drop of a lug nut. Even if these paladins are only helping somebody change a flat tire, they do it with stark orange flashers. A local Explorer Scout unit occasionally scans the place from the roof with binoculars. At Christmas, the mall is patrolled on horseback. That’s good community relations: the horse is a former member of the Philadelphia Police Department owned by the local animal-control officer who likes to keep his mount’s skills sharp by working him amid people and cars. It’s also beautiful public relations: children want to pet the horse. The horse patrol has tremendous visibility: the officer sits up so high that he can see and be seen for great distances. The pair can cruise real slow if that seems right. And they are intimidating—it’s a big horse.
“You’re in a toughie situation,” say Jackson. “We’re not police and we’ll never usurp the police power.” But Jackson gladly does everything he can to blur the line. He wants the township’s police to have
“a knowledge of the center that is very intimate.” The chief of police is encouraged to lunch in the food court. The patrol officers are encouraged to park their cruisers in the deck, get out, and walk around. Even the normally desk-bound dispatchers are wooed with awards plaques and private tours. “There’s definitely a symbiotic relationship. The police have a substation here. In the mall, sure. I’m trying to encourage that coordination to the nth degree. We have a police liaison who just happens to be the juvenile officer for the high schools and the township. Most high school kids, they’re very good and well behaved. You will only have a small segment with problems. We recognize them by sight and we ban them. We are private property. Arrest them for trespass and ban them.
“Kids on average will have in their pockets $25 apiece when they walk in the door. We know that. When they leave they are much better than their parents because they leave almost to the penny with nothing. When you stop and think about it, that is very strong economics. You don’t want to just arbitrarily throw them out. But being private property, that does give me a lot of rights. High-spirited youth can be escorted off. Quietly, subtly, but out of the picture.”
“Sharper Image controls who they let in their store,” Richmond picks up. “They have somebody watching who’s coming in. Sometimes they have a greeter at the door say ‘There’s a limit. You can’t go in until somebody leaves because there’s too many people in there.’ Kids get bored and leave. It’s their sales philosophy—they want their salespeople to be able to meet, greet, and sell. And they’re looking for shoplifters.”