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decision makers, and Sunvalley—with a beautiful 200,000-square-foot Macy’s exceeding all sales expectations—debuted in 1967 as “the world’s largest air-conditioned shopping center.”
    Although he didn’t say anything at the time, I think as we cut the ribbon at Sunvalley’s grand opening Jim must have been thinking: “This better work, kid. It’s my ass if it doesn’t.” Soon after, Macy’s hired Jim and made him the head of its real estate department, where he enjoyed a very successful career as one of the industry’s most respected executives.
    The greater Bay Area turned out to be very fertile ground for the Taubman Company. In rapid succession, we built three centers there in the 1960s. The third, Eastridge, was built near San Jose, which between 1960 and 1967 saw its population soar by nearly 50 percent, making it the second-fastest-growing large metropolitan area in the country. Built on the former Hillview Golf Course, Eastridge was a 1.5-million-square-foot center with 150 stores, anchored by a large Sears, JCPenney, and May.
    We took the lessons we were learning in California and applied them closer to home. In effect, we realized that by building large centers, we were essentially creating new commercial downtowns under a single roof. In 1968, we opened the Woodland Mall in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In its first full year in operation, the seventy-store mall captured 25 percent of total general merchandise sales in the Grand Rapids market.
    Reimagining the size of the prospective customer base, the scale of malls, and the footprints they could occupy was an important first step in building successful, lasting retail operations. It took a lot of self-confidence and a willingness to peer deep into the future to envision the viability of our projects. To a large degree, the centers we built in the 1960s and early 1970s were bets on the construction of new highways and subdivisions. Using rental cars and gas station maps, I got very good at explaining the impact of future highways on retail locations. One adventure I remember all too well took place in the suburbs of Chicago when we were planning the development of the Woodfield mall in Schaumburg, Illinois. We were planning tospend $90 million to build a 2 million-square-foot mall in a community whose population numbered about 18,000, which required a huge leap of faith by all parties involved.
    Taking a break from an industry conference in Chicago, I convinced a car full of bankers from the Chase Manhattan Bank (they had already lent us the money to buy the land) to join me for a quick drive out to the site, about twenty miles northwest of the Loop. Construction was just getting under way on the extension of Interstate 90 west of O’Hare Airport, and Woodfield was to be built on farmland right off a future exit.
    I headed past the airport along small country roads, and we passed farm after farm. One looked just like the other. Hopelessly lost, I sped past a farm I thought I recognized. Waving my arm out the car window, I confidently exclaimed, “That’s it!” I think the bankers knew I had no idea where we were. But they couldn’t miss the signs of growth all around us. And lost or not, it was easy to grasp how Interstate 90 would dramatically shrink drive times for the families moving out to Chicago’s booming northwest suburbs. An outstanding retail market was forming right before our eyes. When Woodfield opened in 1971, it was the largest enclosed mall in the country.
    But situating the center in the big, macroeconomic picture was only the first step. Our centers stood out because of what happened inside their walls and in their immediate surroundings. From the outset, I believed that building shopping centers wasn’t a real estate or a development business; it was a retail business. Shopping centers were department stores of stores, and we were the merchandisers. Understanding