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as busy pedestrian passageways connecting two busy public activity centers—piazzas. The center is adjacent to the city’s most active commercial and residential districts, and is anchored by a cathedral. Back when Italians attended mass far more regularly than they do today, the church acted as a “people pump” as potent as any major department store or rail station.
    Explore the streets of London today, and you’ll discover such thriving destinations as the Burlington Arcade, still delighting customers after more than two centuries in business. It was in fact an Englishman who brought the arcade to America. John Haviland, a British architect, designed the Philadelphia Arcade, which debuted in 1826. Additional multilevel, enclosed Haviland projects soon followed in Providence, New York, and Cleveland. Haviland died long before the introduction of Cinnabon or Victoria’s Secret, but he—far more than me or Victor Gruen—really deserves the credit and the sneers for malling our great nation.
    In fact, the earliest department stores were born as arcades. As individual retail tenants ran into financial difficulty, the landlord would take over the space to make sure all merchandise categories were represented sufficiently in his arcade. Over time, enough of the shops, or departments, came under the control of a single owner tomerit a single name or brand for the property. Historic department stores in Europe evolved in this way, offering customers the resulting advantages of consistent return policies, predictable hours of operation, and storewide promotions.
    Between the Civil War and the turn of the century, pioneering retailers in the United States like John Wanamaker in Philadelphia and Marshall Field in Chicago took advantage of the availability of machine-made goods and the dramatic growth of our cities to introduce their popular shopping emporiums. Isaac Merrit Singer’s sewing machine had made it possible to mass-produce garments and shoes with a consistency (and accuracy) of size and quality never before possible. In turn, the American department store offered customers some revolutionary innovations. Because there were no longer wide variations of color, quality, and fit inherent in unique hand-made goods, items could be offered to everyone at the same price. John Wanamaker called it his “one price for all” policy. Gone were the days of bartering and haggling between buyer and seller. Money-back guarantees were honored for the first time.
    Let’s not forget threshold resistance. Imagine how much more confidence a shopper would have in a store that posted the same prices for all customers and was willing to take a purchase back if everything was not just right. How comforting to know that a single known and respected proprietor stood behind every sale, and that if some kid sold you the wrong size pair of shoes, the store would give you another at no charge. Finally, consider today’s department stores, with their in-house boutiques and carefully delineated sectors. What are they if not vertical arcades?
    So in building new centers, I was standing on the shoulders of giants. Developers and merchants for centuries had been breaking down the barriers of threshold resistance. My experiences at Sims and in Ann Arbor were helpful, but I was convinced John Wanamaker had a few things to teach me as well. We wanted to build uponthe history of the arcade and tap into our nation’s economic and social momentum to create the most successful retail destinations ever developed.
    To find the answers, I looked to America’s downtowns. What were they doing right? What were they doing wrong? And how could we create the optimal retailing environment?

FIVE
Creating 100 Percent Locations
    I n the early 1960s, just as the first Taubman regional centers were coming on line in California, I spent some time with James Rouse at an industry conference. A mortgage broker turned urban