Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (67 page)

The Song:
“Love Is Strange” (1957)

The Artist:
Mickey & Sylvia

The Story:
In 1956 blues legend and early rock ’n’ roll influence Bo Diddley wrote this blues song about the intricacies and exasperation of being in love. He had to publish it under the name of Ethel Smith (his wife) because of a legal dispute with his record label, Chess Records. Diddley performed and recorded the song, and it was a minor success. But it didn’t register much with the public until it hit #11 as a cover by the married duo Mickey & Sylvia (Mickey Baker and Sylvia Vanderpool), who turned the song into a sexy, purring love duet. The most famous part, the call-and-response portion of Diddley’s song, became a spoken interlude between Mickey and Sylvia. (“How do you call your loverboy?” “I say, ‘Come here, loverboy.’”) The song has been used in a number of movies, including
Badlands, Deep Throat,
and
Dirty Dancing
. It was Mickey & Sylvia’s only major hit. Baker returned
to session guitar work—he’d played on dozens of classic rock ’n’ roll songs, including “Shake Rattle & Roll” and “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On.” Vanderpool went on to found Sugarhill Records, which released some of the first-ever rap singles in the ’80s, including “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang and “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

Between 1934 and 1955, there was not a single bank robbery in Hawaii.

The Song:
“Love Hurts” (1976)

The Artist:
Nazareth

The Story:
Boudleaux and Felice Bryant got their first big breaks as songwriters with a series of hits for the Everly Brothers in the early ’60s, including “Bye Bye Love” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” In 1960 Boudleaux wrote “Love Hurts,” a familiar “woe is me” country-music heartache song. It wasn’t a single or a hit, but it appeared on the Everly Brothers’ 1961 album
A Date With the Everly Brothers
. Musicians seemed to love it, though—Roy Orbison, Gram Parsons, and Emmylou Harris all recorded the song. The British hard-rock band Nazareth often played “Love Hurts” for fun during warm-ups and tunings. It was a joke…until they heard Harris’s version and thought it could be a hit for them. Nazareth recorded the song in 1974, and it became their only Top-10 hit in the United States.

The Song:
“Love is a Battlefield” (1983)

The Artist:
Pat Benatar

The Story:
Mike Chapman had been a top-level pop songwriter for years when rock superstar Pat Benatar called in 1982 and asked him to write a song for her. Chapman extended the offer to his protégé, Holly Knight. She played him a three-chord electric guitar riff she’d come up with; Chapman thought the riff was catchy and “very commercial,” but to “make it special,” he thought they should make the lyrics really weird. He came up with “Love Is a Battlefield,” comparing the uncertainty and risk of falling in love and being in love with being bombarded by bombs and bullets in war. They actually wrote it as a ballad, but Benatar sped it up to make it an up-tempo rock song. Appearing on her
Live from Earth
album, “Love is a Battlefield” peaked at #5 on the pop chart.

Famous foot fact: Dorothy’s ruby slippers were size 5 ½
.

The Song:
“Crazy in Love” (2003)

The Artist:
Beyoncé

The Story:
In the summer of 2002, Beyoncé starred in and recorded the theme song for
Austin Powers in Goldmember,
taking a two-pronged approach to the launch of her solo career after a decade in the R&B group Destiny’s Child. Her debut solo album,
Dangerously in Love,
was finished and set to be released in October 2002. But when “Hey Goldmember” bombed on the pop chart, and another member of Destiny’s Child, Kelly Rowland, scored a #1 hit with “Dilemma,” Columbia Records decided to delay the release of
Dangerously in Love
until 2003 in order to focus on Rowland’s success for a bit longer, and to give Beyoncé time to make sure she had a hit the next time. Seeking to add one more track to
Dangerously in Love,
Beyoncé asked R&B songwriter/producer Rich Harrison to pitch something. He played her a sample of the 1970 Chi-Lites song “Are You My Woman” and accompanied it on the bongos. Beyoncé liked the hook (Harrison had been holding on to it for months, in search of the right project) and asked him to write a song around it…and gave him only two hours to do it. He was up to the challenge. Remembering an offhand comment Beyoncé had made about her harried appearance that day—“I’m looking so crazy right now”—Harrison wrote “Crazy in Love” in less than two hours. Beyoncé recorded it that night (her boyfriend, Jay-Z, came in at 3:00 a.m. and improvised his rapped section) and took it to #1, where it stayed for seven weeks in the summer of 2003, successfully launching her solo career.

The Song:
“Love Story” (2008)

The Artist:
Taylor Swift

The Story: Swift was 19 when she wrote this song, in tandem with a later hit, “White Horse.” Both are about the same boyfriend, and each expresses a different side of young love—fairy tale romance…and disillusionment. Swift’s inspiration:
Romeo and Juliet
. Like the play, “Love Story” is about teenage lovers whose parents don’t approve, but her song doesn’t end with suicide—it ends with Romeo asking Juliet’s dad for her hand in marriage. “Love Story” was the first single from Swift’s second album
Fearless,
which propelled her from country star to pop superstar. The song hit #1 on the country, adult contemporary, and pop charts.

14th-century Chinese emperors used 2-foot-by-3-foot paper sheets as toilet paper.

A HISTORY OF THE
SHOPPING MALL, PART III

Tired of shopping at the mall? Try reading about one instead—it will forever change how you look at malls. (Part II of the story is on
page 230
.)

N
UMBER TWO

Southdale Center, the mall that Victor Gruen designed for Dayton’s department store in the town of Edina, Minnesota, outside of Minneapolis, was only his second shopping center. But it was the very first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall in history, and it had many of the features that are still found in modern malls today.

It was “anchored” by two major department stores, Dayton’s and Donaldson’s, which were located at opposite ends of the mall in order to generate foot traffic past the smaller shops in between.

Southdale also had a giant interior atrium called the “Garden Court of Perpetual Spring” in the center of the mall. The atrium was as long as a city block and had a soaring ceiling that was five stories tall at its highest point. Just as he had with the public spaces at Northland, Gruen intended the garden court to be a bustling space with an idealized downtown feel. He filled it with sculptures, murals, a newsstand, a tobacconist, and a Woolworth’s “sidewalk” café. Skylights in the ceiling of the atrium flooded the garden court with natural light; crisscrossing escalators and secondstory skybridges helped create an atmosphere of continuous movement while also attracting shoppers’ attention to the stores on the second level.

GARDEN VARIETY

The mall was climate controlled to keep it at a constant spring-like temperature (hence the “perpetual spring” theme) that would keep people shopping all year round. In the past shopping had always been a seasonal activity in harsh climates like Minnesota’s, where frigid winters could keep shoppers away from stores for months. Not so at Southdale, and Gruen emphasized
the point by filling the garden court with orchids and other tropical plants, a 42-foot-tall eucalyptus tree, a goldfish pond, and a giant aviary filled with exotic birds. Such things were rare sights indeed in icy Minnesota, and they gave people one more reason to go to the mall.

Only bone never reported broken in a ski accident: the
stapes,
found in the inner ear.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN

With 10 acres of shopping surrounded by 70 acres of parking, Southdale was a huge development in its day. Even so, it was intended as merely a retail hub for a much larger planned community, spread out over the 463-acre plot acquired by Dayton’s. Just as the Dayton’s and Donaldson’s department stores served as anchors for the Southdale mall, the mall itself would one day serve as the retail anchor for this much larger development, which as Gruen designed it, would include apartment buildings, single-family homes, schools, office buildings, a hospital, landscaped parks with walking paths, and a lake.

The development was Victor Gruen’s response to the ugly, chaotic suburban sprawl that he had detested since his first visit to Michigan back in 1948. He intended it as a brand-new downtown for the suburb, carefully designed to eliminate sprawl while also solving the problems that poor or nonexistent planning had brought to traditional urban centers like Minneapolis. Such places had evolved gradually and haphazardly over many generations instead of following a single, carefully thought-out master plan.

The idea was to build the Southdale Center mall first. Then, if it was a success, Dayton’s would use the profits to develop the rest of the 463 acres in accordance with Gruen’s plan. And Southdale was a success: Though Dayton’s downtown flagship store did lose some business to the mall when it opened in the fall of 1956, the company’s overall sales rose 60 percent, and the other stores in the mall also flourished.

But the profits generated by the mall were never used to bring the rest of Gruen’s plan to fruition. Ironically, it was the very success of the mall that doomed the rest of the plan.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

Back before the first malls had been built, Gruen and others had assumed that they would cause surrounding land values to drop, or
at least not rise very much, on the theory that commercial developers would shy away from building other stores close to such a formidable competitor as a thriving shopping mall. The economic might of the mall, they reasoned, would help to preserve nearby open spaces by making them unsuitable for further commercial development.

Billionaire Warren Buffett filed his first tax return, for a paper route, at age 13. (He claimed a $35 deduction for his bike.)

But the opposite turned out to be the case. Because shopping malls attracted so much traffic, it soon became clear that it made sense to build other developments nearby. Result: The once dirt-cheap real estate around Southdale began to climb rapidly in value. As it did, Dayton’s executives realized they could make a lot of money selling off their remaining parcels of land—much more quickly, with much less risk—than they could by gradually implementing Gruen’s master plan over many years.

From the beginning Gruen had seen the mall as a solution to sprawl, something that would preserve open spaces, not destroy them. But his “solution” had only made the problem worse—malls turned out to be sprawl
magnets,
not sprawl killers. Any remaining doubts Gruen had were dispelled in the mid-1960s when he made his first visit to Northland Center since its opening a decade earlier. He was stunned by the number of seedy strip malls and other commercial developments that had grown up right around it.

REVERSAL OF FORTUNE

Victor Gruen, the father of the shopping mall, became one of its most outspoken critics. He tried to remake himself as an urban planner, marketing his services to American cities that wanted to make their downtown areas more mall-like, in order to recapture some of the business lost to malls. He drew up massive, ambitious, and
very
costly plans for remaking Fort Worth, Rochester, Manhattan, Kalamazoo, and even the Iranian capital city of Tehran. Most of his plans called for banning cars from city centers, confining them to ring roads and giant parking structures circling downtown. Unused roadways and parking spaces in the center would then be redeveloped into parks, walkways, outdoor cafés, and other uses. It’s doubtful that any of these pie-in-the-sky projects were ever really politically or financially viable, and none of them made it off the drawing board.

HOMECOMING

In 1968 Gruen closed his architectural practice and moved back to Vienna…where he discovered that the once thriving downtown shops and cafés, which had inspired him to invent the shopping mall in the first place, were now themselves threatened by a new shopping mall that had opened outside the city.

He spent the remaining years of his life writing articles and giving speeches condemning shopping malls as “gigantic shopping machines” and ugly “land-wasting seas of parking.” He attacked developers for shrinking the public, non-profit-generating spaces to a bare minimum. “I refuse to pay alimony for these bastard developments,” Gruen told a London audience in 1978, in a speech titled “The Sad Story of Shopping Centers.”

Gruen called on the public to oppose the construction of new malls in their communities, but his efforts were largely in vain. At the time of his death in 1980, the United States was in the middle of a 20-year building boom that would see more than 1,000 shopping malls added to the American landscape. And were they ever popular: According to a survey by
U.S. News and World Report,
by the early 1970s, Americans spent more time at the mall than anyplace else except for home and work.

VICTOR WHO?

Today Victor Gruen is largely a forgotten man, known primarily to architectural historians (and now bathroom readers). That may not be such a bad thing, considering how much he came to despise the creation that gives him his claim to fame.