The Mall That Was Supposed to Be a Town

Gruen, Merton, and a Third Way Between Socialism and Capitalism Using See-Judge-Act

An October Morning in Edina

On 8 October 1956, crowds flocked to a Minneapolis suburb to witness a marvel: Southdale Center, the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall. Step inside, and it was always a perfect seventy-two degrees, unaffected by the wildest Minnesota weather. Beneath a soaring skylight, visitors sauntered through a lush garden court abounding in exotic birds, a goldfish pond, sculptures, and a group of songbirds in a grand cage. The press called it a wonder, and for many, it truly was.

Victor Gruen, the architect behind Southdale, was a Viennese Jew and devoted socialist who fled the Anschluss in 1938 with only eight dollars and his architecture degree, or so he liked to say. Gruen never intended to invent the shopping mall. He dreamed of building the heart of a town that did not yet exist.

In 1952, Gruen unveiled a sweeping vision for 484 acres. Just 84 were reserved for shops; the rest would have developed into apartments, homes, schools, a medical center, a park, and a lake. The enclosed court at the center was never meant to steal the show. It was designed as a piazza, a welcoming public square where neighbors would cross paths as naturally as breathing. Gruen wanted to give suburban America the vibrant center he remembered from Europe's cities.

But Gruen’s vision never came to life. As Southdale rose from the ground, the Dayton Company sold off the surrounding land to outside developers. The promised park and lake vanished, replaced by rows of tract houses. Only the lucrative 84 acres of retail were built, a blueprint that would be cloned across America, each time encircled by endless parking lots.

Gruen watched this for two decades. In a 1978 speech in London, he finally said it out loud:

I want to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.~ Victor Gruen, London, 1978

Here is the heart of the matter. The market didn't turn down Gruen’s dream; it embraced the profitable pieces and left the rest behind. No one stood up to oppose the park or claimed the schools were foolish. Shared spaces just had no way to pay their own way, so they faded before they began. Southdale is not only a tale of greed. It reveals what happens when a system perfects only what it can count, with no higher purpose to steer it.

Two years later and four hundred miles south, a Trappist monk stood on a Louisville street corner. He gazed at the same kind of busy crowd Gruen had imagined, but what he saw was something entirely different.

SEE

Joseph Cardijn, a Belgian priest who started the Young Christian Workers, introduced the See-Judge-Act method to the Church. It became part of official teaching in John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra (1961, §236). The steps are simple: first, look at the real situation; then, judge it using Christian principles; finally, decide what action to take. This is not a way to debate. It starts with the world as it really is, not with any theory you might have.

So: See. On 18 March 1958, Thomas Merton — cloistered, famous, and by his own admission somewhat pleased with his separateness — was standing in downtown Louisville at the corner of Fourth and Walnut. He wrote:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. ~ Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Notice the setting: right in the heart of the shopping district. The same kind of crowd, the same commercial street, the same postwar shoppers Gruen had envisioned. Yet Merton caught a hidden strand of connection among them, something no architect could construct and no store could sell. Three years before, he had captured this idea in a book title: No Man Is an Island.

Set the two men side by side, and the picture sharpens. Gruen saw that our built world made community nearly impossible: no center, no square, nowhere to gather. Merton, by contrast, recognized that community is woven into our very being, present before any walls go up. One diagnosed the problem; the other named what was at stake.

JUDGE

Now comes the judging step. This is where Catholic Social Teaching moves from a set of pious notes to a real tool for analysis.

Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891, standing between two systems which were both, in his reading, wrong about the human person. He rejected socialism because abolishing private property “would rob the lawful possessor” and strike at the family, the prior society. Liberal capitalism he rejected with equal force for having laid upon workers “a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.” He was not splitting the difference. He was refusing a shared premise: that the human being is fundamentally an economic unit whose relationships are downstream of production.

The tradition has held that line for 135 years. John Paul II put the question with unusual bluntness in Centesimus Annus (1991, §42). Should capitalism be the model for post-communist nations? If capitalism means “an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property... as well as free human creativity,” then yes. But if it means “a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality... then the reply is certainly negative.”

This is not a matter of compromise. It is about restoring the right order. The market excels as a servant yet falters as a master. The real question is not ‘market or state,’ but ‘what purpose does it serve, and to whom is it answerable?’

Which brings us to the principle that does the real work here, and the one that explains Southdale precisely. Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931, §79):

Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. ~ Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno §79

Subsidiarity is often mistaken for a simple plea for small government, but it is much richer than that. It is about where real life unfolds: in families, parishes, neighborhoods, guilds, unions, congregations, and city blocks. Larger bodies should lift these groups, not swallow them. Seen this way, subsidiarity critiques both socialism and capitalism for the same flaw: both erase society's middle layer. Central planning absorbs local groups into the state, while unchecked markets reduce them to consumers. In both cases, people are left alone before a vast, impersonal system, and the public square continues as a dream.

Gruen’s park belonged to no one, and the neighborhood that might have cherished it had not yet come together as a community with a voice. This was a failure of subsidiarity before it was a market failure. Without the middle layer, the market had no one to hear.

ACT

So, the answer is not to split the difference between Marx and Hayek, but to set our priorities straight. Property and business are genuine goods, as tradition has held since 1891, but only when based on the belief that creation belongs to all and private ownership is stewardship, not privilege. Solidarity is essential too, but it means a lasting devotion to the common good, not simply passing the buck to an agency. Subsidiarity binds both principles, insisting that work happen as close to home as possible.

In practice, this approach is quiet and rooted in the local. It takes shape in worker ownership and cooperatives, where those who risk also reap the rewards. Credit unions and community land trusts put capital in neighbors' hands. Parish and neighborhood groups can join forces to own, negotiate, or say no. Zoning laws can help towns rediscover their centers. The aim is shared ownership, not concentrating property in a few hands or in the state.

None of these solutions propagate like the mall model, and that is by design. They grow as neighborhoods do: by reproducing a pattern, never by stamping out identical copies.

Merton leaves us with the final, most demanding insight, for the Act step is where this custom frequently falters. He would say that no reform endures if people remain strangers. What happened at Fourth and Walnut was not a policy, but a person waking up to his connection with others. Every cooperative, land trust, and public square is a way to make that awakening real, turning the sense that ‘these people are mine and I am theirs’ into shared rules and responsibilities.

Gruen died in 1980, back in Vienna, a city with a true center. Merton died in 1968, twelve years after Southdale opened, still struggling with the illusion of separateness. Together, they left us a diagnosis: we are made for communion, yet we have built a country where communion has no home.

Stand at the corner of Fourth and Walnut. Remember the eighty-four acres that rose and the four hundred that never did. Then act—go and build the park.

Sources

Southdale Center opening and Gruen’s 1952 master plan: Minnesota Historical Society; MNopedia; Library of Congress, “This Month in Business History.” Gruen’s 1978 London remarks as widely reported. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966); No Man Is an Island (Harcourt, 1955). John XXIII, Mater et Magistra §236. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891). Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno §79 (1931). John Paul II, Centesimus Annus §42 (1991).