Kalamazoo Mall
The Kalamazoo Mall, the first outdoor pedestrian shopping mall in the United States, is four blocks of Burdick Street in downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan that have been closed to automotive traffic. Built for $60,000, it became the first of several hundred built in the United States.
It was designed by Victor Gruen, who three years earlier had designed the country's first enclosed shopping mall.[1] It was opened in 1959.
The mall has since been restyled to resemble the Arcadia Commons development at the mall's north end, where the Kalamazoo Public Museum is located. In 1999, after much political debate, two blocks of the mall were modified to accommodate auto traffic.[2] Kalamazoo is nicknamed "Mall City."