A Mall Not Built

I was recently reading a history of freeway building in the Twin Cities (Yes, I am a nerd. I realize this.) and came across a reference to a potential large shopping center that was mentioned in 1973 for Woodbury called "Eastown."

The interesting part about this was that at the time, a route for I-94 had not even been set yet.

The development, to be located somewhere along Afton Road, would have been quite significant, with two anchors and 100 stores. This would have made it about the size of present day Northtown Mall in Blaine, although considering the expansion that most major malls have undertaken, it’s not hard to imagine it being the size of a Burnsville, Maplewood, or even Rosedale.

This development would have put it in the second wave of indoor malls in the Twin Cities. The first gave us Southdale (1956), HarMar (1961) and the gone-but-not-forgotten Apache (1961) and Brookdale (1962). 

The second brought us Rosedale (1969), Northtown (1972), Maplewood and Ridgedale (1974), the Galleria and Eden Prairie Center (1976),  and Burnsville (1974).

The history—done by the Center for Transportation Study at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities—doesn’t say how serious the project was, but it does note other groups, including Dayton-Hudson, were pursuing similar projects in the area, none of which appear to have come to fruition. (I was 2 years old at the time and living in northern Minnesota, so my memory of it is non-existent.) 

Reading between the lines, it appears that Eastown was somewhere between a paper project (built only on the architect’s drafting table) and what a former boss referred to as a “Beach Boys” project (where four guys stand around and sing, “Wouldn’t it be nice?”)

It led me to wonder what constructing Eastown would have meant to Woodbury.   Considering that Woodbury was not even a community of 10,000 residents at the time, it would have cast a large retail shadow upon the city and likely hampered commercial developments in other parts of the city. Would it have led to a rapid, unsustainable lower quality development that would have led to one generation of rapid growth followed by a migration to the “next new thing?” (which I witnessed in the Saint Louis Metropolitan area.) 

Looking at the malls of its potential generation, would Eastown have remained viable, like Ridgedale, Roseville, Burnsville, the Galleria, and Eden Prairie Center… or would it have slalomed between viable and forgettable as Maplewood, Northtown, and the nearby but smaller Sun Ray?

Looking to the previous generation, Southdale has largely flourished, HarMar is overshadowed, but Apache and Brookdale are retail ghosts. Which of these varied paths would Eastown have followed?

Since no shovels ever turned dirt at this mysterious project, we’ll never really know what would have happened.