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Twenty-five years ago, the glass doors of Madison's first indoor shopping center swung open, and thousands of curious shoppers marveled at the fountains and tropical plants and climate-controlled comfort of West Towne Mall.
There was little hoopla. Attractive young women called "mall-ettes" handed out flowers and balloons to the women and children. There were no speeches, no special promotions. It merely opened for business.
And on Oct. 15, when West Towne turns 25, don't expect anything unusual. Mall manager Paul Matyas said no anniversary parties are planned. The only special events you can look forward to this month, he said, are a 20-percent-off sale and a sale on coats -- neither tied into the anniversary.
The developer, Jacobs, Visconsi and Jacobs of Cleveland, (now known as the Richard E. Jacobs Group) didn't make a big deal out of the 1970 opening. But Madison residents did.
"To put something of that magnitude so far outside of (the developed part of) Madison was enormous," recalled Carol Pfefferkorn, secretary to the mall's first manager, James Roche. "It was such an event."
Back then, it seemed like a dream to walk from shop to shop in the middle of autumn without slipping your coat on and off. Parking was free and there was plenty of it.
Although the first indoor shopping mall was built in 1956 in the Twin Cities' suburb of Edina, it took a full 14 years for the trend to make its way to Madison. The nation now has nearly 2,000 regional shopping malls, according to Witold Rybczynski, a professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania.
West Towne was, and still is, maintained at a comfortable 72 degrees. Innocuous music, then as now, hung in the air of its tiled corridors. You could visit 25 stores (and a lot of vacant store fronts) within its 800,000 square feet without ever stepping outside. Since then, it has grown to 100 stores covering nearly 1 million square feet.
The mall, set in a former cow pasture at Gammon and Mineral Point roads, was a big contrast to Downtown Madison and State Street, the city's traditional shopping districts. When West Towne opened, Madison was still reeling from the bombing two months earlier of the Army Mathematics Research...