WASHINGTON, March 15, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Following is the daily "Profile America" feature from the U.S. Census Bureau:
AMERICA'S FIRST SHOPPING CENTER
Profile America — Wednesday, March 15th. Everyone who loves convenience in shopping can thank visionaries Edward Delk and J.C. Nichols, who conceived, designed, and built the first shopping mall in the U.S. The Country Club Plaza, on the outskirts of Kansas City, opened this month in 1923 to wide acclaim. It was the first shopping area to have stores facing inward toward a promenade, rather than facing out toward a road. The mall had 150 stores and a 2,000-seat auditorium. There were parking spaces for 5,500 cars; a notable figure when there were a little over 13-million cars in America. Today, the Country Club Plaza is still in business — along with nearly 110,000 other purpose-built shopping centers, where Americans ring up much of the nation's roughly $4.5 trillion in retail sales annually. Profile America is in its 20th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.
Sources: Kane's Famous First Facts, 2501
Shopping centers/accessed 12/29/2016: http://www.icsc.org/research/shopping-center-facts-and-stats
Autos in 1923: 1933 data: Historical Statistics of the United States, Part 2/page 716
Retail sales/t. 1: http://www.census.gov/retail/marts/www/marts_current.pdf
Profile America is produced by the Center for New Media and Promotion of the U.S. Census Bureau. Statistics and accounts drawn from cited non-Census sources are employed for illustrative or narrative purposes, and are not attested to by the U.S. Census Bureau. These daily features are available as produced segments, ready to air, on the Internet at http://www.census.gov (look for "Audio" in the "Library" pull-down menu).
SOURCE U.S. Census Bureau
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