PETER GIBIAN The Art of Being Off-Center: Shopping Center Spaces and Spectacles "The commercial spirit has nurtured some of our most interesting American design," writes historian Neil Harris, of the virtuosity of technical innovation in the service of spectacle that has formed the "architectural fantasy" of today's malls: "The last architectural form that serviced American dreams so effectively was the movie palace of the inter-war years.''l Of course, malls have now absorbed the movie-theater concept, offering their own multiscreen cinamettes, along with exhibits, lectures, concerts--at least one mall even has enclosed amusement park rides and a carnival-style midway. But the real spectacle is always the mall space itself: its escalator and elevator rides and ramps, its vistas and displays, its gardens and waterworks, graphics and glass, its recreated ambiences and "quartiers." This larger focus is what has sparked the technical virtuosity of these new designs in space and light, extensions of the metal-and-glass structural experiments of the mall ancestors: arcades, exhibition halls, and railroad stations. Actually, the American shopping center itself has a surprisingly short history, but development has been rapid and design has become extremely self-conscious. These are now highly defined, highly designed environments. But what do designers think about when they try to organize such a complex phenomenon? In the half-century history of American malls, there seem to have been five phases of design strategy.2 Phase one came out of the car culture of 1920s-1930s California, when people discovered the simple "one-stop" attraction of putting several small stores (with maybe a grocery store as base) near a single parking area. Through all suburban mall development, this basic structure has remained the same: a cluster of stores surrounded by seeming acres of barren parking lot. From outside, a mall is just cars and walls, as exciting as the solid brick exterior of a panorama building or a theater. But the only mall "show," of course, is directed inwards. And the paved lot can serve as a sort of transitional "moat," accenting the insular feel, the "otherness," of that self-enclosed "palace" at the core. (We think: "That must be someplace really different!") Phase two is the gold-rush rise of the regional centers, produced by the addition of large "anchor" department stores to the grouping of smaller shops. Because of the boom of highway construction in the Eisenhower era and the huge migrations of people to the suburbs, the 1950s and 1960s were the golden years for shopping center development. Centralized ownership was the radical innovation that really made things happen, that laid the foundations for these new giant centers. The department store anchor magnets, which provided the drawing power for these regional complexes, were also able to attract major financing from insurance companies, and so often singly owned and planned the entire operation. Controlled by one large-scale developer, the regional center could now begin to regulate both its economy and atmosphere: carefully choosing its tenants, avoiding internal economic competition, and working for a unity of architectural "effect. Turning Backs...Wishing Away... The movement toward "unity" in these phase-two centers only accented some crucial aspects latent in the phase-one designs: basic tendencies toward self-containment and introversion. Even before the 1920s, the trail-blazing J. C. Nichols was using the "Spanish mission" model with stores facing inward on a central pedestrian courtyard so that they could be set apart from cars and (in a move paradigmatic for later malls) "turn their backs to the street."3 The large phase-two centers would simply expand on these principles. The influential design of Seattle's Northgate, for example, creates a central pedestrian mall between its two big straight lined strips of stores (which "turn their backs to the highway"4) and relegates service activities to a hidden underground tunnel. Harris notes that the earliest experiments in the separation of pedestrian customers from cars and from any service activities--creating a carefree inner circle distant from outside concerns (forget your car, forget the street, forget services, forget yourself)--were made at shopping centers and at Disneyland.5 Both malls and Disney's Main Street derive from the townscape, but their closed, cleaned stage-set "streets" move in similar ways to keep practical services (deliveries, employee access, building supports, circuitry, etc.) behind or below the "scene." While one critic describes the Disney wonderland as "acres of fiberglass fantasy resting upon an unseen technological superstructure,"6 mall designers combine an interest in this kind of fantasy entertainment with the more directed goals of selling. They have good reason to seek to wish away mall superstructure and let the for-sale merchandise take over center stage. The separation from cars and "the elimination of all service facilities from the public consciousness" become the "necessary ingredients" of a shopping center to a 1950s design theorist 7; these are "necessary" because, as a 1950s planner sees it, the future center should be a fantasy realm "kaleidoscope of movement . . . where shoppers will not be conscious of the building but only of the displays. So already in phases one and two the basic mall structure is set--or rather, what is set is the denial of superstructure, the desire for an inner "open" domain freed from external necessities. In this, the earliest shopping centers join the most modern ones. For example, Victor Gruen creator of the first modern enclosed mall (what he aptly calls the "introverted center") writes that he found his inspiration in many aspects of the nineteenth-century arcades: their self-enclosure around a central pedestrian plaza, their separation from external weather, from services from traffic, and from the hostile city environment.9 Like the 1950s suburban malls, Gruen says, the arcades were born in a movement away from the city, with architectural gestures of introversion. Turning Inward In the 1950s, even with the advent of large-scale single-developer centers, some regional malls continued to be built simply as giant extensions of the earliest plans--just your basic straight lines and big blocks on a monumental scale. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some developers began to place a great new emphasis on design planning and environmental control. Reacting against the early centers that simply rose up out of the demands of the road--growing uncontrolled, unstyled, on the "strip"--new mall designs would turn their focus ever more clearly inwards, strengthening the existing impulse to self-containment with further major shifts in the direction of the fully orchestrated mall. A new self-consciousness in design centered on new problems: (1) the choice of an atmosphere, and (2) the question of scale. How should the plan reflect or deflect the fact of a mall's increasingly giant size, its self-enclosure, its clearly controlled environment? Responses to these problems took two general forms--in phases three and four. Both alternatives, though, are part of a general movement inward, towards enclosure, and concentration of effect--reacting to the imposing realities of mall superstructure with a new focus on special effects for the mall interior. What we might call phase-three centers are the "market town" styles which deliberately underplayed their large size (they now often included several department stores), reacting against the straight lines of the earlier malls with meandering, informal patterns. Even in earlier phases, this approach had been very successful. The prototype "Town and Country Village" chain, for example, backed its name with designs accenting "the charm of irregularity" and "picturesque congestion,''l0 adding old materials, heavy timber, and tile roofs for down-home informality. The aptly named Old Orchard mall in Skokie, Illinois, the first of the extensively landscaped malls, is often seen as the classic example of the "country market" style in its late 1950s boom years. Streams, bridges, finely gardened courtyards, and shop squares of varying dimensions were to suggest the atmosphere of a country village. As in a diorama,ll the goal was to dissolve the static sense of the building frame, making it serve simply as the site for perception of changes in visual effects: "changes of pace, of scale, of direction, of shape, of surface.''l2 Informal arrangements divided the mall experience into a series of cozy limited views, with meandering water and bridges to lead shoppers on to each new surprise; as one planner comments, at Old Orchard "the lure of around-the corner urges the shopper on" so that "he sees more than he otherwise would" and he "concentrates his attention upon the attractions most nearly at hand.''l3 Some other of these phase-three rustic malls have two levels, a crucial innovation (begun by James Rouse) which halves the distance shoppers have to walk, accents and insulates the courts, allows more views and more people-watching, and increases the psychological intimacy of the "rural" setting. Love Story: Mall as Movie: "Looking," "Buying" Clearly, the design self-consciousness of the late 1950s brought a great new emphasis on the psychological effects of mall environments; the big new design buzzword is "the experience." With the new concentration on special effects for the mall's "inner realm" comes a new concern with the emotional "inner realm" of the shopper. A seminal 1957 article by planner and pop psychologist Richard Bennett speaks for the whole complex of emerging orthodoxies involving (1) the "village" atmosphere with irregular lines, changing effects, the "lure of around-the-corner"; (2) the focus on the "psychological needs" of shoppers; and (3) the new stress on shopping as a non-utilitarian "visual experience," a quasi-cinematic spectacle, an adventure. "The 'looking at' becomes as important as 'the buying,"' writes Bennett, and so the mall is seen as a sort of "moving picture," with a coyly erotic plot of Girl Meets Goods: "a piece of architecture--the building --should be considered as a frame for the picture of the love affair Like a spectator at a Panorama, this customer should step inside the frame of the "moving pictures" and walk around immersed in illusion.between a customer and a piece of merchandise.''l4 If a mall is a successful movie, its shopper will lose herself (Bennett's 1950s customer is always female), forget that building frame, suspend disbelief, and consummate "the experience." When the "buying act" becomes so deeply associated with this kind of illusionistic visual spectacle, a very special mode of shopping is involved: It enters an arena of entertainment in which the experience of looking is as important as the object found, in which customers are willing to "pay for the atmosphere," for "just looking," and their surplus money goes for emotional rather than physical necessities. At this turning point in the late 1950s, Bennett's excitement with the strategies of visual display is part of an effort to urge a basic mall reorientation to "the impulse-buying which comes after the essentials are bought."15 (And the "radical shift" to what is now given the strange name of"non-merchandise retailing" has indeed continued as a major "trendline" for malls from Bennett's time into the 1980s; with our current emphasis on "specialty" food-and-entertainment centers, it is the dominant mode.)l6 Bennett details and reenacts the psychology of impulse-buying because, for him, the designer's goal is to help release these "impulses," to help free a shopper's "inner" desires from external concerns (with the "frames" of time, money, self, and so on). An interior atmosphere of fantasy and festivity can make shopping an adventure, a "quest," and so bring "more dollars out of women's purses."17 (These fresh 1950s inventions have become our commonplaces, our ad copy, our household words.) So the changing, irregular views of an "English village" mall work to keep the buyer dazzled and nearsighted, to prevent a static overview of the whole, to close off awareness of the outside. And Bennett relates this to the carnival model of"high-powered merchandising," with its multiplicity of attractions and rides luring customers into continual movement while providing no focal point. In fact, malls probably have the most to learn from the amusement park, "where most people spend more than they intend." Bennett finally presents the curved lines of Coney Island as an ideal system for the "country village" mall. This is the vision of amusement-in-enclosure, of shoppers' losing themselves in involuntary repetition within the oneiric circles of fun visual attractions: "a meandering closed ring which returns on itself so that one starts a second circuit before one realizes it."18 Closing the Ring: Phase Four's "Introverted Center" Many of these open, village-garden style centers of phrase three are still flourishing attractions, but it was the era's phase-four design alternative that set the pattern for most mall development in the next two decades. The Southdale Shopping Center near Minneapolis, a 1956 work by Victor Gruen and Associates, added a second major innovation to the new two-level concept: It was the first large, fully enclosed, air conditioned mall design. Inspired by the Milan Galleria and nineteenth-century arcades, what Gruen called "the first introverted center" offered a series of arcade entrances opening into a large covered central "mall." With this move to overall enclosure, the center becomes a completely separate domain, sealed off, an economy in itself. As one observer writes, from this point on, "Malls aren't part of the community . . . they are the community.''l9 Like the nineteenth-century arcades, the panoramas, and the exhibition halls, the enclosed mall can here be seen as a sort of city in itself. And in fact Southdale's interior sought not village serenity or old-style charm but a simulation of downtown activity and bustle. In this enclosed-mall prototype, Gruen arranged his indoor sculpture and trees, and the closeness of his two levels, to recreate the effects of urban variety and energy. The interior model was a suburbanite's dream of an early 1800s unplanned city, offering substitutes for streets and an arena of concentration to those feeling the uniformity and isolation of suburban sprawl. In 1960, Gruen wrote that the new shopping spaces must "represent an essentially urban environment, be busy and colorful, exciting and stimulating, full of variety and interest."20 And indeed the decade of the 1960s saw a mall boom with "increasing sophistication . . . in successfully repackaging an idealized urban form into the suburban milieu."2l In our day, two-level verticality and overall enclosure have become standard in the designs produced and reproduced by the large mall development companies. Since multiple levels create problems of access and shopper mobility, systems of undulating ramps, connecting bridges, broad staircases, escalators and other "rides" have become necessary features. And these can only add high-tech pizzazz to the color and activity of the desired urban "effect." Utopia: No Place But of course part of the mysterious attraction of a mall's city "feel" is that it is an "effect"--a designer's virtuoso recreation. First of all, the background fact of mall enclosure always works in an intriguing tension with the surfaces of an urban ambience, reminding us of the differences between such highly defined space and the organic chaos of a town. We get a frisson in recognizing a sameness of mechanical reproduction behind a mall's "downtown style" diversity: instead of a competition of unique one-owner "specialty" shops, most malls offer outlets of the same widespread franchise chains; reproduced clones of an entirely standardized mall design, in fact, often reappear throughout the continent--with the same Muzak, fixtures, and controlled climate--denying regional differences or local color; the mall crowds, actually, are much more homogenous (housewives, older people, teenagers) than those on a city street (or in the ghettos the urban malls have "renewed"); and those dizzying mall traffic patterns, we soon recognize, are also clearly preplanned and permanently fixed. But too much of this sort of demystifying customer "recognition" is the main threat to the phase-four designer. These urban-style malls, though they imitate the city rather than the garden village, share basic design goals with phase-three plans. Again the accent is on changing views and variety of stimulation; the concern is still to break up the vast distances and stark vistas, the increasingly monolithic financial and structural frames, of the new malls. At Southridge, for example, an urban bustle of changing elevations, false walls, shifting angles, prismatic lighting, and dispersed niches is intended, the designer writes, to "minimize the effect" of the mall's horizontal size, to "break up" and "distort the measurements of space and distance." Here again, the basic point is to "provide no focal point to distract from the visual attraction of the stores "22 to keep shoppers dazzled by each display as it rises before their eyes-- and unaware of the enclosing frame. The Bird-Cage Mall With this late 1950s culmination of the mall tendency to introversion, as the phase-four mall becomes literally enclosed, comes a great new designer concern with interior effects of"openness." It seems the more indoor the reality, the more outdoor will be its desired effects. Gruen speaks for this fundamental ambiguity when he states that "The underlying purpose of the enclosed mall is to make people feel that they are outdoors."23 To achieve this "psychological connection with nature,"24 Gruen's 1960s mall plans involved skylighting, extensive waterworks, programs of kaleidoscopic light shows, an almost tropical density of plantings, sidewalk cafes (with umbrellas for an illusion of "weather"), and "a much more daring use of works of art than ever before undertaken."25 In fact, as mall enclosure brought a strong demand for art works (to bring variety to uniform patterns), several early designs featured giant sculptural bird cages--a surprising indication of the appropriateness of Michael Snow's 1979 Eaton Centre sculpture to the base themes of "openness" in mall enclosure, of nature brought indoors. The live ancestors of Snow's flock of Canada geese (gliding through their glass galleria) flew in the courtyard bird cage at Southdale, the central symbol of Gruen's first enclosed mall. The later Southridge mall, too, used its central aviary as a natural attraction joining the vertical levels of the mall with their celebration of floating lightness and highlighting the surrounding vertical transportation system of elevators, escalators, and stairs. Like anything connected with malls, this germ idea has proliferated widely and rapidly. The motif continues in many present-day malls: a tall "aviary court" centers Tyson's Corner Mall, near Washington; a new bird cage mall opened just last year [1980] in California. The Herd Instinct: Flocks and Schools The enclosure of the mall now seems to be its essential feature and its main allure. Even in areas with mild climates, new developments are almost always covered and temperature-controlled. Revitalizing an old center usually involves adding an all-encompassing roof. Culture critics now focus their attacks on this move toward the self-contained environment; Romero's Dawn of the Dead turns a mall's closure to horror; The Blues Brothers betrays a similar pent-up aggression when its chase scene gets sidetracked and its slapstick turns unfunny, vicious--as rampaging cars try to escape a sealed mall. But there still seems to be a hunger for large, enclosed spaces, where people can be a part of a collective movement while avoiding the "shocks" and dangers of actual city life. Many mall planners point to ancient origins in the oriental bazaar, the Arab souk, the marche: marketing has long been associated with enclosure; the Jerusalem bazaar shows that "the covered shopping center has existed for at least 2,000 years"26 (though it certainly was not controlled by one developer). And Gruen appeals to even more primitive "natural" urges: His centers are erected in the faith that "the human animal's herd instinct which makes him gather in groups, tribes, and nations . . . will endure."27 Certainly some such nexus of impulses is behind the incredible drawing power of today's advanced urban malls. Toronto's Eaton Centre (1979) attracts more visitors per year than nearby Niagara Falls, with its feature sculpture of migrating Canada geese mirroring the movements of those indoor flocks of tourists below. Baltimore's Harbor place brought in more customers than Disneyworld in its first year (1980-1981), with a festive "chaotic marketplace" atmosphere "blending commerce and showmanship." Time magazine was fascinated by this new sort of crowd movement in a glass galleria where people become the display: ". . . translucent pleasure domes where visitors can be seen from outside swarming in rhythmic schools like the angelfish at the nearby National Aquarium..."28 In such a regulated environment, we come for the spectacle, the playful imitations and virtuoso effects of the designers. The absence of weather is actually a selling point: Ironically, Snow's geese are moving through the sort of controlled climate and timeless space that one mall advertised with this mock weather report: "Forecast: consistently pleasant . . . Skies over . . . enclosed street continued irrelevant."29 With controlled lighting, plantings, and music, we want to see what scenes man (one of the new Daguerres 30) can create or recreate. Like the urban crowds which flocked to the circular Panorama buildings to see illusory cities, perhaps we come to the panoramic mall mini-cities to experience for ourselves one of the themes of Snow's optical illusion in Flight Stop: the paradox of visionary freedom in enclosure. New Directions The ambiguous status of the enclosed phase-four "city-style" malls is only compounded in the current phase five of mall design--with the advent of the urban or vertical mall. City planners have always criticized the suburban mentality of the inauthentic creations that were draining the downtown: "Of course, any real downtown is more interesting than a single mall, just as Los Angeles is more interesting than Disneyland," said Dick Rosann, director of New York City's Office of Development, in 1977.3l But by now malls are opening in many city centers, and it appears that downtowns may be rebuilt with the help of these thriving city replicas in their midst: the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, Water Tower Place in Chicago, Citicenter in New York, Eaton Centre in Toronto, Harborplace in Baltimore, etc., etc. These urban supermalls are pushing the potentials in verticality and enclosure to new extremes. Often, such expanded projects absorb many new functions to increase their status as self-contained economies: They can contain dances, lectures, exhibits, concerts, all high-school events. Water Tower Place, for example, supports a twenty-two-story hotel and forty floors of high-price condominiums, so that people can live, work, eat, shop, tour, or mingle there--both earning money and spending it --day and night. And this trend could continue: There seems to be an omnivorousness inherent in the mall concept; this hardy form proliferates by absorbing ever-new life functions. The enclosed mall does not want to close itself off, but instead wants always to enclose more. From early on, shopping centers have been linked to planned communities. J. C. Nichols's Country Club Plaza, perhaps America's first center, was part of a planned Kansas housing development. In the 1930s and 1940s, planned towns (such as Greenbelt, Maryland, Levittown, Long Island, and Park Forest, Illinois) often had experimental "malls" at their center. The James Rouse Company, behind one of the earliest enclosed malls in 1958 and now one of the most prolific mall developers on many fronts, owns several of today's model planned communities (with Columbia, Maryland, as centerpiece).32 And Victor Gruen, inventor of the enclosed mall, has built on his youthful excitement with the "ville radieuse" of Le Corbusier in recent work on Paris's "new city" at La Defense, and has written a book on the need to expand the mall concept (as a way out of atomized closure) into the planning of minicities or "multi-functional centers."33 "People Movers" Since they are all several stories high (a dramatic escalation of the earlier two-story idea), "vertical malls" make use of new possibilities for large-scale construction in metal and glass. Glittering light-drenched courts are designed for dazzlement. But planners use displays, vistas, lights, and conveyances to accent a vertiginous sense of movement for a pragmatic reason: Extended verticality presents a great problem of shopper circulation. How do you draw people along, how do you stimulate them to explore all levels? The main spectacles in vertical malls, then, are often fun, fancy forms of moving people: Some modern mall courts have the playful amusement-park feel of a flamboyant Portman hotel (and Portman's Hyatts and multi- functional cities-within-the-city, with their structured chaos and whimsy, have certainly influenced mall plans); a few malls actually incorporate amusement park rides under their roofs; and some current experiments even replace that glass roof--with huge, light-permeable, billowing circus tents more suggestive of the desired shopping mood. Benjamin, we remember, described the "art of being off center" as a sort of Dodg'em Cars ride; urban mall planners must work to suggest just such an experience. The elegant Water Tower Place, celebrated as "a system to move and attract people,"34 greets the shopper with a "cascading garden escalator" which combines a perspectival waterfall with automatic stairs. Called a "spectacular," this cascade suggests an analogy from nature for the mechanical movement of people; it invites crowds to "flow." Such organic analogies for traffic patterns are now basic to almost every design: When streams flow, we flow; when they change levels, we change levels; at a pool, we stop and collect ourselves. In a similar way, designers use trees to link mall levels visually, to encourage shoppers to "climb." Snow's geese--mirroring crowd circulation from the air, "joining" all levels of the central galleria by their position in the "landscape" of mall "earth" and "sky"- -are successful in this way, almost too uncannily so. (Their movement, suspended animation, is also reified wax-model fixity; their free flight is closing on the end of the corridor; their natural flow is also artificially "stopped." Like the Time writer at Harborplace, we see this group movement from outside, in display form, and this the "natural" "herd" analogy becomes unsettling.) The mall designer's main goal is continual "flow." The cascade/ escalator at Water Tower Place leads directly to a second "spectacular" --a seven-story grand atrium traversed by three glass-windowed elevators, which glitter in spotlighting and can provide a panoramic ride. Such a moving spectacle is carefully planned to bring people in for what the designer (and we recall Bennett's views here) calls "the experience." Even more than the suburban malls, these new projects link architecture and entertainment. The stress is on affective "experience," writes one critic praising "the new concept of architecture" in Water Tower Place, because a mall building is not "an object, a thing," but is "an environmental phenomenon," a spectacle surrounding its perceivers: "The question of what it is . . . is less urgent than the question of how it feels."35 (Though this seems to beg the question: What is it?) So here a planner must aim for pizzazz, combining profit and pleasure, commerce and showmanship, in a site for the emotional encounters of adventuring shoppers. This can create a strange atmosphere for the "perceiver's" main activity--for buying. If the "feeling" is of amusement, distraction, and continual motion, we may be so involved in moving and looking that buying seems incidental; in fact, in malls we do mostly buy "incidentals." As Bennett foresaw, "impulse-buying is one result of this combination of shopping and spectacle"--we just pick up what suddenly appears before our eyes, out of the continual flow of surrounding merchandise. (Is this like buying a still from a movie, or a souvenir from a tour?) The new concept in mall bookstores, for example, seems to be to maximize random table-top displays (the new arrivals) and to minimize old-style cataloguing by subject. It may be very difficult to find the specific book that we come for; instead of such goal-directed shopping, we are invited, almost forced, to browse. Buzzed with coffee, lulled by music, we find an endless series of colorful covers rising before us. In such off-center distraction, we will almost inevitably discover a surprise, an unexpected object of desire.36 1. N. Harris, "Spaced Out at the Shopping Center," New Republic, Dec. 13, 1975: 2. This schematic history is especially indebted to Harris. 3. G. Baker and B. Furnaro, Shopping Centers: Design and Operation (N.Y.: Reinhold, 1951). 4. J. S. Hornbeck, ed., Stores and Shopping Centers (N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1962): 195. 5. Harris, 24. 6. C. Rowe, Collage City (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1978): 44. 7. Hornbeck, 188. 8. C. Darlow, Enclosed Shopping Centers, (London: Architectural Press, 1972). 9. V. Gruen, Centers for the Urban Environment: Survival of the Cities (N.Y.: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973) . 10. Baker and Furnaro, 85. 11. diorama A three-dimensional scene that depicts people, animals, or natural settings, commonly used in museums.--EDS. 12. Hornbeck, 70. 13. Hornbeck, 75. 14. Bennett in Hornbeck, 145. 15. Bennett in Hornbeck, 153. 16. G. Stemlieb and J. W. Hughes, eds., Shopping Centers USA (Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers State U. of NewJersey, 1981). 17. Redstone in Hornbeck, 75. 18. Bennett in Hornbeck, 158 19. W. Kowinski, "The Malling of America," New Times, May 1, 1978: 33. 20. Gruen cited in Harris, 24. 21. Sternlieb, 2. 23. Gruen in Hornbeck, 165. 24. Gruen, 37. 26. Darlow, 38. 27. Gruen, 3. 28. "Cities Are Fun," Time, Sept. 24, 1981: 42. 29. Kowinski, 36. 30. daguerre Named for inventor Louis J. M. Daguerre (1789-1851), an early method of photography using chemically treated glass or metal plates.--EDS. 31. Rosann in Horizon, Sept. 1977: 48. 32. Kowinski, 51. 33. Gruen, 48. 34. Architectural Record, April 1976: 136-40. 35. Architectural Record, April 1976: 99-104. 36. New Yorker, Sept. 30, Oct. 6, Oct. 13, 1980.