The world's first enclosed shopping mall, Southdale, opened in Edina, a Minneapolis suburb, in 1956.
Only one enclosed shopping mall was built in 2006, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, and none are planned for this year.
This led to the development of a large enclosed shopping precinct, the Arndale Centre, which contains a significant proportion of the total retail activity in the city centre.
"It was meant to safely harness tourists and visitors through a historic district and funnel them into a three-story, enclosed shopping mall.
"They used to have bars on the windows, and we were used to having an enclosed shop," said Bill Ussery, an owner.
Gruen was an idealist: his most enduring invention, the two-storey enclosed shopping mall, was supposed to evoke a European city centre.
Elsewhere in the borough, new housing also sprouted around the expanding Brent Cross Shopping Centre, which was the first large enclosed shopping area in the United Kingdom when it opened in 1976.
Middle Eastern bazaars are often arcaded rows of shops, and the design of modern enclosed or partially enclosed shopping centres has made the use of the label, if not the original form, common in the United States.
At their peak in the mid-1990s there were about 330 such outlet malls; now there are 230 left, competing for the consumer's attention with America's 1,130 enclosed shopping malls and another 45,000-odd shopping centres.
In early June, in the upscale neighborhood of Kolonaki and in the enclosed shopping streets around Syntagma Square, where the recently renovated luxury Grand Bretagne Hotel sits opposite the Parliament building, Athens seemed a safe place to walk around.
