Much has been written about Victor Gruen (Gruenbaum), the Austrian e'migre' who escaped Nazi-occupied Europe in 1938 and arrived in New York City with a degree in architecture, eight dollars in cash and no command of the English language.

From these humble beginnings sprang an illustrious 39-year career in the design of retail structures, which got underway with his creation of fashionable Fifth Avenue boutiques and work on renovating several Manhattan department stores.

At the close of WW II, America -after years of depression and conflict- was ready for some major economic expansion, with virtually all this growth occurring in new, outlying suburbs. The regional shopping center was to become the center of commerce in this reconfigured landscape.

Gruen had many innovative concepts that were utilized in constructing these new-style, suburban centers. He also had a great deal of input in the urban renewal projects that resulted from America's shift away from downtown-centered commerce.

The best known of his concepts -The Gruen Transfer- involved trying to increase consumer spending by manipulating shoppers to do impulse buying. According to Gruen, this could be accomplished via unconscious influences of lighting, ambient sound and music, visual detail of storefronts, mirrored or polished surfaces and climate control of interior spaces.

Gruen also believed that America's central cities, which had been decimated by suburbanization in the 1950s and '60s, could be revitalized by constructing expressway loops around downtown areas, routing automobile traffic into parking garages and creating pedestrian-only zones -free of vehicular traffic- on previously-existing streets.

His first downtown redevelopment plan was commissioned by Fort Worth, Texas in 1955, but never carried out. Kalamazoo, Michigan, Fresno, California and Honolulu, Hawaii implemented parts of Gruen's plans....building only pedestrian malls.