The 1950s and 1960s witnessed the creation of a number of downtown malls across the country. With only a handful of exceptions, these malls were an economic and visual disaster. In the late seventies and eighties a new approach came to the fore: to inject a suburban mall anchored by a department store into an existing downtown grid system. This is what we have in the South Bridge Mall. A block of Federal Avenue (with Frank Lloyd Wright's bank on the corner) has been closed and made into a pedestrian mall. The enclosed shopping center has been built to the south, and behind this is the parking area. From the south the complex appears highly nonurban—it looks like a good, characteristic suburban mall. But the closing of one block of Federal Avenue and its termination with the gable-roofed shopping center is visually not very successful. The street has been divided so that a runway (for fire trucks and delivery) goes down one side; on the other are uncomfortable benches (visually and actually) and a parsimonious planting of trees. Two rows of sharp, rectangular streetlights do not help to tie it all together. To the south the parking lot is one vast surface plane,