Newer shopping malls have come and gone, while Old Orchard is celebrating 70 years.
Marshall Field & Company was the first store to open in the Skokie mall on October 22, 1956.
Stephanie Guthrie, a coordinator at the Skokie Heritage Museum, says the mall was built on partially-developed land originally planned to be houses and has attracted crowds from the beginning.
“The original schedule was that the stores were closed on Sundays but they left the mall open because people visited just to enjoy their surroundings“ she told WBBM.
Guthrie led a half a dozen walking tours through the outdoor mall that included people who used to work in its stores.
Citing local news archives, Guthrie says the name Old Orchard came from the former chairman of Marshall Field and Company.
She says Hughston McBain told a Skokie newspaper in 1955 that the future father-in-law of Field’s nephew, Stanley Field, by the wrong name - and it stuck.
Old Orchard in 1957
Courtesy of Skokie Heritage Museum
Old Orchard opened just two weeks after the first indoor shopping mall in the US opened in Edina, Minnesota.
Southdale Center was designed by Victor Gruen, the Austrian architect who is considered to be the father of the American shopping mall.
Guthrie thinks he would like Westfield’s plans to start construction on residential units in 2027 because Gruen saw malls as mixed-use hubs focused on pedestrians.
A proposal to enclose Old Orchard in the late 1980s or early 1990s was roundly rejected by the public, Guthrie says.
