Certain buildings are fated to be seen from the inside and remain more or less invisible from the outside. Major airport terminals, for instance, such as the ones that opened in the mid-20th century and expanded over the decades into long, unmemorable sequences of glass and concrete. What does Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, the world’s busiest, look like on the outside? Can anyone recall ever seeing it? Or consider the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which has expanded so many times that it almost fills a midtown block. It’s become harder, not easier, to identify from the street.
Add to this roster of paradoxically invisible buildings American Dream, a three-million-square-foot parade of precast concrete volumes located in the New Jersey Meadowlands. A mega shopping mall sporting a dizzying array of attractions, including an indoor ski slope and water park, the project is nebulous to the point of being incomprehensible. It’s impossible to get a clear view of the exterior as a whole, which seems fitting for a project with such a long and arcane history.
Sixteen years in the making, American Dream endured lawsuits, business failures, and untold miscalculations (former New Jersey governor Chris Christie once called it the “ugliest damn building in New Jersey, and maybe America”) before it finally opened in October 2019—just in time for the pandemic. Right before coming online, some of the complex’s banner retail tenants, like Barneys New York, went bust. And then, thanks to COVID-19, American Dream sat shuttered from March until October of last year. In the coming weeks, the Triple Five Group, the complex’s developer, appears poised to lose a 49% stake in two of its other properties, the Mall of America and West Edmonton Mall, that it had used as collateral for $1.2 billion of construction loans for American Dream. At a Bloomington, Minn., city council meeting, Triple Five executive Kurt Hagen framed things this way: “It would have been much better if American Dream would have burned down or a hurricane had hit it, financially, because we would have been covered by insurance.”
As for the most prominent architect associated with the project, originally called Xanadu, he refuses to speak about it. David Rockwell, AIA, whose firm The Rockwell Group is renowned for its exuberant approach to commercial projects, had nearly completed construction on the complex when the initial developer, the Mills Corporation, went bankrupt, in 2007. Rockwell replied to an interview request with a polite, but firm, no: “I'm sorry I cannot be of help on Xanadu. We were involved very early on but withdrew soon after given changes in direction and design.”
Today, American Dream stands as a cautionary tale. This is a story about development for development’s sake, about a project that tried to be visionary, but that only serves to valorize late-20th-century ideas, especially ones that celebrate the convenience of the automobile. The complex’s propitious name, once alive with possibility, is now just a sad irony.
A Grab-Bag of Gimmicks
American Dream is part of the New Jersey Meadowlands Sports Complex, a 1960s-era mega-concept in which 750 acres of wetlands along the New Jersey Turnpike were transformed into a football stadium (now called MetLife), a racetrack, an arena (formerly named Brendan Byrne), and, of course, 28,000 parking spaces. Its raison d’etre was to lure a professional football team to the Garden State. Today, both the Giants and the Jets play at Met Life. The arena, which opened in 1981 and is now chronically underused, was home to the NBA’s New Jersey Nets before the team moved to Brooklyn.
American Dream's beginnings date back to June 2002, when the Meadowlands Sports and Exposition Authority solicited proposals for a 100-plus-acre plot adjacent to the arena. The development, privately financed, was intended to help the authority pay off $100 million in remaining arena debt. The six leading proposals were mostly a hodgepodge of concepts. Xanadu, proposed by the Mills Corporation, a developer of regional shopping malls, was the biggest hodgepodge of them all: a $1.2 billion grab-bag of entertainment and recreation gimmicks. New Jersey hardly needed another mall, which is why Mills doubled down on novelty. When the sports authority signed off on the concept in October 2004, the development promised “a year-round indoor ski jump, a mini Formula One racing oval, an indoor wave pool, and a 35-screen movie theater billed as the nation's largest.” There was more: “a child-size city, a digital playground, television studio, indoor sky-diving and ski jumping, a cooking school, and theme-oriented tenants like Nickelodeon, Fox Sports, House of Blues, and Nascar.”
Mills and its partner, office developer Mack Cali, won the bid in part on sheer chutzpah. But the plan also succeeded because Mills agreed to give up development plans for a separate Meadowlands site the company owned: 560 acres of sensitive wetlands that had emerged as a magnet for environmental lawsuits. In addition to a $160 million payment to the Meadowlands Sports and Exposition Authority for the development rights to the Dreamland site, Mills agreed to donate the contested wetlands to the state.
Almost immediately, the Xanadu team was sued: by the Sierra Club, by a competing developer, Hartz Mountain, and by the Giants. The football team didn’t want to share parking spaces with shoppers on game days or have their fans’ tailgating limited. Hartz Mountain, based in Secaucus and the one local developer in the competition, argued that the selection process was flawed and that Xanadu was “just another mall masquerading as a family entertainment complex.”
As the lawsuits made their way through the courts, a decade of start-and-stop construction commenced, the complex gaining a distinctive exterior thanks to a 16-story-tall, 1,000-foot-long ski slope that projected upwards inside a long, angled shaft. It looked like a coal-fired power plant had been adorned with a pattern of orange vertical stripes. The long, low façades facing the Turnpike, meanwhile, were covered with a quilt-like pattern of blue rectangles.
At the time, Mike Poitras, the principal architect of LineVision, a small architectural studio based in Alliston, Ontario, worked for the project’s executive architect, Adamson. He told me the building components were mostly precast and arrived at the site with the bright patterns. They were distinctive and highly visible—and deeply unpopular. In 2008, Meadowlands officials summoned the lead architects to explain the design in a public meeting. “That's one of the ugliest buildings I've ever seen in my life,” said Loretta Weinberg, a state senator from Teaneck. “It looks like something my 4-year-old granddaughter might build with old Legos.”
By then, the Mills Corporation had gone belly up, and after Colony Capital and then the Related Companies took over the project, the Triple Five Group finally seized control, in 2011, after snagging a $390 million tax break from the state of New Jersey. In 2013, Triple Five counter-sued the Giants and the Jets, accusing the teams of "an ongoing campaign to delay, thwart and ultimately prevent this project from ever opening,” and the following year the lawsuit was finally settled.
In the intervening decade, the shopping mall industry had begun to lose its luster. Increasingly imperiled by online retailers in the first decades of the 21st century, the industry has only been further damaged by the pandemic. Prior to COVID, the idea that brick-and-mortar retailers need to draw customers by offering unique experiences had become the conventional wisdom. When the pandemic ends, that will likely still be the case. Whether American Dream survives may depend on its ability to convince visitors that it’s not just a mall.
When I spoke to American Dream’s creative director, Ken Downing, before the project opened, he emphasized the experiential features of the place: the indoor ski slope, the first in North America, and the indoor water park/wave pool. He promised that the pool, a draw for children in the daytime, would have adult-oriented late-night “sound-wave events, disco dives, and roller disco around the pool.” He added: “We can build a stage or runway in the wave pool and host fashion shows.” And he talked up the complex’s “garden court” full of “indigenous greenery that represents New Jersey,” and his hope that there would be a “bunny field” in which kids could frolic with and adopt “virtual” bunnies.
An Intentional Vanishing Act
I had to see it for myself. On a weekday morning last December, I visited American Dream for the first time. Inside, visitors were scarce, all of us masked and reminded to “frequently utilize hand sanitizer stations” by vivid LED displays mounted on multiple tiers of the mall’s many atriums. On the outside, the building’s colorful façade is no more, replaced by a neutral, off-white exterior, the color of concrete highway dividers. I found one bold gesture, on the top level of the parking deck: an ambitious manga-inspired mural based on ideas from community workshops organized by En Masse, an arts organization. “Many people have not loved that striped structure above the property, but we’re turning it into a piece of art,” Downing had told me about the ski slope, “so it will be as fun on the outside as it is on the inside.”
![Debbie Kaliski, an associate of retail development at GH+A, says the design team's mandate was to "tone down the palette [of the original design] and make it something more contemporary and with more of an international appeal to it.”](https://cdnassets.hw.net/dims4/GG/f43b901/2147483647/resize/876x%3E/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdnassets.hw.net%2Fec%2F0c%2Fc13a1d6d45ad9eb7251e34ae2b96%2Famerican-dream-meadowlands-atrium1.jpg)
So far, the mural extends only to where the garage deck wall meets the beginning of the slope. And it’s hard to see from anywhere but the parking structure. The complex as whole remains largely invisible—an intentional vanishing act after its original, highly festive—and controversial—presence alongside the Turnpike. I’m surprised to discover that I miss the stripes.
After Triple Five took over the project, the executive architects Adamson and Gensler, along with Toronto-based GH+A, were called in to overhaul the design. “It was, as we know, quite an eyesore,” Debbie Kaliski, an associate of retail development at GH+A, told me. “The exterior was a patchwork of different patterns and materials. Our mandate was to make it more cohesive, architecturally, tone down the palette, and make it something more contemporary and with more of an international appeal to it.”
The dominant color, inside as well as outside, is now white. It vaguely resembles the World Trade Center’s Oculus without Santiago Calatrava, Hon. FAIA’s, level of ambition. In Kaliski’s words, it’s “harmonious, a clean white palette.”
An elongated, multileveled mall, American Dream is rounded and biomorphic in some places, angular in others. There are the usual stores: Zara, Uniqlo, Bath and Body Works, and a few I’d never encountered before, like the Beef Jerky Experience. Vivid murals cover up the many stretches where retail spaces are unoccupied or under construction. Expanses of white are also broken up with bright objects such as Valentine-red, three-sided ottomans and newfangled social media-linked photo booths decorated to look like they’ve been gift wrapped.
The ski slope’s observation area was closed when I visited—it isn’t big enough to allow social distancing. But the opposite end of the mall contained a cluster of attractions, visible through glass walls: a Nickelodeon-branded indoor amusement park, the Dreamland-branded indoor water park, an Angry Birds-branded miniature Golf Course, and a large candy store called IT’SUGAR, which one enters by walking beneath a two-story tall, three-dimensional Statue of Liberty holding aloft a lollipop instead of a torch. I found the cartoon aesthetic of the family-oriented portions of the complex more appealing than the cool, “harmonious” expanses of the mall; I liked the complex where it’s strangest and least self-conscious. My favorite thing was a ride-able fleet of giant stuffed jungle animals, big enough for adults. The sight of whole families gliding silently together, atop plush monkeys and tigers, across the icy white floor is the one thing in this epic grab bag that’s inarguably dreamlike.
Missed Opportunities
Today, it’s astonishing to think that the state of New Jersey encouraged and courted this massive, impractical, money-sucking beast. (NJ.com reporters estimated that the project has soaked up about a billion dollars in public money through state and local tax incentives, tax-free bond issues, and infrastructure investments.) Poitras chalks up some of the excess to the post-September 11 psychology of reasserting our primacy by building big.
And yet there were other, more rational proposals. In 2004, one of the competing ideas, from shopping center developer Westfield, was called Arena Place, envisioned as an ''Urban Village'' with offices, movie theaters, hotels, and restaurants configured around a “town square.”
The architect Stanton Eckstut, best known as the master planner of Battery Park City, saw even greater potential. In 2002, Eckstut was retained by New Jersey’s then-Acting Governor Donald DiFrancesco to explore the possibilities for the site. Eckstut realized that if the endless acres of surface parking went vertical, if cars were shunted into multilevel garages, the Meadowlands site could contain an entire city. There was plan to link a New Jersey Transit rail line to the site (the connection was completed in 2009 but is only used on game days). “I thought it was a great place for people to live, work,” Eckstut told me when we talked recently. “What would be better than being on Route 3, connected to jobs from all directions, including Manhattan. I thought it was huge. I couldn’t believe how much land was there. I could do a whole town and still fill up only half the parking lot.”
“So I showed how to do a new town,” Eckstut continued. “Everybody loved it, including Xanadu. The only problem was the Giants. They were the stumbling block.” Once again, the football team didn’t want to give up the ability for fans to tailgate.
While it’s not surprising that Eckstut’s vision didn’t win out—New Jersey is uniquely resistant to anything conspicuously urbane—it’s a shame. American Dream feels like an overstuffed concept that’s missed its moment. On my visit, I found myself looking out from the highest level of the parking deck, mesmerized by the scale of MetLife stadium and the lifeless parking lot that surrounds it. I can almost imagine a whole different version of the Meadowlands, one that features Eckstut’s city, or something like it—a Meadowlands where tailgating doesn’t dictate the design of public space and someone has given serious thought to what the phrase “American dream” should mean.
