17, 1952, the first plans unveiled for the shopping center were announced by Gruen and Donald Dayton, president of Dayton's. They estimated the cost to build the shopping center to be around $10 million. Public response to the announcement was generally positive, with many hailing the project as a utopia. In a near unanimous vote by the city of Edina, zoning ordinances were changed to constitute the mall. Gruen was a European-style socialist; he found individual stores in downtown venues to be inefficient, and the suburban lifestyle of 1950s America too "car-centric" and wanted to design a building that would be a communal gathering place, where people would shop, drink coffee, and socialize, as he remembered from his native Vienna. Southdale Center was loosely modeled on the arcades of several heavily populated European cities and purposely included "eye-level display cases" to "lure customers into stores". Gruen imagined that Southdale would eventually include "a medical center, schools and residences, not just a parade of glitzy stores." In a statement to the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune (now the Star Tribune), Gruen and his economic consultant Lawrence P. Smith described the regional shopping center as a place that could "take care of today's needs and today's living" and would bring the community together by providing "a new outlet for that primary human instinct to mingle with other humans." The neighborhood surrounding the center was specifically built to accompany the mall. Groundbreaking for Southdale took place on October 29, 1954; 800 construction workers were needed to build the three-story, , center, which had 5,200 parking spaces, 72 available tenants, and cost $20 million to construct. Due to Minnesota's harsh climate in the winter, Gruen constructed the center with a roof and air-conditioning system capable of maintaining a comfortable temperature of year-round. The mall was originally anchored by Dayton's, Donaldson's, Walgreens, and Woolworth. Over 40,000 visitors attended the grand opening ceremony for the center on the morning of October 8, 1956. An additional 188,000 customers visited the mall throughout the following week. The center was constructed to successfully bring the community together by "gathering art, culture, and entertainment under one roof with retail." The Dayton's store was modeled after Dayton's flagship store in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In November 1956, organic architect Frank Lloyd Wright visited the mall as part of a tour of new buildings in Minnesota; he critiqued Southdale's overall design, stating "[the] garden court has