Not fooling anyone

Pic from Wired New York.

I have to disagree with this ArchPaper.com article which contends that the tall malls in New York have gotten more innovative with building connections to the street while ground-floor retail have gotten more bland and boring - and mall-like.

I'm not opposed to malls in theory. Remember Benjamin describing the Arcades of Paris? I confess, I didn't read all his writings, but from his descriptions, they sounded great, still set in a mall-like structure, but full of life.

Some people think the problem with malls is that they are so middle class. There's nothing wrong with being middle-class. What's wrong are the cold, unhumanlike environments that the most recent mall developments are. You don't really feel like you're in Union Square Park while shopping at DSW, as much as Vornado would like you to think. The retailers have covered up the windows with displays and the reflection from all the wattage inside the store makes being part of the park impossible. And why are malls nearly always populated by chains, regardless of location? The Time Warner Center could have chosen so many other innovative, New York-based stores (Kate Spade, instead of Coach; Bigelow's, instead of Sephora; and I guess Scoop, if you really need a J. Crew, etc.) but now we have a retail hub that we can find in any suburb outside of NYC.

The proof is not the first 2 years of the mall's operation - but whether the mal, like Time Warner Center, can sustain the pedestrian traffic flow 3-5 years down the road. I'm keeping an eye on that point in the future.

In the meantime, some great example of malls are being built by Ron Sher and his company Metrovation. He took Ray Odlenburgh's Third Place ideas to heart and have rejuvenated malls in the Seattle area into community centers, stocked with small business owners and community services. Five years since the project took off, the mall is still expanding. Now, that's a mall I'd happily go to.