Little Toy Robot

There’s a great article in Slate on the emergence of “lifestyle centers,” the new breed of malls. It’s interesting to me because I live in a neighborhood that resembles the ideal that these places are trying to emulate. But it’s as if the developers have the power to simply wave their arms and whitewash some of the undesirable problems that will plague a neighborhood like Virginia-Highland when they build from scratch, things like traffic, poor people, parking difficulties, and the limited space and residential reluctance that keeps larger chains out of the area.

I grew up near one of the first “lifestyle centers,” Mizner Park, and I realized something disturbing about the way an ideal gets perverted by Florida during my recent trip to Tampa. The huge, new International Plaza and Bay Street (right by Legends Field, the Yankees Spring Training camp) is a hybrid supermall/”lifestyle center,” the first mall I’ve ever seen that tries for both.

Bay Street is a fake, pedestrian street that leads from the parking lot to one of the mall’s main entrances. It is lined by restaurants with patios and a few choice vendors like Starbucks. But indoors, the mall could be any mall. Which is just the point. It was almost eerie to see the place concede a little bit to contemporary taste, this trend to mimic urban shopping districts, but to do it in such a half-assed manner that it seems so inconsequential and draws so much attention to how artificial it is.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 7th, 2005 at 9:20 am and is filed under general.