LIVING MALL-LINGERING

IT IS ABOUT to be a beautiful day in Dallas, so they have locked me up in North-Park mall. Not literally, but I’m forbidden to leave. On any other beautiful day in Dallas I might want to come out to NorthPark- come in, rather-which is ironic, but so are malls. They’ve locked me up so that I might spend the day (a pun!), think about the mall, think about malls, observe and ask questions, do a story.

But there’s not much I can tell you about any mall that you don’t already know. That’s the great thing about malls, all of them: they’re familiar. Joan Didion wrote that the reason we like malls is that they are all basically the same place. 1 understand what she means, but I doubt she’s been to North-Park. NorthPark is not the same as Valley View or the Galleria, and it’s certainly not the same as Town East. NorthPark epitomizes Dallas and enshrines it. It’s at the heart of Dallas, and not just geographically.

But NorthPark is familiar, blissfully the same as always. More or less the same as it has been for twenty years, the smooih cement floor, the soothing, uncommitted but- ter color of the brick. Neiman’s this way Penney’s that. Which is why I can’t tell you much about NorthPark that you don’t al- ready know. Ws’ve all been (here more times than we can count.



IT IS 5:30 a.m. on a Friday and I’m being , let into NorthPark by a security guard. I’ve never been to a mall this early (I’m not sure I’ve ever been up this early), but I’m not the only one here. A couple in their sixties wear-ing cotton jogging suits-he in navy, she in deep red-stretch and bend and explain to me what they’re doing.

“We live in Lane Park, off Park Lane,” she says. “We come every morning. Usually, we walk, oh, about five laps.”

I ask how long they’ve been doing this.

“About five years,” he tells me.

They are mall walkers, mostly elderly cardiac patients who march through the mall on doctors’ orders. I decide to do a bit of mall walking myself since me stores don’t open until ten. I’m surprised by how many walkers I see-maybe fifty or sixty before ten-and by how normal it all seems after a couple of laps. The sun is rising through the skylights, in one comer of the mall a janitor is buffing the floor. A new day begins.

By ten I am starving, and I’ve spent a great deal of time planning where I’m going to eat and in what order. In a mall with almost a dozen places to eat, I’m not going to settle for one. A pastry at LaTartine, a cappuccino at Neuhaus Chocolate Shop. Later, lunch at Wyatt’s Cafeteria and. for dessert, that in-credible vanilla frozen yogurt at Neiman’s Fresh Market cafe, the one on the second level, outside the store but inside the mall. Al fresco in its way. I suppose. They even put umbrellas out. Very authentic.

Over a croissant at LaTartine it strikes me that malls are miniature towns, sort of. Not a new thought, but a key to why Dallas is so mall crazy. Malls spring up most quickly in auto-bound communities, especially those like Dallas or Los Angeles, where pedestrian hubs-walkable downtowns-are obsolete or missing altogether. Malls turn big cities into small towns. I confess that I thought twice about what I was wearing when 1 came here today because I know I’ll run into at least one person I know-just as if I were going down main street in Grover Corners or Zenith or Hannibal, Missouri. Running into people is yet another thing people like about malls.

1 love NorthPark mall. This is not sarcasm. Nor is it exaggeration. I love the place. I used to hate malls, and there are some that I still can’t stand, but I like them more than I used to and I know that has something to do with NorthPark, which I love more every time I come here.

I love how quiet it is.

I love how easy it is on the eyes. Great long rectangles, big, clean spaces, bright skylight, few protrusions.

I love how simple it is, a squared-away horseshoe, with each turn distinct from the other. The fountain that picks up momentum always in front of Joske’s, the pond fountain always in front of Neiman’s.

I love how the mall doesn’t really change and how when I’m here I don’t really have to think. I appreciate all the art at NorthPark, but if it were taken away I’d still come. I appreciate the fine design of NorthPark. The mall won awards for its design when it opened, and it remains a model mall. Have malls been around long enough for one to be called classic? If so. NorthPark is classic.

I love NorthPark’s staying power. Who would have thought that in this city, which almost daily defines the obsolete and discards it, a mall, as trendy an item as the products inside, could not only hold up for twenty years, but be thriving more than ever?

That’s something you may not know. NorthPark is doing a whiz-bang business, sucking the dollars in. So are most of the malls in Dallas.

I was hoping to learn that Dallas was the mall capital of the world, but that would depend on definitions. L,A. has the largest (Del Amo Fashion Center) and the most; Minneapolis has the oldest fully enclosed mall (Southdale Shopping Center). Dallas does have a phenomenon unique as far as I can tell, and that’s the golden triangle of the Galleria, Valley View, and Prestonwood, three mammoth malls within five minutes of one another. And each is successful. They should link up, form a mall of malls.

I love NorthPark for standing up to those big guys, or rather lying low. Most of North-Park is one-story, increasingly a rare trait in a mall. But it turns out the trend in malls is toward smaller and less sprawling, according to National Mall Monitor, an industry bible. NorthPark can be trendy all over again.

And of course it is. Crate and Barrel, Brookstone, Rizzoli, Britches of George-towne, a remodeled Neiman-Marcus. But NorthPark isn’t as blue-chip as the Galleria, and that’s another thing I love about it. It’s got something for everyone-even a Wool-worth, at least for the time being.

NorthPark and the other malls serve as surrogate downtowns, surrogate main streets. Where else in this city do you find several blocks’ worth of retail and service, restaurants and art, familiar faces and friends? I bet the new downtown Arts District, an uncovered mall, will never enjoy the enthusiasm and attendance of NorthPark, a kind of mall we like better.

Another trend in malls is toward mixing in more of what the industry calls “nontradi-tional tenants”-financial planners, telephone centers, dentists-offering expertise instead of service. The Mall more closely approximates Main Street all the time.

Well, not NorthPark, not in that way. But NorthPark is more than a collection of shops and restaurants. It is a landmark, a gathering place, a hangout, a see-and-be-seen spot, a geriatric jogging track, the best pedestrian hub we have. And since we who live in Dallas are mostly confined to our offices and our cars, there’s no exaggerating the importance of such a place.



IT’S 11:15 AND the mall is in swing. We all know what that looks like, but I’ve never really looked before. Usually as I move through a mall, I see store names and merchandise, but the people remain obscure. I see people, I watch certain ones, but mostly in an oddly detached way. The movement of the mall, the colors, even the faces look the same, so who would really notice?

But now that I’m paying more attention, I see something else. A kind of formality presides at the mall, a kind of cool. People are moving with a sense of presentation, but not just that. Everyone looks so calm. (Isn’t one of the Living Dead films set in a mall?) If this were an outdoor street or the Farmers Market there would be more variation, more distress, more exuberance, more noise. More something. But the mall is quiet; the faces are cool and calm. Mallgoers seem so placid. The mall itself is anesthetizing, perhaps because it’s built to look serene and, in its way, elegant. Is it the soft colors, the soft lighting? Sure, they shut people up.

NorthPark’s hush is also due to the art. Raymond D. Nasher, who built and runs NorthPark, likes art-real art, the expensive kind-and he has spent years collecting it and placing it in and around the mall. North-Park feels like a museum, which is just a decibel or two up from a library. And nothing shuts you up like art.

Actually, the Galleria is the quietest mall in Dallas, but it has all that carpet and all that space. There’s no need to speculate about its silence; that was part of the design. North-Park, on the other hand, encourages you to be quiet, in the name of good taste.

And something else: NorthPark, perhaps more than other malls, encourages conformity. All malls do this of course, by definition: they squeeze a lot of different stores under one roof. Stores may be as varied as clashing colors, but when you look down the mall of the mall, it all looks the same. This is especially true at NorthPark. which, unlike some malls, forbids tenants to build out into the mall with awnings or signs, with a few exceptions. Mostly each merchant keeps to himself.

That malls have a look, one look, is an advantage to the tenants. It’s false egalitarianism. suggesting that each store is as good as the next. They all made the cut (the three-year-old Galleria, which has leased 90 percent of its tenant space, has rejected hundreds of prospective tenants because they didn’t ’”fit”; this is standard mall practice), they all share the look, they all have the Good Image-keeping seal of approval. At NorthPark, the appealing qualities of the mall-its design and serenity, its classiness-are instantly conferred upon the stores. The mall is good public relations for the tenants.



IT’S 1:00 P.M. and I’m at the east end of the mall, near El Fenix, with my sights set on Rizzoli, the arts bookstore located aboul halfway between Joske’s and Neiman’s in the west link. But watch what happens. The decision I’ve made to go straight to Rizzoli is undermined by my trying to go there. I’m distracted by Romancing the Stone on video at Video Concepts, where I spend about four minutes. Then I pass Melody Shop, the record and music store. I’ll just run in and glance at new albums, right? Eight minutes and fifteen dollars later I’ve bought two of them. I truly want to get to Rizzoli, but the smell of Cathy Anne’s cookies, as I round the southwest bend, is irresistible. An hour or so later I make it to Rizzoli, but not before stopping in Oshman’s (to look at swim goggles), Doubleday (because I can’t resist a bookstore), and Crate and Barrel (for reasons completely beyond me). I have spent $38.98, and don’t think for a minute that D is paying for me to shop.

What happened on my little odyssey is what malls are all about. I made the metamorphosis from what is called in the trade a “destination” shopper to an “impulse” shopper-the ’”Gruen transfer,” named after retailing high priest Victor Gruen, who conceived the notion thirty years ago. Modern shopping malls make you want things you didn’t know you wanted.

l”m an easy target, but the system can grab even the most destined destination shopper. Later in the day, back in Rizzoli, a woman walks in to ask for a particular book she thinks Rizzoli carries. She is in a hurry; her husband is waiting in the car. She carries no packages. A salesman tells her that Rizzoli doesn’t have the book, but that Doubleday might. I follow her. curious to see if she too will make the Gruen transfer. It is hard to keep up; she is almost running. But Crate and Barrel must have mysterious powers.

Eventually. I watch the woman leave the mall with one small C&B bag, another from Centennial Wine-and no book. I am glad to see her go. Rush-in shoppers don’t belong in the mall. They make everything tense.

By dusk-noticeable only because I’m hungry again-I have come to realize how complete the mall is. I’ve spent a day here, and never did I want, never was I bored. This mall has everything I need: food, clothing, shelter, chic-the four necessities. Granted, I couldn’t really live here, not day after day (although some people seem to), but it feels as if I could.

In the same way that malls simulate a small town environment, they also give us the whole world. When I mset someone more or less of my generation (I’m twenty-four) from Omaha, or Fort Smith, Arkansas, or Los Angeles, I don’t expect to find them terribly different from myself (Lafayetie, Louisiana), the way my parents or grandfather warned that I would, because we all had malls and television and movie theaters, often in the malls. Malls are not just a part of our culture, but the keepers of such culture.

Most everything in a mall is familiar and blessedly name brand. Often the name brand is elitist-Saks, Tiffany & Co.-which allows the suspension of disbelief, the fantasy that I’m getting something rare, unique, elite. People who will never even borrow the bathrooms at Saks Fifth Avenue, people who are 500 miles from a Saks, all know the name and the mystique, the clout. Ironically, that makes Saks about as pedestrian as Sears.

A mall is familiar not just because Saks is familiar, but because Foot Locker is familiar, big white flower pots are familiar, ficus trees are familiar, shopping bags are familiar, entrances with eight doors are familiar, parking in left field is familiar. And the billion images that sell products, including the products themselves, are familiar.

Modern man’s “global village” as described by Marshall McLuhan is a media-bound world where the most private and remote details and symbols of other cultures become instantly, irrevocably shared. Television is the great equalizer Oceans are now virtually theoretical, the planet ever-shrinking. Earth as Peyton Place.

It makes sense, then, that as our nation’s cities homogenize, each relinquishing its role as community or village, something must take that place. Psychologically, media does. But that leaves us physically lost, searching for a neighborhood, our own territory. Malls fit the bill. But because malls operate on mass-media symbols, these small towns are each the entire planet. A nifty inversion, I think.

And yet a mall is also small for its size. By 8:30 I have had more than a full day at the mall. I’ve been in every one of the stores and businesses at least once. (I made myself do this, and it was just as bad as it sounds.) Part of the fun of a mall is trying to conquer it. Trying, not succeeding. A mall isn’t doing its job if it doesn’t overwhelm.

But how can North Park do that when I’ve been so many times before? For one thing. the merchandise keeps changing. (Neiman’s windows change every two weeks; you can set your watch by it.) And even as I grow mall-weary. I haven’t seen it all. haven’t pushed through every clothes rack, noticed every well-bred knickknack at Brookstone, or lifted every book at, yes, Rizzoli.

8:45 p.m. This is the part I wasn’t looking forward to. Fifteen minutes until closing. Some stores, like Britches, have pulled their metal gates down to half mast. Some shoppers are beginning to scurry. I think there is a difference between shoppers and mall-goers-although mallgoers are often shoppers-and I’ve been a mallgoer all day.

“You can almost always tell which ones might buy and which ones are just looking,” a salesman in the cologne department at Nei-man’s tells me. “You have to be polite, but you can always tell.” I didn’t try to surprise him by buying cologne, but I did surprise myself by buying another Cathy Anne’s cookie. And I was sure I was just looking.