July 24, 2005 - Shopping Malls and Cinema

July 24, 2005 - Shopping Malls and Cinema

It’s hotter than hell in south San Jose this Sunday and the only relief is the air conditioned comfort of Oakridge Mall, which is where my wife IM and I go right after breakfast, arriving just at 11:00, a half hour before the start time for “March of the Penguins”. Oakridge is located on Blossom Hill Road at its junction with Santa Teresa Boulevard. We walk about the light-foot-trafficked mall, window shopping, remembering what the place was like before the Sydney, Australia-based Westfield Group, the largest retail property group in the world, purchased the center from Toronto-based TrizecHahn Corp. in 1998. Oakridge was one of 12 malls that Westfield purchased that year. Westfield expanded the original center by 30 percent to make room for new shops, restaurants, and a 20-screen Century Theater—where we were bound today. In the expansion, it created two awful multi-level parking garages on the west and east side of the mall. Getting in and out of either structure is a nightmare when traffic gets heavy. We had arrived early and found parking on the second level sheltered from an irate sun that promised a 100-degree (Fahrenheit) temperature today.

IM and I grew up with the shopping center, as we know it today—though generations before and since have seen different incarnations of this international homage to consumerism. Steve Schoenherr, Professor of History at the University of San Diego in his history of the shopping mall (http://home.sandiego.edu/~ses/) traces them back to ancient agoras and medieval piazzas of European cities. But the shopping center we grew up with owes its existence to the automobile. When IM and I first started our life together, the shopping center was a place to window-shop for goods our very tight budget could ill afford. It was a place we would come to spurge on a meal out. But mostly it was a great place to take the kids and let them run around in relative safety. When we arrived in Dallas in October 1968, we passed the incredible Northpark Mall Shopping Center on Central Expressway on the northwest corner of its intersection with Texas Loop 12, driving north to Plano, Texas where we would settle.

Northpark Mall was the creation of Raymond D. Nasher who in the early 1960s leased a 97-acre cotton field where the shopping mall sits today to build the then largest climate-controlled retail-shopping complex in the world. The center was completed in 1965 just three years before we arrived. However, the Northpark Shopping Mall was not new to Dallas. In 1906 entrepreneur John S. Armstrong purchased 1,326 acres of land bisected by what is now Preston Road. He created the town of Highland Park (now part of Dallas)—a planned community of upscale homes built around Turtle Creek. In 1912, his sons-in-law, Hugh Prather and Edgar Flippen, brought into the town the Dallas Country Club, the oldest country club in Texas. In 1931, Hugh Prather designed the Mediterranean-style Highland Park Shopping Village with storefronts facing an inner parking lot. The mall was made a National Historic Landmark in 2000 as it represented a milestone in the development of the shopping center as a distinctive form of 20th century American architecture, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior.

However, Northpark outdid Highland Park in a couple of ways. Foremost, Northpark was enclosed and shoppers were sheltered from the humid heat that plagues Dallas for a good part of the year. Air conditioning attracted marginal shoppers like IM and me who would come to hang out; we were the mall’s future customers. In addition, the mall with its climate control environment became a public exhibition venue for Nasher’s extensive collection of 20th Century sculpture and modern art. The collection included works by Jonathan Borofsky, Andy Warhol, Henry Moore, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, among others—many being rotated throughout the mall over time. I suspect that Nasher built the profit-generating center solely as a showcase for his art having no other local outlet for his passion. Nevertheless, it was the perfect place for the masses to view great art. It was a popular place for mall walking too, women in fashionable exercise attire could safely power walk the length of the mall before the crowds of shopper arrived.

Shortly after we arrived, Dallas experienced a shopping center building boom each a reproduction of one another—the first being Valley View, just off Interstate 635—the LBJ Freeway just a bit west of Central Expressway. None of the new malls had the distinction of Northpark or Highland Park. When we arrived in San Jose in 1974, the one thing we noticed was a lack of shopping malls. East on Tully road a mile or so from California 101, we found Eastridge Shopping Center. The other shopping complex was Valley Fair and Town & Country Village on opposite sides of Stevens Creek Blvd just west of Interstate 880. The T&C shopping center was where Santana Row now sits. And there was Oakridge, which back then was a single-corridor, enclosed mall with Sears anchoring the complex on the west, Montgomery Wards on the East, and Macy’s in the middle. The old Town & Country Village implemented the concept of a “town” which was embodied in Highland Park, opting for a Spanish mission look and feel, with two long rows of stores that you accessed via one-way streets perpendicular to Stevens Creek Blvd. The one remaining T&C is in Palo Alto at the intersection of Embarcadero Road and El Camino Real, just south of Stanford Shopping Center, which embodies the open air idea of Highland Park—more practical than in Dallas as Palo Alto’s temperature swings between 50s to 80s Fahrenheit during the summer months with modest humidity.

With Oakridge Mall, the Westfield Group opted to up date the old center and make it into what Schoenherr calls an Entertainment Center; the Sony Metreon being a prime example: a fifteen screen movie theatre with restaurants scattered throughout and a number of retail outlets, selling mostly toys, consumer electronics, and sundries. Oakridge added the Century 20 movie theatre and a handful of chain restaurants: Cheesecake Factory, Buca di Beppo, P.F. Chang’s, and a couple of others. IM and I have only recently started coming to Oakridge, mostly to see a movie or to grab a bite at the Cheesecake Factory. As we walked through the mall before the start of our 11:30 movie, IM remarked that all the stores we passed had passed us by. We weren’t their customers. With their goods they were catering to our children and soon our grandchildren. I started to wonder when the shopping mall—so much a part of our early life—stopped being important to us. I think it began when our daughters were in high school and there was no longer any need for us to take them shopping. They were shopping on their own at places like The Limited, Wilson’s Leather, and many others I can no longer remember.

The “March of the Penguins” proved to be a fine movie that tells the story of the Emperor penguins’ annual fall migration from the ocean waters around Antarctica 70 miles inland to a desolate frozen place where they mate and nurture a single egg through the harshest winter on the face of the earth. From the time they leave the sea until the egg is laid neither adult eats. Once the egg arrives, the female who has lost 30 percent of her body weight travels 70 miles back to the sea to feed leaving the male to hatch the egg. She returns after feasting, in time to begin feeding the newborn chick while the male who has lost half his body weight—without food for two months—returns to the sea to feed. Once the chick had grown sufficiently, the two parents return to the sea leaving their juveniles alone to take the plunge and begin fending for themselves—all by instinct. IM and I could relate.