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A Valley Girl celebrates the much maligned building type on its 30th anniversary.
By Jade Chang
April 2003
The people of Los Angeles have a tighter grip on existential thought than
the French. It is one thing to ponder the singularity of being and nothingness
while strolling down the misty banks of the Seine and quite another to be
sad where the sun always shines. When you grow up in L.A., your world is
peopled with cars and you accept the beauty of highways. Six-lane city streets
with their wide stretches of pavement can feel cozy, and mini-malls can
be places of rest.
Reyner Banham, a displaced Londoner, wrote in his seminal Los Angeles:
The Architecture of Four Ecologies, "I learned to drive in order
to read Los Angeles in the original." People from elsewhere will fall
into a begrudging acceptance of the car--especially if the road to reason
is eased with a particularly saucy convertible--but they usually refuse
to budge on the mini-mall. Empty, they'll say. Soulless and depressing.
How much dry cleaning does one city need? All of their vitriolic thoughts
and unfulfilled Hollywood dreams are released on these poor corner
lots, pilloried on the spikes of their own convenience. "Oh my god,"
says the one-time New Yorker, with as much of a Valley Girl accent as he
can muster, "do you have to work on your tan? Do you want to
go get some fro-yo?" What's to like, they'll ask? Why can't
we just wipe them out and start over ?
Mini-malls, it turns out, were actually built on that urge to write over
an unsuccessful past. In 1973 the La Mancha Development Company put up the
first modern-day mini-mall, on a corner lot in Panorama City, in the
San Fernando Valley. It was the start of the OPEC oil embargo, and hundreds
of gas stations across the county were going out of business. Those abandoned
sites, surrounded by chain-link fences and strewn with ripped-up chunks
of concrete, were usually at busy intersections chosen with the motorist
in mind; oil companies were eager to get rid of the properties, and they
were priced to sell. Later, in the mid-1980s, Standard Oil sold off the
last of its iconic gas stations in Los Angeles, again providing a bonanza
of cheap real estate for developers like La Mancha.
I am nearly the same age as the mini-mall. And though lovers of cities will
weep for me, I must admit that much of my life has been spent--not at the
mall, as you might expect of a San Fernando Valley girl--but at the local
mini-mall. Just three blocks away from our Northridge tract home, this prototypical
collection of Chinese restaurant, beauty salon, candy store, and dry cleaner
was the first place I was allowed to go on my own. I would skateboard
or bicycle over with my fifth-grade friends, ready to pick out jelly
bean flavors and watch the ladies come and go, talking of nail polish
colors. My first job, at 17, was next door to the candy store, personalizing
bar/bat mitzvah favors and children's birthday presents with puffy paint--I
got very good with "Ashley," but nothing's as sugary as my "Brittany"
with a heart over the "i."
The center of things is where you find it. In the pre-Starbucks era,
when coffee shops first began to appear, we spent our nights listening
to bad poetry and decent guitar playing at Common Grounds. I learned about
chakras at the Psychic Eye bookstore, in the same mini-mall, which was New
Age back when it was actually something new. (It's since been replaced by
an Internet café where hosts of teenagers gather to do online battle
in a multiplayer game called Counter-Strike.) I had sushi for the first
time at Kabuki Sushi, a neighborhood mini-mall mainstay that my parents--and
every other raw-fish devotee in the surrounding area--walk to weekly.
On television in 1992, in the wake of the Rodney King trial, I saw Korean
small-business owners on the roof of a mini-mall, armed with guns, ready
to defend their shops and restaurants from looters. Historic Black-Korean
tensions rose to near breaking point in the city, and I began to see how
neighborhood borders can be drawn like battle lines. It provided my first
glimmer of insight into the corrosive nature of racial enmity, which allowed
me to understand how you can sympathize and disagree with all sides at once.
From the air mini-malls can look like staging points for urban battle. Cars
crisscross the city down below--on brief recon missions, traveling well-worn
supply routes, or launching lengthy forays into the desert. Drivers stop
at these L-shaped buildings fronted by small parking lots with easy street
access--places to fortify themselves with coffee and donuts before speeding
into the daily fray. From the street, from the driver's seat, they look
like easy places to rest your tired vehicle. Like little nests, lined with
things you need.
Of the many evils that mini-malls are blamed for, the worst is the murder
of the pedestrian shopping street. But in Los Angeles--where the car has
come to feel like an extension of the self--people simply do not use the
sidewalks as much as they do in other cities. Mini-malls are a symptom of
the disease, not the virus itself. In a metropolis seen mostly from behind
the steering wheel, mini-malls actually enable the chance encounters and
new experiences that a city needs to stay alive.
The first of Jane Jacobs's four famous conditions for generating "exuberant
diversity" in The Death and Life of Great American Cities says,
"The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible,
must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These
must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules
and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many
facilities in common." The salesperson who stops by for a morning cappuccino,
the wardrobe assistant who picks up dry cleaning and a pair of flip-flops,
the junior-high-school kids who read magazines at the convenience store
after school, the young couple who has dinner at the new Brazilian restaurant--they
can all do their business at the same corner, at different points throughout
the day.
Lately all of the frozen-yogurt stores that proliferated throughout the
1980s and 1990s are being replaced by boba tea parlors. Mini-malls
have always been a good measure of change. They provide low-priced storefronts
to try out the new, which can then be folded up quietly if supply does not
meet with immediate demand. In a city that works, according to Jacobs, things
you need to do should be next to things you want to do. If Los Angeles is--as
it has often been called--the city of the future, it is in part because
of this fluidity, this ability to constantly reinterpret both our wants
and our needs.
Last year the Grove, the latest in "destination shopping," reared
its fancy head on Fairfax Avenue. A high-end megaplex filled with Banana
Republics and J. Crews and Crate & Barrels, it turns a fortress face
to the street. When you enter the Grove or any of its cousins--the Shops
at Willow Bend outside Dallas, Horton Plaza in San Diego, Lenox Square in
Atlanta--you are entering a place of carefully created experience where
your every move has been anticipated and your every desire will be directed
to a point-of-sale.
If the choice is between the mega and the mini, I'll take number two. In
the face of those enormous retail centers, the hated mini-mall starts to
feel subversive, almost punk rock. There is no pretense in pizza stands.
The visionary architect Charles Moore, who lectured and wrote about the
social responsibility of architecture, liked Los Angeles but asked, Where
would you go to start a revolution? In this scattered, disparate city the
revolution will have to come from all sides. Mini-malls manage to be at
once pervasive and low-key, filling your neighborhood with Sri Lankan
spice stores and Korean hot-pot joints--while you're busy bemoaning the
steady march of chain restaurants. Things will start to simmer there, in
the unexplored but much used crevices, along the enveloping edges of this
metropolis. The revolution, if it ever comes, will be slow and steady--you'll
wake up one morning and realize that it was waiting for you all along.
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