Ambiance Is the Key for Today’s Mall

The tot stopped as a voice called out: “Hi, there, you with the packages.”

After all, it isn’t every day you get to converse with a tree. But there in the center court of the Eagle Rock Plaza stands a 12-foot artificial Christmas tree, its ability to communicate aided by a hidden video camera. And more than a few youthful visitors have been seen in animated conversation with it.

It’s all part of a trend in shopping malls toward offering more than just stores and restaurants.

A far cry from the early days of shopping centers when the idea was to get people in and out as quickly as possible, malls have gradually evolved into complete environments with creature comforts--cafes, theaters, bakeries, coffee nooks, art galleries and conversation pits--at least as important as the vast array of consumer goods for sale. What is new in this mix, observers of mall life say, is the proliferation and growing sophistication of what might be called “on-site entertainment.”

“Customers are more visually sophisticated than in years past,” said Maura Eggan, marketing director at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa. “People are exposed to more visually stimulating things in their lives, and for this reason, their level of expectation from malls is changing.”

Actually, the South Coast center wised up to that when it opened in 1967. Since then, and continuing today, it has had a full-scale carrousel in operation year-round in Carrousel Court.

Otherwise, said Ron Merkin of Center Ring Productions in Reseda, shopping mall entertainment consultant and co-inventor of Eagle Rock’s loquacious limbs: “When children come to malls, there is little for them to do except follow their parents.”

Not that the various diversions are aimed solely at the small fry. In an unlikely desert setting, the year-round non-shopping attraction of the Palm Desert Town Center has for five years now been an ice skating rink.

To usher in the holiday season, Santa arrived on ice skates, escorted by Olympic skating champion Dorothy Hamill. Good thing, too because spectators said his belt broke, his trousers began falling, and Hamill held them up as they skated together.

“Not everybody wants to make use of the rink or be entertained by watching,” said Palm Desert assistant marketing director Sandra Christensen, “but we want to make it available. If one member of a family wants to take a break from shopping, he or she can do so, and the others can keep going.”

The granddaddy of all skating rinks would appear to be the one at the Galleria Houston. When that mall opened in 1970, it installed an 80-by-185-foot rink on its main floor; it is open for business throughout the year. “We consider ourselves a fairly cheap ($7 for about seven hours) baby-sitter,” rink manager Pat Ferrick said.

Rented Ice Rink

For the first time this year, Nordstrom department store rented a 40-by-60-foot portable ice rink, which it placed in the parking lot outside its South Coast Plaza location--the proceeds from which benefited the Make a Wish Foundation of Orange County. That attraction was temporary, but “our tradition of live piano music inside most of the Nordstrom stores continues,” media relations representative Lucy Hamilton said. According to Hamilton, the Nordstrom chain discovered long ago that its customers enjoy seeing and hearing a pianist year-round.

For most stores, though, the idea now is to have the mall provide something.

Some of it, of course, is seasonal. Right now, said Barbara Ouse, marketing director at Topanga Plaza in Canoga Park, the plaza has a storyteller who sits on artificial snow in a forest and delivers Christmas stories. “During the Thanksgiving weekend, we had ballet and tap-dancing in the South Court,” she said.

Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance has a display of 16 life-size Santa mannequins--costumed as the way St. Nick is traditionally viewed in different nations. “And as you ride our escalators,” marketing vice president Brandace Berger said, “you pass through a chalet containing animated characters.”

No wonder that more than one sociologist has observed that shopping malls are becoming the centers of community life. Call it the call of the mall.

No question about it, Don Pendley said by phone from New York City. Pendley, spokesman for the International Council of Shopping Centers, said that “aside from home, work and school, people now spend more time in shopping centers than anyplace else.”

He described their evolution: “When the first indoor mall opened 32 years ago in Edina, Minn., the design was rather stark. The idea in those early years was to get as much turnover as possible. “Things have made a 180-degree turn,” he said. “Now the idea is to get a person to spend as much time as possible inside the place.”

Just Like Downtown

One reason they have become so big a part of the American scene is that “there are no visitor age limitations at either end,” Pendley said. “Also, they are just the way downtowns used to be before many of them lost a lot of their residential populations.”

Kingsley Davis, distinguished professor of sociology at USC, said: “One reason shopping malls are increasing in popularity is that there are often more such public areas than, say, parks. Besides, people are in many cases avoiding parks because they regard them as dangerous.”

In the opinion of Elizabeth Burke, marketing director at the Glendale Galleria, “People come to shopping centers for the ambiance as much as for the shopping. The experience makes you feel good.”

Burke said that this holiday season, for the first time, the Galleria has a snowing Christmas tree: “A blower sends white beads up through a hollow trunk to the tip, where they strike a big ornament and fall gently onto the branches. When the branches are filled and become heavy, the snowflakes fall off and are recycled.”

As it has since mid-1987, Santa Monica Place once again has a huge sand creation on its main floor, courtesy of Sand Sculptors International of Redondo Beach.

“It is the North Pole, the fifth sand sculpture we have had here, and it measures 20 feet in some places,” marketing secretary Lisa Carroll said. “Once a night, inside the village, we have a participating theater entitled ‘On Rudolph’s Tail.’ Children sit inside the sand castle near Santa, singing and trying to get the reindeer to appear.”

As is the case with other malls, not all the attractions at Santa Monica Place will end after Christmas. For St. Valentine’s Day, Carroll disclosed, the center by the bay intends to provide gigantic blocks of chocolate for carving contests.

Super Mall

All of these local mall accomplishments, however, pale when compared with those at the West Edmonton Mall in Canada, completed three years ago and described by some as the eighth wonder of the world.

“It is the size of 115 American football fields and has 828 stores and 110 restaurants,” said spokeswoman Susan O’Connor.

Within its confines are an amusement park with 24 rides, an ice rink where the National Hockey League’s Edmonton Oilers practice, a replica of Christopher Columbus’ Santa Maria, a lake containing four passenger-carrying submarines, an 18-hole miniature golf course fashioned after Pebble Beach, 19 movie theaters, the world’s largest indoor pool with 22 water slides and waves up to 6 feet, a 360-room luxury hotel with theme rooms, even a chapel (presumably for praying that your energy holds out).

Eggan said the ambiance of a mall dovetails with the atmosphere inside the stores themselves. “It is all part of retailing as theater,” she said. “For instance, you go inside Polo / Ralph Lauren (in South Coast Plaza) and it’s like walking into an elegant home.”

And not all mall happenings are trivial. A little more than a year ago, Horton Plaza in San Diego hosted a large citizenship ceremony:

“It took place in front of Robinson’s,” special events coordinator Linda Natal said. “More than 250 people from 33 nations became U.S. citizens.”

And while all malls seem on the verge of becoming shopping-eating-entertainment destinations, now and then, an individual operation comes up with something unique.

Take, for example, the McDonald’s on the plaza level of the Wells Fargo Center downtown. From 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, while consuming their burgers, customers can listen to Leslie Stratton plucking a harp.

Top that, Edmonton.